This has been one of the most life-changing books I have read about the consultative sales process. I was lucky to be at a training seminar with Mahan Khalsa in about 1998, and he taught us, like children, to learn the approach visually, by voice and with our hands. That memory stays with me 20 years later – unlike most other training.
The key take aways I had from this is about asking powerful questions and structuring an interview to get the important information out of it, rather than dive down rabbit holes, and you think it’s been productive but you haven’t heard the real issues facing your client.
The second thing I learnt was listening for ‘yellow lights’ with a client, and rather than reactively responding to them, using them to understand further what’s happening with the client.
In the end if you are not building a solution that exactly meets your customers’ needs they will not be satisfied and you will have wasted your time … so the whole purpose is to help both parties get to that point.