The Probe Step: How Great Salespeople Ask Better Questions

The Probe Step is probably one of the most important parts of the sales process.

It's also one of the steps that many salespeople struggle with the most.

Why?

Because salespeople love to sell.

They get excited about their product. They know their solution inside and out. They know all the features, benefits and success stories. And when they finally get a prospect on the phone or in a meeting, there's a natural temptation to start talking.

But there's a problem with that.

You can't recommend the right solution if you don't understand the problem you're trying to solve.

That's the purpose of the Probe Step.

It's about asking the right questions, listening carefully to the answers, and developing a deeper understanding of what is happening in the prospect's world before you start talking about what you're selling.

And here's the part that I think gets overlooked:

The Probe Step isn't just about gathering information. It's about building credibility and trust.

The better your questions, the more your prospect begins to see you as someone who understands their business rather than someone who simply wants to sell them something.

Why Is the Probe Step So Important?

At its simplest, probing helps you understand whether there is actually a reason for the prospect to buy.

But it accomplishes much more than that.

Good probing can help you:

• Qualify the opportunity
• Understand the prospect's current situation
• Uncover needs and challenges
• Identify consequences of the current situation
• Understand priorities
• Discover decision-making criteria
• Establish credibility
• Build rapport
• Develop trust
• Determine whether your solution is actually relevant

Think about that list for a moment.

All of that can begin with asking questions.

That's why I believe great salespeople spend considerably more time listening than talking.

The Quality of Your Questions Matters

Asking questions isn't enough.

You can ask a prospect twenty questions and learn almost nothing useful.

The quality of the questions matters.

Compare:

"Are you happy with your current CRM?"

with:

"What is your current CRM making difficult for your sales managers?"

Those questions may sound similar, but they're likely to produce very different conversations.

The first asks for an opinion.

The second starts to uncover a problem.

And that's what good probing is supposed to do.

You aren't asking questions simply to collect information. You're asking questions to understand what matters to the customer.

Know What You're Looking For Before You Start Asking

Here's something I've learned over many years of working with sales teams:

You can't teach salespeople to ask great questions simply by giving them a list of questions.

Before they can ask good questions, they need to understand why they're asking them.

There are two questions salespeople should be able to answer before they ever build a discovery-question framework:

1. What problem does our solution actually solve?

2. Why would a prospect buy our solution instead of doing nothing or choosing an alternative?

Once you understand those two things, you can start working backward.

What would you need to learn from a prospect to determine whether that problem exists?

What would you need to understand about their current situation?

What consequences would indicate that the problem is important enough to solve?

What would make the prospect willing to change?

What would prevent them from buying?

Those answers become the foundation for your Probe Step.

That's how you move from asking questions to asking meaningful questions.

Qualification Is Part of the Probe Step

Probing and qualification aren't really separate activities.

They're intertwined.

You want to understand things such as:

• Does the prospect have a problem you can solve?
• How important is that problem?
• What happens if they don't solve it?
• Is there a reason to act now?
• Who is involved in the decision?
• How will they evaluate potential solutions?
• What does the buying process look like?
• Is there a realistic path to purchase?

Traditional qualification frameworks such as BANT — Budget, Authority, Need and Timing — can provide a useful starting point.

But don't turn qualification into an interrogation.

The goal isn't to march through a checklist of questions.

The goal is to have a conversation that helps both you and the prospect determine whether there is a legitimate reason to continue.

That's an important distinction.

Great Probing Builds Credibility

Here's the counterintuitive part.

You might think that the best way for a salesperson to establish credibility is to demonstrate how much they know.

Sometimes it is.

But early in a sales conversation, the quality of your questions may establish more credibility than the quality of your presentation.

Imagine two salespeople.

The first spends fifteen minutes explaining their product.

The second asks thoughtful questions about how the prospect currently operates, where they're experiencing problems, what those problems are costing them, and what they've already tried.

Who sounds like they understand the customer's business?

The second salesperson hasn't even presented their solution yet.

And that's the point.

You don't build credibility by proving how much you know. You build it by demonstrating that you understand what matters to the customer.

Don't Turn Discovery Into an Interrogation

There's another trap here.

Once organizations decide they need better discovery, they often create a list of twenty questions and tell their salespeople to ask every one.

That's not discovery.

That's an interrogation.

A good Probe Step should feel like a conversation.

One answer should naturally lead to another question.

For example:

"We're having trouble getting our sales managers to use Salesforce consistently."

A weak salesperson might move immediately to the next question on their list.

A good salesperson gets curious:

"What does that look like today?"

The prospect explains.

Then:

"Which parts are they not using?"

More information emerges.

Then:

"And what's the impact of that on your managers?"

Now you're getting somewhere.

The best questions often come from listening carefully to the answer to the previous question.

That's a sales skill.

And it can't be completely replaced by a script.

So Where Does Salesforce Fit?

This is where things get interesting.

Salesforce can't teach a salesperson how to be curious.

It can't make someone a great listener.

And it certainly can't turn a poor salesperson into a great questioner simply by adding a few fields to a Lead record.

But Salesforce can reinforce the sales process you want your team to follow.

That's an important distinction.

The sales process comes first. Salesforce supports it.

Sales Process Consulting

Use Salesforce to Capture What Matters

Once you've identified the information your salespeople need to uncover during discovery, Salesforce can help you capture it.

For example, you might determine that your sales team needs to understand:

• The prospect's current situation
• Primary business challenge
• Business impact
• Desired outcome
• Timing
• Decision process
• Key stakeholders
• Competitive situation

You don't necessarily need a field for every question.

In fact, that's probably a mistake.

Instead, identify the handful of pieces of information that are genuinely important to qualification and opportunity management.

Then determine where that information belongs in Salesforce.

Some information may belong on the Lead.

Some may belong on the Account.

Some may belong on the Opportunity.

The key is to make the system reflect the way your sales process actually works.

Salesforce Platform Optimization

Don't Make Every Field Required

This is one of the mistakes I see when organizations try to enforce a sales process through Salesforce.

They identify information they want salespeople to collect and then make every field required.

Problem solved, right?

Not necessarily.

If the salesperson hasn't asked the question, making the field required doesn't magically produce the answer.

You may simply end up with:

• "Unknown"
• "N/A"
• "TBD"
• Garbage data
• Or, worse, a salesperson entering something just to get past the validation rule

You can't force good discovery by forcing fields to be completed.

The better approach is to teach salespeople why the information matters, give them the skills to uncover it, and then use Salesforce to reinforce the process.

That's a much more effective form of adoption.

Salesforce Adoption & Change Management

Use Salesforce to Reinforce the Conversation

This is where Salesforce can become particularly powerful.

Imagine that your sales process says that, before an Opportunity moves beyond the early discovery stage, the salesperson should understand:

• The business problem
• The impact of the problem
• The desired outcome
• The decision process
• The expected timing
• The next step

Those expectations can be reflected directly in Salesforce.

The platform can provide guidance about what information matters at each stage.

Managers can inspect Opportunities using those same criteria.

And salespeople can see what is expected of them as they move through the process.

Now Salesforce isn't simply storing information.

It's reinforcing the way you want your salespeople to sell.

Use Sales Path to Guide Discovery

Salesforce's Sales Path can be particularly useful here.

Sales Path allows you to provide Key Fields and Guidance for Success at different stages of an Opportunity.

That means you can use Salesforce to remind salespeople what they should be trying to understand at each point in the sales process.

For example, early in the Opportunity lifecycle, your guidance might remind the salesperson to understand:

• The prospect's current situation
• The business problem
• The impact of that problem
• The buying timeframe
• Key stakeholders
• The next step

Later stages can introduce more advanced questions around decision criteria, competition, implementation requirements, commercial considerations and the consequences of maintaining the status quo.

The important thing isn't the specific fields.

It's that the Salesforce platform reinforces the sales process you've already defined.

Give Salespeople the Questions — and the Reason Behind Them

There's nothing wrong with giving salespeople examples of good discovery questions.

In fact, I strongly recommend it.

But don't just give them a script.

Teach them the thinking behind the questions.

For example:

Instead of:

"What are your biggest challenges?"

teach them to understand what they're trying to discover.

If the company's solution addresses sales-management problems, perhaps the salesperson needs to understand:

• How managers currently inspect pipeline
• How forecast calls are conducted
• Where managers lack visibility
• How much time is spent gathering information
• What happens when Opportunities aren't updated
• What impact poor visibility has on the business

Now the salesperson isn't memorizing questions.

They're learning how to think through a discovery conversation.

That's a much more valuable skill.

Sales Managers Have a Role to Play

This is also where sales managers become critical.

If you want your salespeople to become better at probing, don't just train them and send them back into the field.

Coach them.

Listen to their calls.

Review their Opportunities.

Ask them why they asked a particular question.

Ask what they learned.

Ask what they still don't know.

And ask the most important question of all:

"What did the customer tell you that makes you believe this is a real opportunity?"

That question can reveal a lot.

If the salesperson can't answer it, you may have a probing problem.

And if you see the same problem repeatedly across the team, you may have a sales-process or sales-training problem, not an individual salesperson problem.

ProSell Salesforce Training & Adoption Program

The Probe Step Isn't a Step You Check Off

Perhaps the biggest misconception about probing is that it's something you do at the beginning of a sales call and then move on from.

Good salespeople don't work that way.

Discovery continues throughout the sales process.

The questions you ask during an initial conversation should be different from the questions you ask after you've understood the customer's problem.

And those questions should evolve again as you learn more about the decision, the competition, the stakeholders, the business case and the path to purchase.

Great salespeople are constantly probing.

They're constantly testing their understanding.

They're constantly looking for gaps in what they know.

And they're constantly listening for information that might change their view of the opportunity.

That's what separates genuine discovery from a checklist.

The Best Salespeople Talk Less and Learn More

There is a reason the Probe Step has remained such an important part of selling for so long.

Selling isn't fundamentally about telling someone how great your product is.

It's about understanding whether you can help.

And you can't understand that if you're doing all the talking.

The best salespeople aren't necessarily the ones with the most impressive presentations.

They're often the ones who can sit across from a prospect and ask a question that makes the prospect stop and think:

"That's a really good question."

That's the skill we're trying to develop.

And Salesforce can play an important supporting role — by reinforcing the process, capturing the information that matters, and giving managers visibility into whether the process is actually being followed.

But the technology is not the answer.

The questions are.

Listen first. Understand the problem. Then earn the right to talk about the solution.