Questions

I was talking with a business owner that came from the technical side of the IT business and one of the things that he was struggling with was sales (Big surprise) and he, of course had the standard vision of sales. Once we got past the thought that sales was negative and rather about helping the customer. We moved to questions.

A particular thing that seemed to come to the top was that many times in the IT industry we get calls like I have Pop ups or a Virus. Immediately we begin to diagnose the problem. Many times we need to ask open ended questions that are more broad to get to the real problem and really deliver great customer service.

Like as in our example we may ask what else is the customer having problems with. (You would be surprised the answers you may hear) Are there other PCs with the same issue? How is security handled at your business? What things would you like your IT to do that it currently does not?

Then, once you get the answers to these questions, do not deep dive until you get all of the possible opportunities addressed.

Key is that we are so trying to educate, diagnose, talk, show how smart we are, jump to conclusions that we miss most opportunities.