The Curious Salesperson

It is interesting that today's effective seller attributes include: the ability to demonstrate insight into the customer and their challenges and to do this they must be adept at the skill of questioning (including insight led and disruptive questions).  Yet when listing the attributes of today's winning sellers, curiosity is often omitted.  How can you discover insight or effectively use questions without the prerequisite attribute of curiosity?  It is missing in The Challenger Sale by Dixon and Adamson and also in Richardson's Changing The Sales Conversation. Both of which, I think so highly of, as to have them as texts in my selling class.  However curiosity is listed as a key attribute of winning salespeople in the book Insight Selling: Surprising Research on What Sales Winners Do Differently by  Mike Schultz and John. E. Doerr. They make the following comment: " Without curiosity: sellers don't have the depth of knowledge to apply insight selling across the 3 levels of connect, convince and collaborate. The sellers often comply with insight selling as a strategy but never commit because they aren't drawn to knowledge itself.  Also sellers without curiosity can have difficulty with opportunity and account research, needs discovery and listening."

So being a sales teacher, instructor and coach, how do I coach curiosity?  This question led me to a new book by Brian Grazer and Charles Fishman, A Curious Mind, The Secret to a Bigger Life.   For those of you who do not immediately recognize Brian Grazer, he is a very successful movie and TV producer. He founded Imagine Productions with Ron Howard and has many successful films (Apollo 13, Parenthood, A Beautiful Mind, to name just a few) as for TV he was the executive producer for the series  24 (one of my personal favorites).  Brian Grazer has made curiosity a fundamental of his life and career and the book outlines how he has done it.  He talks of curiosity as precursor to innovation and creativity, attributes we value in salespeople. In fact his whole life has been a series of Curiosity Conversations with many of the worlds most interesting people.

As I read on I could not help but realize that Brian Grazer is one of the worlds very best salespeople and curiosity is the key to his success.

Normally at this time of the year I like to make professional recommendations for the salesperson's summer reading list.  Topping this years list, you guessed it, is:  Grazer's A Curious Mind, The Secret to a Bigger Life.  I believe you will get more help for your professional development from this book than a whole host of "sales books."