A Better Way to Probe for Information

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You should rarely, if ever, start an executive dialogue with the question: "What are your top challenges?"  Sure, it's a relevant question and salespeople use it all the time to probe for information. Why then, do I advise against it?

1. Show that you already know their challenges. Do some homework. Browse the press room of your prospect's web site, google your client, read up on related industry trends or talk to people that work for, or with your prospect.

Rather than probe for challenges, ask your prospect to validate some of the challenges you've researched. People love to share their opinions and they want to know what's going on. Remember, your prospects are time-starved. 

2. Your prospect also thinks it's a dumb question. Why? Because they get it all day long, and it sounds like you read it on the back of a self-help book.

3. Your prospect is thinking, "Why should I tell you?"  The CIOs top challenge might be a highly political, highly sensitive post-merger situation. Costs might be out of control or she's trying to figure out who to fire and who to keep. Unless you have a long-standing, trustful relationship, you're not going to get any real answers so don't waste time with canned questions.

4. This question can be far too threatening. Why?  See paragraph above.

Try an alternative approach
I was with a junior account executive who organized a brilliant sales call the other day. It was a first call on the VP of Asset Management - and after the usual small talk, she said, "You know, we just polled 65 CIOs about their attitudes and points-of-view about IT asset management. Would you like to see the results? It will only take a minute."

Her prospect quickly sat up in his chair. Here's what she shared, which by the way, got her prospect to share volumes of information about his "top challenges."

IT Asset Management (or ITAM) is high priority with CIOs.
50 percent of those polled reported having formal ITAM programs in place today, 30 percent planned to have them implemented by 2006 and another 10 percent by 2007.  These numbers are significantly higher than previous years.

IT Asset Management is moving beyond PCs and laptops.
Though PCs have driven IT asset management for years, 65 percent of respondents use ITAM to manage desktops, workstations, laptops and servers with plans to include routers, switches and printers.  PDAs are close behind since they have the same security and compliance issues of PCs.

More IT managers are monitoring software usage.
Half those surveyed have started to monitor software usage to harvest and redeploy licenses that go unused.

CIOs use integration to boost investment return
Nearly half those surveyed integrate asset management with the IT service desk to increase ROI. 63 percent are bringing asset and configuration management together to realize greater efficiencies.

Advice for salespeople: If you want your prospect to share what's going on with them, share what's going on with others.

Note: The observations above were taken from a CIO polled conducted by Gartner at its 2005 Data Center Conference.