Stop asking your clients what keeps them awake at night
“So, what’s keeping you awake at night?”
Please stop asking clients this.
I know what you’re trying to do. You want to uncover their biggest challenges, understand what they’re worried about, and move the conversation away from your services and towards what actually matters to them. All good intentions.
But if somebody asked me what was keeping me awake at night, the honest answer would be the neighbour’s dog. Probably not the commercial insight you were hoping for.
There are much better questions, and marketing and BD teams are well placed to help people ask them.
Good BD conversations shouldn’t feel like BD conversations
One of the risks with business development training is that you accidentally hand people a list of “BD questions”. What are your biggest challenges? What keeps you awake at night? What are your priorities? Where do you see the biggest opportunities?
There’s nothing wrong with any of them in principle. They’re just incredibly broad. And if your client has been asked a version of each one by every adviser they’ve met for the past ten years, you’re unlikely to uncover anything they haven’t already said out loud twenty times.
The best conversations feel like genuine curiosity instead. You know something about the client, you understand something about their market, and you ask a question that gives them something specific to respond to.
Do your homework first
A better client conversation usually starts well before the meeting.
What’s happening in their organisation? Have they entered a new market, made an acquisition, changed leadership, launched a strategy, reported strong growth somewhere or announced redundancies? Are they facing regulatory change? What’s going on across their sector more widely?
This is where marketing and BD can make an immediate difference, because you often have that information already. Rather than sending someone into a meeting armed with “ask them about their challenges”, you can send them in with something far more useful:
“I saw you’re expanding into that market. What does that mean for your team over the next 12 months?”
Or:
“We’re hearing from a few businesses in your sector that this is becoming a bigger issue. Are you seeing the same thing?”
Now they have somewhere to start, and the client has something real to react to.
Ask about change
If you want to uncover opportunities, change is usually the best place to look. Change creates problems, and problems create reasons to buy.
So instead of asking what someone’s biggest challenge is, explore what’s shifting. What’s different compared with 12 months ago? What’s likely to change over the next year? Where’s the biggest movement in their market? Has anything got noticeably harder recently? What is the board asking them to do differently?
These give people something tangible to talk about, and the answers often lead somewhere you weren’t expecting.
Ask about priorities, then go one step further
“What are your priorities this year?” is a perfectly reasonable question. The interesting part is almost always what comes next.
Why has that become a priority? What needs to happen for you to achieve it? What could get in the way? Who else is involved? What happens if it doesn’t get done, and where are you finding it difficult?
That’s usually where the useful information lives. Good BD isn’t about having a brilliant opening question. It’s about listening properly to the answer and being curious enough to keep going.
Ask questions you don’t already know the answer to
This sounds obvious, but it’s worth saying, because client conversations have a habit of turning into a route back to the thing you wanted to sell anyway.
You ask a question. You hear half the answer. Then, “that’s interesting, because we actually have a service that…” and off you go.
If you walk into every conversation hunting for an opening for a particular service, you’ll almost certainly miss something more valuable. The purpose of the conversation is to understand the client better. What matters to them, what’s changing, where are they trying to get to, and what’s making that difficult?
Sometimes there’ll be an obvious opportunity. Sometimes there won’t. Both are fine outcomes.
Help your people prepare, don’t hand them a script
This is where marketing and BD adds real value, and it isn’t by producing a laminated card of 20 questions to take into every meeting.
Help people prepare instead. What do you already know about this organisation, and what don’t you know? What’s changed since anyone last spoke to them? What are you seeing across their sector? What hypotheses could you test? Who else in your firm knows them? And what would it genuinely be useful to learn from this conversation?
Five minutes spent on that will do more than memorising another generic BD technique.
Some better questions to try
There’s no perfect set of questions that works with every client, but these tend to open up more interesting conversations:
- What’s changed most in your world over the past 12 months?
- What’s getting more attention internally than it was a year ago?
- Where do you think the biggest pressure is going to come from next?
- What are you finding harder than you expected?
- If you could fix one thing in the next six months, what would make the biggest difference?
- What’s your team spending too much time dealing with?
- What are you being challenged on internally?
- What do you wish your external advisers understood better about your business?
That last one can be uncomfortable, which is exactly why it’s worth asking.
Curiosity beats a clever question
There’s no magic question that makes a client suddenly reveal a £500,000 opportunity. And trying too hard to land the perfect BD question is usually what makes a conversation feel forced.
Do your homework. Know something about the person and the organisation before you walk in. Ask about what’s changing, listen properly, ask the obvious follow up, and be genuinely interested in the answer. You’ll learn far more that way than from any question on a list, including this one.
And if you really do want to know what’s keeping them awake at night, you can always ask about the neighbour’s dog.
Need help?
If you would like help with your marketing and business development, bringing on a marketing consultant with a fresh pair of eyes can make all the difference. I work with B2B businesses and professional service firms in London, Kent, the UK, and Europe, specialising as a professional services marketing and bd consultant. Please get in touch or book a free 30-minute consultation.
