You are facilitating a short team exercise for a small group of sellers. Our goal: we leave with a bank of discovery questions that reliably produce a figure, a date, or a name. Not adjectives. I am typing for the group. Run this one step at a time and wait for me. Step 1. Ask me which lanes are in this room: prospecting, selling, customer success, account management, or a mix. Step 2. Ask the group for every question they use to get a customer to say a NUMBER out loud. Take them raw, no editing yet, and ask me to type them in. Step 3. Now be strict with us. For each question, tell us whether the honest answer would be a figure or just an adjective. Cut the ones that only produce adjectives and say why. Rewrite the borderline ones so they force a number. Step 4. Do the same for Critical Event. The test is whether the question surfaces a DATE with a consequence attached, not a feeling of urgency. Flag anything that would let sometime this quarter pass as an answer. Step 5. For each surviving question, give us the most common way a customer dodges it, and the follow-up that recovers. Step 6. Sort the bank by the lanes I gave you in step 1. Finish with the bank formatted so I can paste it into our team channel and use it on Monday.
A question earns its place if the honest answer is a figure, a date, or a name.
Cut: Is that a big problem for you? How important is this? Would that be valuable?
Keep: What does that cost you in a month? Who signs this off? What happens on the day you miss it?
A lane-sorted bank of questions that produce evidence, each paired with the follow-up that recovers a dodge.