Socratic Selling

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One of my mentors recommended this book called Socratic Selling: How to Ask the Questions That Get the Sale to improve my selling and consulting skills which are quite applicable in various scenarios.


The book's structure is straightforward. The beginning chapters explain the importance of socratic method, which is well known a form of cooperative argumentative dialogue between individuals, based on asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking and to draw out ideas and underlying presuppositions. It highlights 3 socratic principles: Respect the customer, Help the customer think and Help the customer made decisions.

The remaining chapters explain how to apply along the sales cycle, i.e., opening, advancing and closing.

The opening aims at letting the customer speak what he wants in the underlying. The book advises a socratic opener structure, i.e.

  1. Say you are prepared. e.g. Mr. Customer, I'm prepared to talk about the Product, which we discussed on the phone... Other samples could be "I'm ready to discuss", "I'm here to tell you about", "I could start by explaining", "I have thought about the subject we discussed", etc.
  2. Invite the customer to speak on subject. e.g. If you could give me your perspective on that... In addition to perspective, we could say viewpoint, outlook, overview, thoughts, ideas for positive things; priorities, goals, objectives, strategies for possible things; problems, concerns, needs for negative things.
  3. Offer an immediate benefit. e.g. We can focus the meeting on what interests you.

After the opener, it introduces Socratic draw probes and Socratic access probes to help you understand the customer's story.

Examples of Socratic draw probes include:

  • Tell me more about ...
  • Would you elaborate on ...
  • Give me an example of ...
  • What else should I know about ...
  • What else would help me understand ...

Examples of Socratic access probes include:

  • How does ____ fit the picture?
  • Talk to me about your experience with ____
  • How do you handle ____?

In the advancing stage, it advises to touch the urgency of the customer's needs, the feelings for irritants and motivators which determine the buying decision, playback of your listening to the customer, eliciting decisions, and making a "no-surprises" proposal with summary and recommendation based on what the customer told.

For irritants:

  • What bothers you most about this?
  • I sense you're frustrated by this ...
  • How tough a position does this put you in?

For motivators:

  • How does this affect you?
  • I sense this means a lot to you
  • Why is this important to you?
For eliciting decisions, you could say "If you were to go ahead with ...", then "when would you ...", "how many would you ...", "where would you ...", "what kind would you ...", etc.

Finally, the closing stage includes drawing out the customer's interests, negotiation with Get-Give counteroffer, and closing with summary and calendar statements with next action steps.

How to draw out interest before answering in detail:

  • Why do you ask?
  • What are you interested in discussing?
  • Tell me more about...

How to understand objections:

  • Please tell me exactly what you mean.
  • Why do you say that?
  • How did you arrive at that?

The book is not new (published in 1996) but the advice is simple but effective. Rather than keep talking and throwing out keynotes, listening is more important. By asking simple questions to stimulate both sides to think, you could understand your customer's need and lead to a win-win situation.

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