In the last section we talked about the importance of empathy and building a rapport with your prospect. That's extremely important. With that being said, it's also important that you get down to business. Earlier I mentioned the GPCT framework, that stands for Goals, Plans, Challenges and Timeline. The GPCT framework will apply no matter what business or industry you're in. Ask yourself, what are the prospect's goals? What is the prospect's plan to get there? As a sales person, you should ask questions and poke holes in that plan to see how your business fits into it. What are the prospect's challenges? What is the prospect's timeline to hit their goals? This is not the timeline for them to purchase your product. Each of those questions can have dozens of followup questions right after them. Here's an example of a line of questioning. You can start with, what are you currently working on? What are goals for those projects? Then ask, why is that a goal? How do you hope to reach that goal? What efforts are being made to get there? Does this conversation we have fit into that plan? How so? In an ideal world, when would you like to reach that goal? The best question to ask is, why? Because it gets you to learn more about their intentions and encourages the prospect to elaborate further. An exploratory call is often successful when the prospect of speaking over 80% of the time. With various lines of questioning, it's really easy to fall off track during a conversation. So it helps to have the questions in the plan in front of you on a notepad, or Evernote, or you're around. If you don't cover all of the GPCT all in one call you can reach out in that email and say, we had this conversation yesterday. And it went in a different direction I wasn't planning for and I forgot to ask a couple questions. Would you open to another call just so I can get through some questions? If you build trust with them, of course they'll have another call with you. [MUSIC]