Tony Hughes: Did you start with a hypothesis, or was it 'let's just start with a blank piece of paper and see what people do?'
Neil Rackham: It's somewhere in between the two.
We began with at least a feeling that questions had to be important because just watching a few sales calls, the people who we really thought were good didn't even seem to be selling.
What they were doing was they were exploring something with a customer.
At the time, we didn't know whether it was just they had easy customers, whether it was just that the customer had already decided to buy and so it wasn't really a sale it was a 'How do we put this all together?' conversation.
That's where we began looking at, well, could there be a pattern of questioning skills?