Sales Excellence Starts With Customer Curiosity
Updated: Jun 9
When I started in sales, I believed the best sales reps were the best listeners. Over time, however, my perspective shifted, and I now think the best reps are the ones who are genuinely curious about the customer’s business.
Because honestly, if you are not curious enough to truly understand how a business works, how it makes money, and what pressures it faces, how can you possibly recommend the right product or solution?
Later in my career, I became heavily involved in sales excellence and onboarding programs. Like many sales organisations, we were obsessed with frameworks such as BANT, qualification checklists, discovery forms, and needs assessment templates. And to be fair, these frameworks absolutely have their place. They help teams create structure, prioritise leads, and standardise execution across larger organisations.
But I also started noticing the limitations.
Many reps were simply going through the motions: asking the “right” questions, filling in the forms, and completing every checkpoint, yet still walking away without truly understanding the customer. At the end of the process, they were often pushing products that weren’t actually relevant because the conversation never moved beyond surface-level qualification.
I also realised that many of these frameworks were originally designed more for lead prioritisation than for genuine customer understanding. They rarely explored questions like:
How does this business actually compete?
What internal pressures does the decision maker face?
Is the company itself clear about its positioning and priorities?
What does success genuinely look like for them?
The more experience I gained in sales leadership, the more I realised that great sales is less about pitching and far more about problem solving. The best reps are usually the most commercially curious people in the room because they genuinely want to understand how the customer wins, where growth comes from, and what challenges leadership is trying to solve.
One question I think about often as a sales manager is:
How to build that culture of curiosity when teams are constantly under pressure to move quickly through the pipeline?
For me, it starts with leadership. You can usually tell when leaders genuinely care about customers versus when “customer centricity” is simply part of company messaging. The stories leaders choose to celebrate matter. Are we recognising reps for deeply understanding the customer’s business and asking thoughtful questions, or are we only celebrating closed revenue?
Earlier when I was running the onboarding programs in APAC, one exercise we implemented was role-playing different customer profiles based on their business models. Instead of focusing purely on pitching, reps had to explain how the customer made money, what challenges the business faced, what different stakeholders cared about, and why a particular solution would actually matter in that context. For our Google context, we even went a level deeper to explore if a customer is running their own marketing function, or doing it via an agency - because there is a clear difference on how the execution is handled.
I still think frameworks and question banks are useful, but they should support curiosity - not replace it.
