You will produce a sorted bank of questions you can draw on in any discovery meeting.
Twenty minutes before a meeting, most sellers do the same thing. They open a blank note, try to remember the questions that went well last time, and write down whatever comes to mind. It is usually the same five questions, all about the current situation, and none of the follow-ups that made last time work.
A question bank fixes that. It is a short, sorted list of questions you have tested, kept in one place so you can scan it before any meeting. This exercise walks you through building one, using the work from lessons 2.1 to 2.3. Allow thirty minutes.
Open your meeting template, the one where you saved your opener in lesson 1.4, Write and rehearse your discovery opener. Add five headings, one for each stage a discovery meeting moves through:
Current situation: how things work today Problems: what is not working, and where Impact: what the problems cost in money, time, risk or how the buyer is seen Decision process: who is involved, how they decide, what the timeline is Next steps: what happens after this meeting
The order matches the funnel from lesson 2.2, The question funnel: from wide to specific. You will rarely use every topic in a single meeting, but having all five means you never get stuck at the top. Modules 4 and 5 go much deeper into impact and decision process, so treat the questions you write for those two as a first draft.
Under each heading, write at least four open questions that start the topic. That gives you twenty in total, which is the minimum for this exercise. Write them the way you would say them, in plain words.
Check each one against lesson 2.3, Questions that sound like interrogation, and fixes. Does it lead? Is it stacked? Does it start with why? If so, rewrite it now.
Here is part of the bank Hafiz built for selling payroll software to small firms:
Current situation: "Walk me through what happens from the end of the month to the day staff get paid." "Who handles leave and claims at the moment?"
Problems: "Which part of payroll do you dread most?" "When did something last go wrong with a payslip?"
Impact: "Roughly how many hours does payroll take each month, and whose hours are they?"
Decision process: "When you last changed a system like this, how did the decision get made?"
Next steps: "What would you need to see from me to take this further?"
For every opening question, write the two follow-ups you would most likely use beneath the most common answer. This is the step people skip, and it matters most, because the follow-ups are what take you down to the real problem.
Use the event, effect, cost pattern from lesson 2.1, Open, layered and follow-up questions, and leave room for the buyer's own words. Hafiz writes his under "Which part of payroll do you dread most?" like this:
Follow-up 1: "You said [their word]. What happened the last time?"
Follow-up 2: "What did that lead to, for you or for the staff?"
The brackets remind him to use the buyer's word instead of his own. Some follow-ups will repeat across questions, and that is fine. "What happened then?" and "How often does that happen?" earn their place under many questions.
Go through the bank and put a mark beside every question you have actually asked in a real meeting that got a useful answer. A simple tick works. Leave the rest unmarked.
The unmarked questions are experiments. Pick two or three to try in your next meeting, and after the meeting, tick the ones that worked and change or delete the ones that fell flat. Over a month or two the bank turns into a list of questions you trust.
Wei Ling, the adviser from lesson 2.1, found that her favourite opener, "What are your financial goals?", rarely got anything useful, because most clients have never put their goals into words. "What would you like to be different about money a year from now?" worked far better. She kept the second and deleted the first.
When you are done, the bank should fit on one or two pages. If it runs longer, cut the questions that overlap and the ones you would never actually say aloud. A bank you can scan in two minutes before a meeting gets used, and one that takes ten does not.
You have at least twenty opening questions across the five topics, each with two follow-up layers written under it. Every question passes the checks from lesson 2.3. The ones that have worked in real meetings are marked. And the whole thing sits in your meeting template, beside your opener, on no more than two pages.
Hafiz's finished bank has twenty-four opening questions. He reads it on his phone in the lift on the way to every meeting.
Open your meeting template and your notes from lessons 2.1 to 2.3 before you begin.
Write a question bank of at least twenty opening questions across five topics, each with two follow-ups, in your meeting template.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).