Keeping It Simple
The fastest, simplest ways to grow your business - no jargon, no fluff. Practical strategies that actually work for SME owners in the USA, New Zealand, and worldwide.
Listen to a recording of your top performer's sales calls next to your average performer's, and you'll usually notice the same thing: your best salesperson talks less. Not because they're less confident — because they've learned that the close is built on what the prospect reveals, not on what the salesperson pitches.
The pitch-heavy call is a symptom, not a style
Salespeople who talk through 70-80% of a call aren't being thorough — they're usually anxious, filling silence because they haven't built a structure of questions that does the selling for them. The result is a prospect who's been told a lot and asked very little, which means the salesperson is guessing at objections instead of hearing them stated directly.
What good questions actually do
A well-built discovery sequence isn't about being liked — it's about surfacing three things before you ever pitch: the specific cost of the problem to the prospect in their own words, what they've already tried and why it didn't work, and what happens if nothing changes in the next six months. A prospect who says these things out loud has effectively built your case for you. You're not persuading anymore — you're confirming what they already said.
The talk ratio test
A practical benchmark: on a well-run discovery call, the prospect should be talking more than the salesperson — somewhere around 55-60% of the call. If your team's calls run the other way, that's not a personality issue to coach around vaguely — it's a specific, measurable behaviour to correct with a defined question sequence.
Building the sequence, not hoping for it
This isn't about winging better questions in the moment. It's a written sequence: an opening question that gets the prospect talking about the problem, two or three follow-ups that quantify the cost of inaction, and a bridge question that leads naturally into your solution because the prospect just described needing it. Reps who use a written sequence consistently outsell reps who rely on instinct, because instinct is inconsistent under pressure and a sequence isn't.
The businesses we work with inside the Simple-Growth System™ don't fix sales performance by telling people to "listen more" — they fix it by installing the actual question sequence that makes listening the natural outcome.
Want your team's talk ratio audited against their actual close rate? Get in touch with Kevin D'Ambros-Smith — it's usually the fastest diagnostic we run.
Kevin D’Ambros-Smith
Kevin is the founder of Simple-Growth and a business growth coach with experience at DDB, Ogilvy, and Saatchi & Saatchi. He has co-founded 9 companies, coached 200+ business owners one-on-one, and holds a 9.5/10 NPS. Every article on this blog reflects real-world experience - no theory, no fluff.
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