What's the best way to identify gaps in your customer needs assessment?

This is a great start if you have a solid relationship with your contact and if they are ready, willing and able to disclose. - When you approach a contact you need to connect in the moment. Their mind may be on the last thing they worked on or on the the next thing they will work on once you leave. You might be tempted to ask if they watched the game last night. All these things put their mind in another place and in another time. If you want to connect with your contact in the moment, and if you want to warmly move the conversation to a point where they are ready, willing and able to disclose their current and emerging struggles, you need a plan. Then you can dive into these questions, but first, connect and build trust.

Something we all know but rarely follow... ONLY ask questions that make us & prospects fully understand the gaps + let us ethically develop &surface their need. At the beginning, relationship and trust levels are low. Asking great questions that provides clarity +new perspective on prospects' problems, will incentivize them to stay engaged. A guiding framework of questions is fine but beyond that to truly uncover and develop need, questions have to contextual & appropriate = crafted in the moment, not scripted. A skill that may seem hard at first. But here's where you can start... Buy thinking time: Be comfortable to pause &reflect. Take a strategic 30 secs to acknowledge what's been said and establish the next best question...

This is right-on, except for the last phrase! Once you get your customer talking, listen, ask deepening and clarifying questions and summarize. Don't ask questions or summarize to show your customer that you are listening. Ask questions to be sure you ARE listening and that you have it right! If you ask deepening and clarifying questions, your customer will know that you are connecting with them; they will know you are smart. If you do anything to show your customer how great you are, you will transform the meeting from one where you learn to one where you put your ego over the customers needs. Be humble.

Ouvir é fundamental, mas interagir com o cliente também, você não precisa só ser um gravador humano e fazedor de perguntas, mesmo na fase em que você escuta mais (80escutando/20comentando ou até 70/30) tente colocar ideias e opiniões que alimentem a conversa para uma direção que você deseja, pratique isto com seus amigos e pessoas próximas até colegas de trabalho.

This is all on target except for one point. I would be very careful about challenging customer answers! The last person a customer wants to buy from is an adversary! (Am I breaking my own rule?)

Tools and frameworks are great. No need to reinvent the wheel. Lots of great thinking has already been done and we can take advantage.

It's extremely important to confirm the problem statement with your prospect's buying team. As deals get more complex, with different stakeholders, not everyone will agree on the right framing of the same problem. It's important to get a consensus on this before spending too much time. Once that's done, you can start aligning your solution to the correctly framed problem with that account

Always gather the customer's objective, decision making process, decision making criteria, decision making schedule and find out who the decision makers are. Ask them what it would be worth to their business to have their problem solved. Make sure your solution is worth it to them!