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I'm convinced that questions are the best part of the sales process. I think you have to have really good questions to really understand what you're trying to solve for, and the pain that your contact is really experiencing from this problem. Um — if you don't ask questions, all we're doing is showing up, giving them a menu, and letting them pick from the menu. And so that's order taking, that's not selling. Questions are really the tool to help you build trust with your buyer um — because it builds empathy. It builds their confidence in you, in how to solve that problem and allows you to build the business case. If you can start your meeting by just saying; what what prompted you to to reach out? or Why did you take the sales meeting? I think that — uh — starts the conversation in the right direction and that you you don't waste any time talking about things that aren't applicable or relevant to the sales process. So that allows you to uncover what uh what they know so far, why they thought you would be a good candidate for a conversation, it also allows them to start talking about the problem that they're experiencing, and start articulating what it is they're trying to solve. And that's really important in the sales process. And you have to give your buyer some time to articulate and kind of start piecing together what they're seeing, because a lot of times they feel the pain but they don't necessarily grasp what's actually happening, and this conversation, the dialogue and the questions, help them put that all together. I always love to ask the buyer ‘what's in it for them personally?’ I think it's easy for them and natural for them to start launching into ‘okay here's what the organization is like, here's what we're trying to solve, here's what we're doing.’ And it's easy for us as sellers just to get into that but it's important for us to really understand what's at stake for the buyer and I don't think that's intuitive for salespeople. I don't think we realize how much really is at stake when someone brings us in. Um—a lot is riding on it for them personally. Whether it's a career progression, promotion, they want to look good in front of their boss or their peers, or they're experiencing pain themselves from this problem and so getting to ‘Hey what is in it for you personally with this? How can I make you look really good in your organization?’ I want to understand that and I think that is really appreciative of buyers. I think the — like a question around ‘what have you tried in the past’ or ‘what have you tried internally to solve this problem’ I think that's like a no-brainer question that you have to ask, because it qualifies them and gives you reasons for talking. If they've done something or if this is a quick fix for them to do internally, why would they bring you in? So then I think we get to the next layer of questions and you really have to have some business acumen and the language of a business to articulate these questions, and have a conversation around them. Um but one question I like to ask is ‘give me an example of the problem.’ I think that just allows you to have like a really deep dialogue and helps you understand fully what the problem is and so like—I just met with an IT team yesterday and we talked about their directors mismanaging their budgets. And I was able to just follow up with ‘well give me an example of that’ and they were able to articulate ‘well this is what happens when we come in’ and they they come up with they approve projects that they really shouldn’t, and this is the impact the greater impact that they're not seeing, and we were able to have just a — you know we spoke 10/15 minutes on this this kind of example, and I think that we walked away with ‘I get what they're saying’. So just going through an example, asking for an example, is a perfect way to get to that the kind of the deeper layer. I think it's not just empathy, it's understanding how you're going going to solve, and this is where your business acumen comes in. Um so I always like to ask ‘how are we going to measure success’ um and if we can get answers and even get hard metrics around those answers, I think that then just kind of flows through the reasons why they should be buying from you. And it helps also articulate and help them solidify 'okay this is where we're going and this is, again, reasons for buying’. And so you have to understand the language of business to get to some of those metrics. A follow-up question would be ‘how does your C-suite view this this problem?' Because I know that most C-suites are viewing it in metrics that they're accountable for — to Wall Street, and to investors, and stakeholders. And so just really getting to what kind of metrics, what kind of cost reduction, what kind of growth could happen, what kind of efficiency ratios are you looking at? Getting to some of those things really kind of just helps you flow right to the business case and the reasons why they should be buying.