Have you ever found yourself in a moment where you incorrectly judged a situation because you chose not to be curious? I have, too. And I have also learned that prejudgment comes at a cost, sometimes a costly one you don't realize until it's already gone.
The Story That Changed How I Interview
I remember a few years back I had a young woman interviewing for a telemarketing position at my old firm. She was the eighth interview I had that morning, and I remember she walked into my office wearing pajama pants. Pajama pants. And they had cows on them. And the cows were saying "MOOOVE OUT THE WAY."
I had made up my mind before "hello" was even out of her mouth. I all but ignored her resume and politely asked a few useless questions, wrapped with the standard "We'll be in touch," and moved on. Typically, I would have gone through a full mock sales presentation, asking questions as I went along. In her case, and the two people after her, I rushed through because I had already decided based on appearances alone.
Come to find out, she went to work for a competitor of ours and quickly became their number one selling employee, breaking every record they had.
So, have you ever prejudged someone, and it cost you?
The Whitman Line Every Salesperson Should Live By
In our last blog, Dr. Dan Docherty wrote about the curiosity component of the famous Walt Whitman line: "Be Curious, Not Judgmental." Now we want to address the "Judgmental" piece of that statement, and how it can ruin opportunities to expand and learn as a sales professional.
It's amazing how four simple words force you to consider so much. When I read that phrase, I believe Whitman is referring to the power of questioning, and how if you have the desire to be curious about someone, you can position yourself to better understand their Why, What, and How. When you have no desire to understand someone, you automatically prejudge them based solely on your own previous experiences.
It comes down to this distinction:
- Curious: A strong desire to understand
- Judgmental: Lacking a desire to understand (prejudge)
Think about it: how many times in an hour, a day, a week, do we make judgments on or about individuals without actually understanding the circumstances behind them and their situation? It's so easy to assume we understand when in most instances we have no clue until we decide to become curious.
Why We Default to Judgment Instead of Curiosity
When someone in sales stops having a desire to understand the customer and their situation, they need to reassess their role. The temptation to rely on pattern recognition and past experience is real, and it compounds the longer you've been in the field. Here's why judgment wins over curiosity so often:
- Prejudgment is easy; curiosity is hard.
- Prejudgment is lazy; curiosity takes work.
- Prejudgment feeds your ego; curiosity feeds your understanding.
- Prejudgment puts you first; curiosity puts them first.
That last one is the critical one. "Prejudgment puts you first; curiosity puts them first" is vital to any salesperson's success. The types of questions you ask show where your focus is. Is it on you, or on them?
The Difference Between GOOD Questions and BAD Questions
The best way to show curiosity is to ask GOOD questions. Good questions are those that are focused on the client and their problems, not on your product or your agenda. It's very easy to fall into the BAD questions trap, especially the longer you are in a role.
When you believe you don't have to ask good questions anymore because you've "seen it all," that's precisely the moment you need to reassess yourself. Experience should make your questions sharper and more client-centered, not lazier. If you have no desire to be curious, judgment will automatically fill that space, and your assumptions could be completely wrong.
BAD questions sound like:
- "Have you looked at solutions like ours before?"
- "What's your budget for this?"
- "Are you the decision maker?"
Each of those questions has your agenda at the center. They're designed to qualify the opportunity for you, not to understand the person sitting across from you. GOOD questions sound different. They're open, they're focused on the client's world, and they demonstrate that you genuinely want to understand what they're dealing with before you say a word about what you sell.
Serving by Solving vs. Self-Centered Selling
What it ultimately comes down to is this: are the questions you're asking focused on their problems so that you are Serving by Solving, or are your questions focused on you and your product so that you are engaged in Self-Centered Selling?
Self-Centered Selling is transactional. It positions you as someone who needs something from the buyer, which triggers the brain's threat response and puts the buyer on guard before the conversation gets anywhere meaningful. Serving by Solving is the opposite. It signals to the buyer's brain that you are there to understand, not to extract. That shift in perception is the difference between a buyer who engages and a buyer who deflects.
Curiosity is the mechanism that makes Serving by Solving possible. You cannot solve what you do not understand, and you cannot understand what you refuse to be curious about.
What It Takes to Stay Curious in the Field
Curiosity is not a personality trait reserved for a few exceptional reps. It is a discipline. And like any discipline, it degrades without deliberate practice. Here's what staying curious actually looks like in a sales conversation:
- Entering every call with the assumption that you do not fully understand this buyer's situation, regardless of how many similar deals you've worked.
- Resisting the urge to fill silence with product information. Silence after a good question is a signal the buyer is thinking; let them.
- Treating each answer as the beginning of the next question, not as confirmation of a hypothesis you already had.
- Noticing when your questions start defaulting to qualification rather than understanding, and course-correcting in the moment.
The reps who sustain high performance over years, not just quarters, are the ones who stay genuinely interested in the people they're talking to. That interest is not manufactured. It comes from a belief that every buyer has a story worth understanding before a solution is ever introduced.
In our next blog, we'll address a formula to help you focus on Serving by Solving so that self-centered questions can begin to take up less space in your customer conversations. In the meantime, if you want to talk about how NeuroSelling helps sales teams build this discipline at scale, start a conversation with us.
