3 Ways to Improve Your Ability to Diagnose

Selling requires a strong ability to diagnose the client’s problems and challenges. 

- Anthony Iannarino

1 Suspend your judgement and be open to exploring

The first way to improve your ability to diagnose is to learn to suspend your judgement. Just because you have seen the signs before and have been able to make an improvement for a client who shared these signs and symptoms, does not in any way suggest that what you have done before will work in this case. It might work, and it might not. It might need minor changes and modifications, and it might need to be scrapped for a whole new solution. You must be open to exploring.

To really perform a great diagnosis, you need to be able to stop yourself from the tendency to draw analogies from one set of circumstances to another long enough to make sure you really understand the root cause. The symptoms and the signs, the causes of the dissatisfaction, may be the same, while having very different root causes.

2 Remember that you are not treating an individual

In sales, we tend to talk about our clients by using their company name. It is almost like that company is an individual entity. And in some ways, it is. But a company is really a staggeringly complex number of parts and systems that are all interrelated. Problems in one area have a way of spilling over into other areas. That is why an excellent diagnosis considers the effect of the solution on the whole.