"As I was headed to the bench, I thought our season was over."
The Shot! And the Importance of Discovery
June 17, 2025
Phil Krone, President
Asking the questions that give you the confidence you need to win in sales.
Basketball fans old enough to have watched the 1992 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament will remember one of the most iconic plays in March Madness history.
With 2.1 seconds remaining, the Grant-Hill-to-Christian-Laettner connection led Duke to an unforgettable 104-103 victory over Kentucky in the East Regional Final game. Duke went on to beat Michigan in the national finals to win the tournament, the first back-to-back championship team since UCLA completed three in a row in 1973.
In this short YouTube video, The Shot, Grant Hill offers a perspective you don’t often see: what happened behind the scenes in the timeout that changed his thinking from “the season is over” to “we are going to win this game.” And you can see the shot, too!
The take-way for me is the reinforcement of something we teach over and over in our popular consultative sales training course, FOCIS®: how the power of questions in discovery is the driver of successful communications, persuasion, and sales.
As Hill points out in the video, Coach K didn’t dictate the play. Instead, he asked Grant whether he could make a good pass to Laettner standing at the free throw line at the opposite end of the court. And, then he asked Laettner whether he could make the shot from the free throw line. They both said “Yes!”
The change in confidence from when the players walked to the bench—dejected—to when they walked back into the game—as confident as they’d ever been—was dramatic. It is a perfect example of the difference between education and persuasion when people are speaking with each other. Coach K proved in that moment how important asking is versus telling and how important confidence is to success.
In our FOCIS® Consultative Selling classes we spend three months learning what the most effective questions will be for each of our clients to use to customize each sales call for each prospect. Canned pitches simply do not work in complex business-to-business selling.
We may only get one meeting with a prospect, so how we use the limited time may determine ultimate success. Our clients usually know everything they need to know about their product or service and their market. They are the experts in that arena. But we’re the experts in knowing how to draw that information out of them so they can write effective discovery questions to determine if our solution is the best option for them and, if so, to persuade their prospects. And we can help you be the experts in selling your product or service. The right questions from a seller at the right times build a buyer’s trust and confidence in the seller and their product or service. This also significantly shortens the sales cycle.
Coach K didn’t tell his players what to do. He asked them what they could do—and they answered out loud in front of their teammates. That gave the whole team the confidence they needed to win.
Please get in touch if:
- Your win rate is too low
- Your sales cycle is too long
- You give away intellectual property within the sales process
- A small group of your people bring in 80 percent of your new business
- A glass ceiling is preventing you from winning large opportunities.
Call us to arrange a no-cost, no-obligation session where we can learn more about your growth objectives and the challenges you face in reaching them. You can learn how we can help you overcome those challenges to meet your growth objectives.
We have extensive experience in helping our clients overcome them. And there’s no fee for an initial conversation. The ball will be in your hands—and you will make the shot.
We’re at 847-446-0008 Ext. 1 or pkrone@productivestrategies.com. We look forward to hearing from you.
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