Implication questions

In most cases, we can discover a propect's situation with just a few quick questions. Using our knowledge of the industry, we can then infer some likely problems. We use this to formulate our implication questions.

Situation: Offices in different locations

Problems:

• Cannot see the database from remote locations

  Implication questions:

  1. Do you vendors every have to make extra trips to the office because they didn't have information locally?
  2. What happens when you need information about a customer in the evening, and you're at home?
  3. How many phone calls does your office take from customers who are looking for status updates on their problem? What would happen if your could reduce that number by 25%. Would that free up your receptionists time by 25%, or could you hire 25% fewer customer support staff? What are the actual costs of a customer support rep. and how much do you save when they can do other tasks?
  4. When you are in another office and you cannot access some pertinent information, does that cause a loss of efficiency?
  5. How do you know which office is more efficient? Who is in charge of making report evaluations about each office -- how much time is spent on that?

• High cost of maintaining IT infrastructure in multiple locations

  Implication questions:

  1. If a computer breaks in a remote office do you have to send a support person out from the central office to fix it?
  2. Are your computer people in each office duplicating work that could be done by a central team?
  3. Is it difficult to get similar reports from different accounting and issue tracking systems?

Problems

• A manager cannot get information on a colleague's issues.

  Implication questions:

  1. Do customers ever get frustrated when they call into the office and there is noone who has info on their problem?
  2. Do you ever find that important issues get dropped if a manager goes on vacation?
  3. Have you ever found a lot of duplicated effort when one problem gets reported multiple times?

• Executives cannot monitor performance of property managers

  Implication questions:

  1. If you cannot effectively monitor what is going on with each of your properties have you ever had problems from issues that suddenly blew up?
  2. Have you ever suffered because one of your property managers was not performing but you weren't aware of the problem?

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