Biased Polls and Poor Sales Questions: 83% of Salespeople Fail at This

One of the cable news networks conducted a new poll where they revealed that 68% of people thought Trump was not spending enough time on the economy.

It doesn’t matter whether you like or dislike Trump, or have no opinion. This was supposed to be a policy poll, not a popularity poll. But since most of the national pollsters and media hate Trump, the question is asked so as to not be a policy question.

Pollsters are notorious for asking questions to get a desired outcome, and probably asked the question they wanted to ask, as opposed to the question that would get the result consistent with what reality is relative to the economy. It’s the same mistake that salespeople make.

For example, how would the answers have changed if they asked these four questions about the economy?:

1. Gas prices are coming down – they’re down by more than 40% compared to the previous five years. Is that positive?
2. Inflation is down from 9.1% from the previous five years to 2.7% in December 2025. Is that positive?
3. Starting in 2026, taxpayers will not have to pay tax on tips, overtime or social security. Is that positive?
4. Starting in 2026, new parents will have $1,000 deposited in an investment account. The value of a “Trump Account” in 18 years will range from about $5,800 (no extra deposits) to potentially over $300,000 with maximum annual deposits. Is that positive?

Sales Questions

Quite often, the compelling, but unspoken reason why a prospect will do business with you is dissatisfaction with the incumbent vendor. One of the common questions that salespeople ask prospects – if they ask at all – about the incumbent is something along the lines of, “Are you happy with them?”

That’s like asking a customer in a retail store, “Can I help you?” The answer is always, “Just looking.”

The answer to the “happy” question is always, “Yes.”

What would happen if salespeople asked questions that are more specific to the known weaknesses of a specific competitor, like:

• How do their long lead times affect you?
• What happens when their deliveries are late?
• How do you cope with their lack of responsiveness?
• How often have you received an inaccurate invoice?
• How do their quality issues affect you?
• How does their lack of reliability affect you?

There are dozens of additional questions you can ask when you teach yourself about your competitors’ weaknesses. But to leverage those weaknesses, you must not only ask who they are buying from today, but ask the specific follow up questions as well. Most salespeople don’t do either. According to the latest data from Objective Management Group (OMG) and its assessments of close to 3 million salespeople, only 17% of all salespeople are strong in the Consultative Seller competency. The Consultative Seller is one of 21 Sales Core Competencies and you can see them along with the accompanying data here. 14 attributes make up the Consultative Seller competency, and the following 5 attributes apply to the topic of this article:

• Asks enough questions
• Asks great questions
• Able to ask tough questions
• Healthy skepticism
• Listens and asks with ease

Back to the data, only 17% are strong, but that’s a misleading statistic. If we break it down by sales percentile, we see something even worse:

If you lead or are on sales team of 6-10 salespeople, only 1 or 2 may be asking questions like this, another 2 are trying but failing, and half or more aren’t asking any questions – at all. If your company has multiple teams sized this way, you can quickly see that the problem scales along with the size of the entire sales organization.

This isn’t rocket science, but it does require more than doing demos, giving bids, quotes and proposals, and hoping for the best. It’s a transactional approach to selling versus taking a consultative approach to selling. Getting the hang of taking a consultative approach requires professional training and coaching. If it didn’t, all sales teams would be doing it and the data would tell a different story.

As always, if you want help with this, feel free to reach out for help.

How is the Economy Doing?

I have always felt like I am in a relatively informed place to comment on economic trends. I saw the 2008-2010 financial crisis coming before most. My company has clients in more than 200 industries. Among my personal clients, enough are in manufacturing, construction and transportation to see the trends before they affect the majority of us.

My manufacturing and distribution clients had good years in 2025 and are expecting even better years in 2026. In my experience, the manufacturing trends run about 8-12 months ahead of the rest of the economy. How predictive are the results with my industrial clients? They’re validated by the experiences of my transportation clients who report an increase in the number of loads. The only sector where our clients saw a down year in 2025 was in building materials, which were negatively affected by high interest rates and depressed construction and remodel starts.

There you have it. My opinion on polls, salespeople and the economy. Here’s to a great 2026!