Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

It’s Only Common Sense: Be Curious and Hire Curious People

Albert Einstein once said that being curious is much more important than being smart. If you’re curious about something you are going to spend a lot of time and effort finding out everything you can about it. You are going to focus as much as you can on that subject. You are going to read books and magazines, watch documentaries, and go online.

If you think about it, some of the biggest contributors to society have been curious; Thomas Alva Edison was curious about everything from finding the right filament to make a light bulb work for longer than 10 seconds, to how to save sound on a wax disc and play that sound with a needle and a giant speaker horn. Henry Ford was curious enough to try to figure out how to make an affordable car by inventing the assembly line. Newton was curious enough to figure out why an apple fell on his head…or so they say—I have my doubts about that one. But anyway, he was curious enough about why things fell that he figured out how gravity works. Curious people are people who move that great tinfoil ball of civilization down the road to progress.

Now let’s apply the quality of curiosity to sales. How can being curious help you to be a great salesperson? How does being curious help you to win and keep customers? I just read a book in which the author said that when he hires salespeople, the number one thing he looks for is curiosity—their level of curiosity—and if he sees that in a candidate he will hire them regardless of product knowledge. That person’s curiosity will drive him to find out everything he can about that product without anyone having to urge him.

A curious person will want to know everything about the product he is selling. Not just what his company is selling today, but how it was initially developed, which includes the history of the product, to how it is used, who uses it, and why they use it. In the end, that curious person will know much more about his product than people who have dealt with the product for decades.

That person will be curious about the companies who use his product—the customers. He will study his customer base. He will ask his customers why they use this product, which type of product they prefer, and how he can make his product or service so good that they will buy more.

He will also talk to those people who are building the product he sells, not only to find out what they are working on now, but what they will be working on tomorrow. In short, he will consider the future of the product.

But even better than that, his curiosity will drive him back to his customers to find out where their business is today, and where it is going in the future. This will allow to advise his own company on product development.

And that curious person will also try to find a better and more effective way to grow his customer base. He will develop new ways to make his customer sales calls more productive. He will invent better reports and matrices and he will find better selling strategies.

The curious salesperson will use his curiosity to find ways to be the best salesperson in the industry. He will study other successful people to find out what makes them successful, to become just as successful.

A curious salesperson will do everything, study everything and learn everything to be the best. He just can’t help himself. Are you curious enough to be successful? Are you smart enough to hire curious people? You should be.

It’s only common sense.