About KnowYourProspect

I was 21 when I sold my first camera. I'd taken a job on the film-processing counter of a camera and Hi-Fi shop, purely because photography was already a hobby of mine. Within two weeks I'd worked my way round the counter to where the equipment was sold. Within a few months I was the shop's specialist for large-format cameras — Bronica, Mamiya, Hasselblad. My boss told me I could sell sand in the Sahara.

I didn't know it then, but I'd already learned the only lesson that's mattered since: people don't buy products. They buy answers to what they actually want — and most of the time, nobody's asked them what that is.

Learning to ask

A few years later, in a completely different job, my manager read something I'd written and said, "That's tautologous." I had no idea what the word meant. He explained it, and something about that exchange stuck with me — not the word itself, but the gap it exposed. I spent the drive home that evening deciding to fix it, and I've been reading with a dictionary close by ever since.

Before any of that, at sixteen, I was given a keyring at a customer relations event — a tiny pair of silver-plated shoes, and a simple message: before you respond to a customer, walk in their shoes. That was fifty years ago. I'm sixty-six now. The keyring's long gone. The lesson hasn't.

Both moments taught me the same thing from different directions: most people don't say what they mean, and most of us don't ask enough to find out.

There's a slide I still use on sales training courses. Three exclamation marks, side by side. I ask the room what they've got to do with selling. A few guesses come back, none of them right. Then I switch to the next slide — three question marks — and the room realises they were looking at the exclamation marks from the wrong angle the whole time. It's a cheap trick, but people remember it, often years later. Which is rather the point: change the angle, and what looked like a statement turns out to have been a question all along.

Forty-three countries, one sales director title, and a lot of listening

Over the following eighteen years I moved through technical roles, export sales, and eventually became Sales Director, responsible for a team of 26 people across the world. I visited 43 countries. I negotiated contracts worth millions of pounds — one, memorably, closed in a sauna in Finland, which tells you sales looks different depending on where you are.

Not every deal survives. I once lost an order worth £3.5 million because a fiery-tempered CEO slammed his fist on a table in a meeting I wasn't even in. You learn to live with that. What you don't get over as easily is realising, years later, how much of it cost your family — the school plays, the football matches, the illnesses you weren't there for. Nobody on a factory floor sees that side of a sales career. It's real all the same.

The deal I'm still proudest of isn't the biggest one. A distributor once arranged a meeting for me with a business he was certain would buy from us. When I actually asked the customer what they needed, it became obvious we weren't the right fit — a competitor was. So I made a call, worked out an arrangement, and sent the business their way. We kept the relationship, they got what they actually needed, and I got a reputation in that company that outlasted any single sale. That's the job, done properly.

Why this matters to me

For years I was a Fellow of the Institute of Sales & Marketing Management, back when HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, was its Royal Patron. I believe selling is an honourable profession — not despite the stereotypes, but in direct opposition to them. A salesperson who's only watching their commission isn't a professional. Someone once told my son, before I could answer him myself, not to say his dad was "a salesman" — as if it were something to be ashamed of. That's the stereotype I've spent a career trying to prove wrong.

Good sales was never about persuasion. It's about asking the right questions, and actually listening to the answers.

Where KnowYourProspect came from

Years ago, faced with more priorities than I could think straight about, I built a simple spreadsheet: every task compared against every other task, one pair at a time, until a genuine order emerged. It took a day. It broke the blockage completely.

That idea grew into a tool for answering focused questions — eventually covering 47 different subject areas, each one built the same way: pairs, not ratings. Working on that, one thing kept nagging at me. Sales conversations ask about budget, timescale, and specification. They almost never ask about the person. What they actually want. What worries them. What they haven't quite said out loud, possibly because they haven't worked it out themselves.

I could see this applying well beyond any one sector. I chose not to build it that way. KnowYourProspect is deliberately narrow — built for estate agents and mortgage advisers, the two conversations that happen either side of a single property sale. For now, doing one thing properly matters more than doing many things adequately.

“The only way to influence people is to talk in terms of what the other person wants.”

— Dale Carnegie