The most underused skill in sales is the one you already have.
You don't need a new technique, a better script, or another certification. You need to get genuinely curious about the person across the table, ask a real question, and then do the hard part: stop talking.
The traveling sales professional spends more time in unfamiliar rooms than almost any other professional, for example, new cities, new offices, new clients, new contexts. That constant novelty is either a source of anxiety or a source of advantage, and which one it becomes depends almost entirely on one thing: how curious you are about where you've landed and who you're sitting across from.
Curiosity as a professional practice is not the same as small talk. Small talk fills space. Curiosity creates connection. The difference is intention. Small talk asks about the weather and moves on. Curiosity asks why someone chose to build their career in this city, what they love about it, what surprised them, what they'd tell someone just arriving. These questions don't just warm up the conversation. They surface the kind of specific, personal information that makes every subsequent interaction feel less like a sales call and more like a continuation of something real.
The road offers a natural laboratory for this practice. Some examples include a local diner instead of the hotel chain restaurant, a conversation with the bartender at the neighborhood spot instead of room service, or a question to the client about where they'd send a visitor for a meal. None of this is a technique. It's genuine interest in the world you're moving through and the people in it. That interest is contagious. People can feel the difference between someone who is asking because they want to know and someone who is asking because they were trained to build rapport. One of those produces a real answer. The other produces a polite one.
The listening part is where most salespeople fall apart. Asking a good question and then immediately preparing the next question while the other person is answering is not listening. It's turn management. Real listening means staying in the answer long enough to let it surprise you, to follow a thread you didn't expect, to let the conversation go somewhere the script didn't anticipate. That's where the most useful information lives. That's also where the buyer decides whether you're actually interested in them or just performing interest.
"Just get curious. Remove the judgment. Talk to locals. Ask why they live there, why they stayed. Then be quiet and listen. You'd be amazed at what you learn."
The practical payoff is significant. The rep who knows their client's city, their local pressures, their professional context, and something genuine about who they are as a person walks into every conversation with a depth of shared ground that no amount of product training can manufacture. That ground is built one curious question at a time, over months and years, by someone who was actually paying attention. It doesn't require a technique. It requires deciding that the person across the table is genuinely interesting. Most of them are, if you give them the chance to be.
Three things worth thinking about
When did you last ask a client a question you didn't already know the answer to?
Discovery questions are designed to surface known information in a structured way. Genuinely curious questions go somewhere else: into the person's actual experience, their history with the problem, their opinion on something adjacent to the sale. These questions don't have a scripted follow-up. They have a response you weren't expecting. That's the signal that something real is happening in the conversation.
Are you using the road to learn or just to get from place to place?
Every new city is a new context. The local economy, the regional culture, the specific pressures that shape how your client thinks about their business. The rep who skips the chain restaurant and finds the local spot, who asks the rideshare driver what's changed in the last five years, who pays attention to what's on the walls of their client's office, is building a kind of contextual intelligence that never shows up in a training program. It just makes every conversation richer.
What judgment are you bringing into client conversations that curiosity could replace?
Every rep has assumptions about certain types of clients, certain industries, and certain objections. These assumptions are sometimes right and always limiting. The moment you think you already know what a person is going to say, you stop listening for what they actually say. Curiosity is the antidote to assumption. It keeps you present. It keeps you learning, and it keeps clients from feeling like they've been categorized before they opened their mouth.
You have been trained to talk. The market has more talkers than it needs. What it's short on is salespeople who ask a real question and then actually wait for the answer. That's the skill. It was always there. It just needs to be used more than it's being used right now.
If you relate to this one, the full conversation that inspired it is waiting for you on The Traveling Saleslady podcast. Find it wherever you listen.
See you on the road and Journey On.
This blog is a production of The Traveling Saleslady in partnership with Brilliant Beam Media.
