Opinion: The questions your sales team never ask are the deals you never win

Rejoose founder and CEO Thomas Winther Mardahl talks up the importance of asking questions, staying curious and never assuming customer silence means no need, particularly when it comes to sustainability and compliance

Nobody asks for flowers. There’s no reminder in your phone, no calendar invite titled “buy tulips”, no note on the fridge. And yet when you walk in holding them, it matters. It matters more than the things that were actually asked for, because the whole charm is that nobody asked. You just thought of them, and you cared enough to do something about it.

The same is true of your customers. Everyone in sales should know without being told, to stay curious and ask the questions nobody has put in front of them, and to show they’re there to contribute. Nobody will ask for that effort. But everyone feels it when it’s there, and notices when it’s gone. And often, that small difference is what makes you and your company stand out from the crowd.

And yet, all the time we hear the opposite from partners across the channel: ‘my customer has never asked me about it, so they probably don’t need it’. It sounds reasonable. It’s also one of the most expensive assumptions a business can make.

The logic falls apart the moment you look at it. If people only needed what they asked for, a good doctor would treat the symptom you walked in with and never the one you didn’t know to mention. The need is real long before anyone finds the words for it.

A customer’s silence is not the same as “no need”

This is true of almost everything you could help a customer with, from the obvious to the overlooked. One of the best examples right now is the one hardly anyone is raising: carbon, energy, and compliance. The quiet around it doesn’t mean the need is missing. It means you’re standing in front of an open door your competitors have walked straight past.

Our industry has been here before. Twenty years ago, hardly any customers asked their IT supplier about security. It wasn’t on the purchase order, not in the budget, not in the conversation. The partners who waited to be asked got overtaken by the ones who raised it first and made it part of doing the job well. Today no serious buyer would leave it out. The need was always there. It just hadn’t been said out loud yet.

There’s a line often attributed to Henry Ford: if he’d asked people what they wanted, they’d have said faster horses. True or not, it lands. Customers ask for what they already know about. Your value is in what they haven’t thought to ask for.

The thing that stops most people is the belief that you have to be an expert to raise a subject at all. You don’t. You don’t need to be a carbon accountant to ask a customer how they’re thinking about the footprint of what they buy, any more than you needed to be a cryptographer to ask about security. A good question isn’t a lecture. It’s an invitation, and the expertise can follow.

Here’s where it gets interesting. The person who needs this is often not your usual contact. Ask about carbon or compliance and you might find yourself introduced to the sustainability lead, the procurement team, or the CFO, people you’d never have reached through the standard order. Each one is a new point of connection, and the more of them you hold, the harder your relationship is to shift. A single contact is a thread. A dozen is a rope.

How a partner can be front of mind for end user customers

There’s a second prize, and it’s a big one. The partner who asks the interesting question is the name the customer remembers. When the need finally surfaces, or the RFP goes out, you’re already in their mind, and often in the room before the document is even written. Curiosity today is pipeline tomorrow.

This shift is already underway. At Canalys Forums 2026, Omdia reported that 44 per cent of partners now say sustainability shows up in more than 30 per cent of the RFPs they receive, up from just 18 per cent in 2023. That’s well over double in three years. If it doesn’t match what you’re seeing in your own deals, that’s a good reason to be curious about why not.

None of this competes with your customer’s other priorities. They’re busy adopting AI and fending off cyber threats, as they should be. But spending more doesn’t shrink what a business has to account for. It grows it. The AI boom is also an energy and hardware boom, and every workload you move carries a footprint. The more a company invests, the more it will one day have to explain.

And here’s what we see when a partner finally asks. More often than not, the customer did need help. They just hadn’t realised you could offer it, so they’d gone looking elsewhere, sometimes to a paid consultant, for the very thing you could have handled yourself. The silence never meant there was no need. It meant the conversation hadn’t happened yet.

And asking is only the opening move. Think of that first conversation as an investment of your time, the groundwork that makes everything after it possible. Once a customer gets it, and knows you can help, the real question turns up. The million-dollar one: can you help us bring our footprint down for 2027?

For a supplier, few questions are more welcome. The honest route to a lower footprint is rarely the cheapest box on the shelf. It’s the more efficient product, the one that lasts longer and costs less to run, the one with the better total cost of ownership and, usually, the higher price today. Helping a customer cut emissions and helping them buy better turn out to be the same conversation. The customer wins, the planet wins, and so do you.

This is the real reward, and it outlasts any single sale. Ask the questions nobody else is asking and you stop being a supplier who takes orders. You become the one who saw it coming, who surprised them, who was useful before they knew they needed you. That’s how to become a trusted advisor, and trusted advisors don’t get compared on price. They get called first.

So, bring the flowers. Ask your customers. Help them tick every box. Win more deals.