You should ask your customers lots of stuff, and take VERY LITTLE at face value.Exactly. But a time when you can take it at face value is when the question is something along of the lines of "will you sign a purchase order for this right now?" or the like.
And to tie back to what someone in another post here said about validation: one of the best way to validate that your solution is real, and will actually sell to the customer (which is the only thing that matters, from a certain point of view) is exactly to ask your customer "will you buy this, right now?" or a close variant. If the answer is "yes, send the bill and get the order underway" then you've validated something. If you get hemming and hawing and "well, maybe, let me talk to the purchasing committee" or whatever, you're still just thrashing around.
And even if you don't go for the actual sale yet (maybe the product isn't ready yet) you can take the approach Steve Blank[1] talks about, and work up to a questions of the form "would you pay a million dollars for this right now" and "well, how much would you pay for it then?" and "if I offered this to you FOR FREE right now, would you start rolling it out immediately" etc. Those answers will really tell you something about where you really stand in your customer's eyes vis-à-vis actually selling your thing.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steve-Blank/dp/09...