Brilliant sales questions that deliver
Great sales questions are vital to selling. Get them right and your prospect will tell you everything you need to know to win their business. Get them wrong and you will be rejected like last weeks stale bread.
Thinking about examples of great questions reminds me of a few years ago (in my dreams) when I was a single girl. It was in the days before gyms became popular, or in my case necessary, and my girlfriends and I would go dancing. The 1980’s was a great time to go clubbing, but there came a downside.
The guys.
Sorry to all the wonderful guys out there, but I only wanted to go dancing and would rather do my thing on the dance floor than be chatted up.
The thing was the chat up lines weren’t very good as they didn’t ask me any good questions about me.
Closed sales questions are only good for one thing
Closing. They are not very good at finding out about someone.
Examples of the chat up lines I got were:
“Can I get you a drink?”
“Would you like a dance?”
“Do you live near here?”
These are closed questions so if I wanted to get back on the dance floor I would have a bit of fun and only answer with a yes or a no. They would soon give up leaving me to get down to a bit of Donna Summer.
If they had changed the question slightly to open questions then I might have been better engaged. So perhaps the guys could of tried:
“What are you drinking?”
“What do you like to dance to?”
“Where do to you live?”
It would be very hard for anyone to answer these questions with a yes or no, and would have got me talking about something I felt comfortable with.
Prospects want to talk about themselves
So like me in the nightclub, the only thing that was going to stop me being on the dance floor, was if a guy asked some questions about me that I felt comfortable with.
Prospects are just the same. Ask big open questions and I guarantee you will get lots of lovely information to help you find your prospects pain. Do that and you will be in a better position of solving it for them by selling them your solution.
[easy-tweet tweet=”The best sales questions have your expertise wrapped into them. Jill Konrath” user=”SucceedatSelling”]
Remember the two other types of sales questions
There are two different types of open questions to ask your prospects. Current state and future state. You need to know what they are doing now, but you also need to find out where they need to be. This creates the gap, and it’s the gap you can solve.
The following examples can be easily tweaked to use when selling pretty much anything.
Current State Questions
- How do you do that at the moment?
- What is wrong with that?
- How do you think you can improve it?
- How does that work?
- Who does it for you and how well are they doing?
Future State Questions
- What is the aim of your business?
- What’s the potential?
- Where is your business going to be in 5 years?
- How will you get there?
- Who will help you?
So it doesn’t matter if you are trying to sell what you do, or chat up the person of your dreams. Great open questions work every time.
My personal favourite is “How’s things?” or to make it more business focused “How’s business?”. Both simple and both highly effective too.
Please let me know how well they work for you too!
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Thanks for sharing another great post. One of the questions people often ask me about my quilt business is how I imprint photos, so I have addressed the answer to that question on my sites and in a note on my Facebook business page.
Brilliant! Questions are probably the most important part of selling. My motto is “If you don’t ask, you don’t get” , but it’s the way you ask that will make you successful!
In my experience, I have found that the H question gets richer answers than the W [Who, What etc] questions. H=How gets people imagining things.
Yes you are so right Ravi. “How” gets people to really think about their problem or the solution to their problem. However don’t you think the “Who, What, Where, When” questions are vitally important to get the facts about their need so we don’t assume what it is they need?
P.S. Sorry about the late response as I’ve been working away followed by a holiday. Back on it now though! 🙂