Create More Opportunities By Asking Better Questions

Carl was having trouble closing sales. Business was terrible. He wasn’t making money.

He had been following the advice of his sales manager, but he wasn’t getting any results.

This is what he had been told to do:

“Always try to close something – anything – to keep the sales  process alive, because closing on something heightens the commitment and increases the prospects’ motivation to buy.”

“Look for and recognize intermediate closes, including gaining the prospect’s promise to:

* Meet again.
* Review product literature.
* Accept a bid or proposal.
* Participate in a demonstration
* Use the product or service on a trial basis.
* Talk with others who use the product or service.
* Arrange a meeting with the decision maker.”

As Carl tried these sales techniques he found that something was wrong. The only thing that was happening was that he was wasting a lot of his time. At the end of the day, the customer wasn’t buying.

But Carl had spent 30, 60 or 90 days of his life trying to make the sale that never closed.

As we discussed his situation, I asked him if he could tell me about one of his opportunities. He told me that he had been calling on Alice for the last two months, but nothing’s happened.

I asked him a couple of questions:

* What are the three biggest problems that Alice’s company is trying to solve?
* Why do they need your product?
* How will your product solve their problems?
* How much money – or time – will your product save them?

Carl shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t have any answers because he had never asked the questions.

When he made a sales call, he would sit down with the prospect and tell her all about his wonderful products, the history of the company, and his business and sales expertise.

After the presentation/meeting, the client would usually say “Thank you. Let me think about this and I’ll give you a call.”

Though he would try to keep the discussions going by asking to meet again, offering to put together a proposal, give a demonstration, (see the earlier list), he always came up empty.

Carl’s problem was that he wasn’t asking any questions. It’s far more important for him to know who his client is, what she does, what her problems are, and what her goals are, then for her to know everything about his company and his products.

She doesn’t care. She only wants to know how he can help her have a better future, i.e. how can he help her cut costs, increase profits, save time, or increase efficiencies.

So Carl started using a different sales strategy. He began to ask questions instead of talking about himself and his company.

He asked about:

* Their biggest challenges.
* Their long, and short, term business strategies.
* The areas of their business that they were trying to improve.

When his prospect answered a question he dug deeper. He wanted to know the cost of the problem. What was the economic or financial impact of their doing things the way they were doing them.

Tip: Listen to what a person says, and then ask a second question based upon what the person said. Then ask a third follow-up question. Do this three or four times and you really get deep into their situation.

This approach was very helpful for Carl because he was looking for a quantifiable number so that he had a starting point for discussing the value and benefits of his solution.

[After using this technique for a while, he remarked one day, “I love looking for the financial impact of a problem, because when I can find someone that has a $1 million problem, my $100,000 solution is no longer ‘that’ expensive.”]

He also made sure that he was ALWAYS speaking with the decision maker. For, as he had discovered, when you’re not speaking with the person who can make the final decision, you’re wasting your time.

Two questions that Carl started asking had a dramatic impact on his sales activity:

* In addition to yourself, who else is involved in the decision making process? and
* How do you go about making a decision to buy widgets?

And when he was getting blocked by a gatekeeper, he began to ask questions that he knew the gatekeeper couldn’t answer.

He would then try to find out who would be the person who had those answers and try to arrange a meeting with her.

If the gatekeeper refused to move Carl up to the next level, he knew that he didn’t have a prospect and would stop pursuing this opportunity. It was time to move on, and find a better prospect.

Once Carl started asking better questions, and searching for decision makers, he started to close more sales – and make more money.

Deals that usually took 90 days, were now closing in less than a month. And because he was no longer wasting his time trying to sell to people who didn’t want to buy, he had more time to look for people who were in the market… today.

– Jeffrey