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Dec 07: News Stories
Selling – Telling or Asking?
When asked to describe a good salesperson, most people immediately think about those who are great presenters and who excel at developing relationships. In fact, many companies around the world focus their training on telling salespeople what to say and how to say it, but very few spend as much time on teaching them what to ask.
Whilst presenting and relationship building skills are important, questions are the cornerstone of the sales process. You have to ask questions to identify new opportunities, find out who will make the decision, uncover their needs, and find out how best to present your proposal. Top sales people develop their technique and skill in knowing how to ask the right questions at the right time as they know from experience that this will increase their success rate.
In today’s busy and crowded world potential customers are inundated with approaches from suppliers and, therefore, your first task is to create interest in you and your offering. The best way to do this is to make your prospects curious as this is the spark that makes them want to find out more about what you have to offer. So rather than tell a potential prospect about the kinds of problems that you can solve ask them about things that are specific to their industry, “can I ask you a question about.......?” or “how do you feel about....?” This approach will help you to obtain the information that you need and, by making the questions specific, it will increase your credibility with your prospect.
The next stage is to uncover their needs. Rather than ask broad questions such as “what’s the most significant business issue that you face?” try “To what extent is ...... important?” This not only helps uncover needs but also encourages people to expand their response. It is also important when uncovering needs to remember that the motivation to buy can be either rewards driven, i.e. increased revenue, or aversion driven, i.e. reduce costs, and therefore your questioning should cover both possibilities.
Finally to the presentation stage, where you would expect the “telling” to be the focus. Using questions can again be very powerful. You will have an agenda of what you want to present but the key is in getting your prospect to buy in to it. You can do this by making it their agenda. Open up by stating that you want to make sure that you cover all of the issues that are important to them and then proceed to ask questions about each of the key issues, i.e. what effect would..... have? And then finish with “is there anything else that you would like me to add to this agenda?” The end result is that you will have agreed an agenda with your client whilst still covering all of the key issues.
If you want to improve your sales performance, work on planning and asking the right questions at the right time. Click here for more on Sales Coaching >
By Martin Dobbs, Ology Business Coach, Droitwich
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