by Paul Cherry
•How long have you been with your current vendor?
•What do you like about them?
•What do you dislike about them?
•What’s your budget?
•What are your goals?
•How much are you paying now?
•What if I could give you a better solution for a cheaper price? Would you be interested?
•When are you looking to make a change?
•Are you the decisionmaker?
•Can I put together a proposal for you?
•Are you ready to get started?
•May I have your business?
•How are we doing?
•Any problems?
You may feel good about a meeting during which you’ve asked these questions. After all, you’ve garnered lots of useful information about the buyer—what they need, what they’re currently using, what they like and don’t like. You may feel you’ve moved the sale forward considerably. In fact, questions like these may be setting you back—because they add no value to the buyer.
There’s a term for this kind of interaction: an interrogation.
Imagine yourself sitting in a small room in a police station, while a burly detective pounds you with questions. It’s clear what the detective stands to gain from this exchange, but what’s in it for you?
Ask too many of these types of questions and your buyers will start to feel like they’re in that little room. They can see how you will benefit from these kinds of questions. But they’ve gained nothing for themselves. They learn nothing from your questions, because they already know the answers. So to the buyer, your questions are at best boring and at worst overbearing.
Yes, you’ll eventually need to gather answers to these questions and more to make an effective recommendation to your buyer. But these are the least effective questions you can ask of a buyer because they only deliver value to you.
If your buyer is a kind and patient soul, she may politely answer all of your obviously self-serving questions, all the while hoping that at some point you’re going to stop sounding like every other salesperson who’s ever tried to get her business and say something valuable.
But if you don’t offer any value, buyers—unlike crime suspects—possess a powerful weapon. They can end the interrogation any time they like—usually by saying something like: “I have to run to a meeting. Why don’t you leave me some product literature so I can take time to digest the information and then get back to you?”
Digging Deeper
Are you a problem solver?
Of course you are. All salespeople present themselves as problem solvers.
Yet in my experience, very few salespeople ask buyers to vividly describe the problems they are experiencing. Rarely do they ask how the clients themselves are affected by those problems.
Problem-oriented questions give you, the salesperson, valuable information. But they also create value to the buyer. They invite the buyerto think more deeply about what he is trying to achieve, and what’s keeping him from it. He has the opportunity to open up and vent his frustrations. And in the process, he may learn something about himself and his situation that he didn’t know.
In truth, any salesperson can gather facts. But the outstanding salesperson ignites the emotions of prospective customers and uncovers what motivates them to act. Unfortunately, most salespeople don’t know how to spur people on to action. Either they’re afraid to get to the real emotions or unclear about what to do once those emotions come to the surface.
Although your usual list of questions might help you collect facts, the questioning techniques presented in the following chapters will help you go beyond mere facts and gain a deeper understanding of what your buyer needs and wants, and how you can deliver it.
Asking engaging questions will not guarantee a positive outcome. Some prospective customers will not yet be ready to admit they need help. And sometimes a buyer simply won’t have a real need for your service or product. Even in these cases, engaging questions will allow you to get to the truth more quickly (or conclude it’s not a good fit and move on).
So are you asking questions that dig deep? That tap into buyers’ emotions and motivations? To get an honest self-appraisal of your questioning skills, let’s start with two simple exercises:
Exercise 1
Take a moment to write down all of the questions you typically ask during an initial sales call to a prospective customer. List as many questions as possible.
Exercise 2
Contact a prospective client and ask some of the questions on your list. Keep track of which questions you ask, as well as how much time you spend talking during the call. Consider recording the conversation; this will help keep you honest with yourself. (Keep in mind that, depending on the state you’re in, you may need the customer’s permission to record the call.)
Immediately after the call ends, write up a “call report” for your own review, answering the following questions:
1. Which questions did you ask?
2. Approximately how long was the conversation?
3. What percentage of the time did you spend talking, versus your customer?
4. Did you find yourself talking more than you meant to?
5. Did your questions serve primarily your needs or the needs of your prospective customer?
6. After this call, do you have a sense of the problems your prospective client is currently facing? If so, what exactly are those problems?
7. Are you aware of the future goals of this prospective client? If so, what is her vision for the future?
8. Do you think you set yourself apart from other salespeople during this conversation? If so, state specifically how you think your questions set you apart from other salespeople in your field.
9. Are you any closer to completing the sale than you were before the call?
10. Do you have a commitment from the prospective client to pursue the next step in the sale? If so, what is it?
11. What do you think the prospective client’s impression of you was after the first call?
Most likely you found several areas that you need to work on to improve your questioning techniques. That’s good news—because now you’ve identified some areas where you can make your questioning technique better.
Inside the Buyer’s Mind
Getting into the psyche of your prospective clients will allow you to ask better questions and get higher-quality information. To do this, you need to know what drives your buyer’s behavior and what pushes his buttons. Here are some areas that your questions should explore:
Who is an influencer? Salespeople often talk about finding the “decisionmaker.” That may even be one of the questions you ask prospects. But it’s a dangerous and misguided question, and can quickly lead you down the wrong path.
Decisions—especially in complex business-to-business sales—are rarely made by one person. Organizations have safeguards to ensure that decisions aren’t made until all possible factors are considered.
So asking “Who’s the decisionmaker?” is based on a false assumption. Your prospective customer must report to numerous people, such as bosses, other departments within the company, colleagues on the team, stockholders, and board members, as well as customers who depend on the company to deliver a product.
What you should be looking to understand is (1) Who are all of the people influencing the decision to buy? (2) How much influence does each one wield? (3) What buying criteria are important to each person?
Figure 2-1 illustrates the different factors prospective customers must deal with when making a decision about whether or not to do business with you.
Who are all of these people shown in Figure 2-1? The category of “internal customers” includes bosses, board members, colleagues, and coworkers in other divisions. Internal customers set limits for how much money your prospective client can spend and may even erect obstacles to block the completion of a sale. Internal customers have their own agendas
—agendas that you need to learn about as soon as possible in the course of the sale. Many times these agendas conflict with each other and lead to disputes among workers in the same company. If you can uncover the motivations and concerns of your prospective client’s internal customers, you will be able to defuse the situation and move on with the sale.
FIGURE 2-1. Factors affecting the customer’s decision to buy.
“External customers” include those who do business with your prospective client. These are the people whom your client wants to satisfy. Therefore you should try to gain as much information about external customers as you can in order to better understand what drives your prospective customer. A prospective customer who has managerial or senior-level responsibilities will definitely be more eager to learn how your solutions could help in dealings with external customers because external customers are what keeps her in business and allows her company to grow.
What is the personal impact? Companies don’t buy, people do. Just like you, your prospective customers have a personal stake in buying or not buying from you. In most cases, they’re motivated to improve their standard of living, upgrade their position in the company, enhance their job security, achieve the recognition they deserve, and avoid looking stupid or being ostracized. You will have success building relationships with your potential customers only when you can get into their worlds and identify the forces at work in their lives.
So it’s important to understand each influencer’s career goals and other personal motivations. There’s the supervisor who wants to become a vice president, and the president who wants to take his national company to international levels: All of your prospective clients have visions and dreams for themselves. By carefully unlocking those desires, you can present yourself as a “solution provider”—someone who can assist them in achieving their goals.
And just to complicate things further, you’ll need to understand the personal impact for each of the influencers that you’ve identified. One “no” can be enough to kill a sale, even if it comes from someone who’s not perceived as a key player.
How will you help their competitive position? Like you, the people you call on are worried about their competitors. Depending on the position of your prospective customers, beating the competition will be anywhere from a minor concern to their number-one priority. If you’re meeting with the president of a company, it’s likely to be at or near the top of the list. When discussing software with the head of information technology, however, the actions of his competitors may not even cross his mind. Either way, it is important for you as a salesperson to discover to what degree internal customers, external customers, and competitors influence the decisions of your prospective clients.
Hot-button issues. One final influence on prospective customers is the “performance pressures” they feel on the job every day. These include issues of profits, losses, and costs of production and they can dictate the day-to-day lives of many working people. A salesperson who identifies these pressures can appeal to the needs of prospective customers to meet their budgets, generate more revenues, reduce costs, save time, or reduce stress so that they can effectively meet their performance objectives.
As you can see from this list, I’m not suggesting that you need to ask more questions, but better questions. In fact, you will be asking your prospective customers fewer questions and getting more information of a higher quality. These techniques will get buyers talking about what’s important to them instead of what’s important to you. They will prompt the buyer to think more deeply about what he wants instead of focusing on surface-level issues such as price, features, and delivery. Equally important, they will allow you to set yourself apart from other salespeople in your field and create more meaningful, deeper relationships. Once you have finished reading this book, you will have acquired all the skills you need to craft a new set of questions, tailored to your industry and guaranteed to earn the rapport and respect of many more customers.
With all of the question types we’ll be discussing, keep in mind that there’s no magic formula that will unlock a sale. Your questions need to be tailored to the situation. One prospect may respond enthusiastically to one line of questioning but resist engaging with different types of questions. Some approaches will work better with decisionmakers, others with gatekeepers or administrators. Nor can you assume that, say, an engineer will be turned off by questions that get at their feelings or frustrations, or that a social worker won’t care about return on investment. We hope to present you with more tools in your arsenal, so that you can try different approaches and see which ones fit.
In addition, keep in mind that you don’t want your questions to come across as canned or formulaic. Prospects will be reluctant to open up to you if they sense that you’re just checking off boxes on the way to the sale. Use these questions to create genuine conversations with buyers, not just to dress up your sales pitch.
CHAPTER
3
Are You a Partner or a Product Peddler?
The Educational Question
ONE OF THE first hurdles you face with buyers is establishing yourself as someone who can add value—not just because of what you sell, but also by virtue of who you are. High-value salespeople successfully position themselves as experts or advisers who use their expertise to improve the lives of their prospective customers.
Most salespeople sincerely want to help prospective customers by improving their business, saving them money, and expanding their share of the market.
But many prospects are cynical—and rightly so. We’ve all encountered too many low-value product peddlers who think their job is to show what they’ve got, say what it does, and ask for money.
You must work quickly to set yourself apart from that crowd, and one of the best ways is with the educational question.
Let’s see how asking educational questions can help establish a high-value sales relationship. I’ll use the example of a pharmaceutical sales rep because that’s an especially difficult relationship to establish. Physicians are busy and their time is expensive. Moreover, they’re experts in their own right and skeptical that a mere drug rep can match their own knowledge, much less tell them something they don’t already know. And since reps can no longer resort to the kinds of perks and goodies that used to get them in the door, what can they do to add value? As you’ll see, a well-thought question can help deliver that value, by leveraging the doctor’s own expertise.
Rep: Doctor, I recently read an article on the American Academy of Pediatrics website that reported on a counseling program in Baltimore for obese children and their families. One of the biggest challenges they face is overcoming parents’ denial about their children’s weight issues and poor eating habits and tending to shrug off warnings from their pediatrician. I’m curious how your experience compares with that.
Doctor: Sure, we encounter that problem every week. Some families are totally out of touch when it comes to healthful eating. I just met with a mother and father who were so proud because they’d cut down their weekly fast-food meals from five to four! It’s unbelievable how many children we’re seeing these days with diabetes and hypertension.
What did this question do? The rep didn’t tout her own expertise on childhood obesity. But the educational question positioned her in the role of consultant—someone who knows what is going on in the marketplace and in the research centers.
When asking an educational question, you not only engage the prospective customer in talk about controversial issues but also present yourself as someone with fresh information, rather than simply trying to sell your product.
The educational question is easy to compose because it requires only that you keep up with the latest news in your industry, as well as other trends or issues affecting a prospect’s business—which you probably do already.
The goal in using the educational question is to engage your prospective customers by sharing information that’s relevant to their problems. The
key is to make the prospective client feel understood, and most of all understood by you. These questions are not meant to be used manipulatively; rather, they are intended to stimulate a prospect’s thinking and encourage exploration of options. Once you have started a prospect thinking about different possibilities and new ways of doing business, your product will almost inevitably be seen as a solution.
A Template for Creating Educational Questions
The simplest way to create an effective educational question is to Google the industry you sell into to find news, reports, studies, and so on. You can search Google News, or simply Google something like “5-year trends in wheat farming.” (If you want to do a really deep dive, check out Google Scholar, which searches academic studies and research.) Once you find some nugget of interest—ideally, an issue that people aren’t yet paying attention to or something that challenges the conventional wisdom—you turn that information into a question for your buyer. For example: “I read recently in an article from ___________ that ___________ . Tell me, how does that compare with what you are seeing?”
Here are some samples:
•“Last week I read an article in the Wall Street Journal that claimed drug testing is an ineffective tool to weed out poor-quality job applicants. Yet five times as many companies test for drugs today compared to ten years ago. What has been your experience on this issue?”
•“A recent article on the Business Insider website said that over 75 percent of high-tech firms today turn to foreign workers to fill web-development positions. One of the key challenges seems to be the language barrier and challenges with understanding U.S. customs and norms. Another challenge for companies is keeping up with federal laws governing foreign workers, which are in a constant state of flux. How do you manage those issues with your IT staff?”
•“In the newest issue of the JAMA, the editors questioned whether gene therapy is living up to its early promises. Some doctors, however, insist that breakthroughs are just around the corner. What’s your view?”
