Questions that Sell

by Paul Cherry

  Using these answers will allow you to better prepare any proposal you might submit to this prospect in the future. It will permit you to anticipate the most likely objections your prospect might have, while giving you an opportunity to address them. Figure 10-1 will help you adapt this process for many different situations.

  FIGURE 10-1

  CHAPTER

  11

  Alien Encounters:

  Questions for the First Meeting That Get Buyers to Open Up

  DEVELOPING ANY RELATIONSHIP is a process, something that takes time and effort. Trying to force or manipulate a relationship into a specific time frame can backfire and cause one or both of the parties involved to quit the relationship. This is just as true for business relationships as for personal relationships. In order to cultivate trust and success, you need to invest time in the process by asking the right questions of your clients and prospective clients.

  Just as important as asking questions, however, is being patient and listening to the rich information that comes your way in the form of answers. Doing so will instill confidence and trust in the prospective clients, the foundation upon which to build powerful business relationships. In this chapter, you will learn about the vital areas to explore when getting to know your clients.

  Preparation

  Putting together a list of questions before a sales call is essential. That’s because your strategy begins with determining what information you need.

  Before meeting with a prospective client, always do your homework. In addition to Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and similar sources, consider online business directories, such as Hoovers, Dun & Bradstreet, Data.com, Charlie, or WHOIS. (Of course, the sources of information are constantly changing and growing, and this should by no means be considered a comprehensive list.) These resources are especially useful for understanding industry trends, a company’s rank in its industry, its financial strength, its executives and their backgrounds, its competitors, and its customer base. The more detailed information you can compile, the more personalized your questions can be.

  If the prospect contacted you and you’re calling back, also prepare questions to find out what prompted his interest and what is on his mind. For example, is it a pressing matter, an idea he is just kicking around, or simply a tactic to keep his current vendor honest?

  The First Meeting

  Whether in person or on the phone, you want to make a great first impression. So what should you do in the first few minutes of the meeting? Do you jump right into questioning if the prospect knows little about you? How do you provide some background on your company without falling into the trap of doing a sales pitch?

  When it comes to building rapport with a prospect, you want to build credibility quickly and set the stage. Otherwise the prospect may ask herself, “Why am I wasting my time with this salesperson?” Because these first moments are so important, it’s important to prepare a “value opening statement” ahead of time, and to practice it until you can deliver it flawlessly.

  The value opening statement is sometimes called your credibility statement, unique sales proposition, or elevator speech (because you have a short window to catch a prospect’s attention—about the time you might spend on an elevator with someone—before she decides whether she wants to continue the dialogue or not).

  How do you condense all the sales information in your brain into a brief commercial that will leave your prospect wanting to hear more? Here’s one template you can use:

  Spend the first eight seconds explaining briefly what your company does or highlighting a specialty that gets the prospect’s attention.

  Then introduce a recent client success story. Prospects relate to stories. Best of all, stories connect with a prospect’s emotions. Just make sure that the story is relevant, specific, short, and results-oriented (that is, in dollars, percentages, or numbers).

  Below is a four-step process to get the meeting going so you can easily transition to the questioning stage and get the prospect to open up:

  1. Introductions and pleasantries: Start with your value opening statement. If it’s on the phone, this introduction should be very brief—just a sentence or two (think of an online ad on YouTube). If you’re meeting face-to-face, you still must be brief (thirty seconds to two minutes). All you want to do is give a buyer a point of reference and some context for your call. Then you want to shift the focus to the buyer.

  2. Assessment: Learn about the prospect and their organization—their needs and challenges.

  3. Evaluation: Determine (jointly with the prospect) whether there’s a good fit.

  4. Next steps: Assuming there’s a potential fit, identify next steps.

  By the way, there’s no need for a hidden agenda here. Prospects already know you’re a salesperson! So make this process completely transparent to your prospect, whether it’s on a cold call or in a face-to-face meeting. If you describe the four steps, prospects will know that they’re not in for a long, meandering conversation. And they’ll be more likely to spend time with you when they see that you’re focused, purposeful, efficient, and respectful of their time.

  Here is an example of the beginning of a first meeting:

  Salesperson: Hi, I’m Paul Cherry [shaking hands as I introduce myself], with Performance Based Results. [A few pleasantries are exchanged, and then I transition into the following.] Before we get started, would it be helpful if I spend sixty seconds on exactly who we are and what we do?

  Prospect: Sure, go right ahead.

  Salesperson: Performance Based Results is a sales development organization. Having worked with more than 1,200 organizations, our goal is to help companies improve their bottom line by maximizing sales performance. Are you familiar with Company__________? [It doesn’t matter whether the customer says yes or no; the question allows your introduction to be interactive.] They were frustrated at the lengthy sales cycle of a new product launch, and turned to us for help. We put together a plan to coach their sales team on key behaviors linked to specific sales outcomes. After three months, they were able to reduce their sales cycle by 23 percent and they documented over $10 million in revenue that they attributed to our sales training process.

  Brevity is important. A great sound bite speaks results in terms of dollars, numbers, or percentages. It should also hit an emotional desire, such as overcoming or avoiding failure and achieving greater success. A full 98 percent of prospects want one or the other.

  Once your sound bite is over, resist the urge to sell. In fact, it’s important to pull back on the reins. If you appear anxious to sell, your prospect will pick up on that and get anxious, too—which creates defensiveness. Plus, you’ll sound like every other salesperson trying to push his solution to the client’s problem. The key to establishing a relationship is to shift the focus onto the customer and keep that focus on that customer, not on you.

  Salespeople tend to spend way too much time on their value opening statement. It feels like safe ground because they know their products and solutions so well. But you want to provide just enough information to create a context for the conversation, and quickly move on to what buyers truly care about: themselves and their problems. Here’s a simple transition you can use:

  Salesperson: Whether our process would work for you, I don’t know. But if it’s okay with you, I would like to ask you some questions to better understand your goals so that I can determine if our solutions are a good fit with your objectives. How does that sound?

  The value opening statement allows you to cite your success and then pull back with a statement such as this:

  Salesperson: I’m not sure if what we did for Client X is a good fit for you, but to find out more, may I ask you a few questions?

  Some salespeople struggle with this approach because they think that saying “I am not sure” will come across as weak or insecure. But it comes across as honesty. The truth is, you don’t know whether your solution is a good fit, and it would be presumptuous to pre
tend otherwise. So this approach achieves two things: It lowers the prospect’s resistance (“I’m not going to get a hard sell”) and it earns you the right to ask questions (“This salesperson has given me a legitimate reason for her questions”).

  Asking Permission

  Another key step that salespeople often overlook is asking permission to proceed. Either they’re too eager to get to the selling part of the conversation, or they’re afraid that they’ll give a prospect an out. But ask yourself: Will a prospect be more or less willing to engage with you if you ask their permission? What would you do if you were the prospect? Asking permission demonstrates respect. It also signals confidence: Only desperate salespeople try to steamroll a prospect.

  Here are some ways to ask:

  “Why don’t we start out with me giving you a brief overview of who we are and what we do? And then I’d like to get to know you and your needs so I in turn can give you some suggestions on how our services might best address what’s important to you. How’s that sound?”

  “Just as a doctor has to do a proper diagnosis to ensure the right prognosis, it’s important that I understand your needs, so that I in turn can make solid recommendations that will address what’s important to you. So would it be okay to ask you a few questions?”

  “I’ve worked with other clients in your industry and have some ideas that might work for you. But first let me ask you a few questions.”

  “With your permission, I’d like to learn more about you and your team’s needs. So let me ask you. . . .”

  Three Suggestions to Make the First Meeting Go Smoothly

  1.Ease into the conversation with warm-up questions. Asking about problems at the beginning of the call is risky unless the prospect has volunteered the information beforehand. Although some salespeople like to ask questions about the weather, sports, hobbies, or a familiar object in the prospect’s office, these approaches are overused and they waste your time and your client’s time. Good warm-up questions are open-ended, broad in scope, and focused on getting the prospect to talk about herself. Here are some examples:

  “How long have you been with this organization?”

  “How did you get into the business?”

  “In preparation for my visit with you, I did a little research about your company and discovered that you do __________ exceptionally well. So tell me: How you were able to achieve that?”

  “What would you say you like most about your work? Least?”

  “If your employees/team/coworkers/customers/etc. were to describe this organization in five words or less, what words would come to mind?” [Listen to the words given and then respond, “The word __________ is an interesting one; could you elaborate on that for me?”]

  “What would your best customers say are the reasons they enjoy doing business with you?”

  Based on the prospect’s responses to warm-up questions, you will be able to understand a lot about her interests, personality, beliefs, how she feels about the organization where she works, and the culture of the company in a very short time frame.

  2.Write down the information given to you by your prospective client. Capture any and all critical information before it escapes your brain. I tend to listen for certain key words and the emotions underlying those words. After you jot those words down, it is much easier to go back and get the prospect to elaborate.

  3.Remove any assumptions you have about this prospect and her problems. Why do they say new salespeople have beginner’s luck? I remember working with a rep who sold high-tech equipment in a complex selling environment. He had been on the job for only six months, yet he closed the biggest deal in the company’s history. When he was asked about his secret to success, he admitted that he hardly understood the product. So he simply asked lots of questions!

  Was it beginner’s luck? I doubt it. It was more likely that he had no assumptions about his client, her problems, or the product. Instead, his curiosity forced him to ask questions that experienced salespeople would have skipped over because they assumed they already knew the answers.

  Many salespeople have strong egos—it’s what helps them survive the rigors of such a demanding occupation. Yet there is a tendency for people with strong egos to want to talk, and to impress customers with their knowledge and ideas.

  Here’s a secret: Your customers love to talk just as much as you do! If you can ask questions to get your customers talking, you are much more likely to learn how to attend to their needs. Let your customer have the microphone. It’s their show. A good measure of an effective sales call is who did most of the talking. If it was the prospect, it was a great call. If it was the salesperson, it was a lousy call.

  CHAPTER

  12

  More Problems = More Sales

  Questions That Enlarge the Need

  SOME SALESPEOPLE STOP digging once they’ve identified one need or pain point. They see an opportunity to sell something and are eager to move on to the next step of the sales process: preparing and presenting solutions. And sometimes salespeople never get past that initial problem.

  But the first need you identify isn’t necessarily the buyer’s only need, or even the best one for you to address. Some are disclosed early. Some are revealed only after the buyer has come to trust you, or after the most urgent need has been addressed. Organizations are always growing and changing, so the needs the buyer described to you last week may no longer be relevant, and new problems have taken their place. Discovery must be an ongoing process.

  In this chapter, we’ll look at some questions that will allow you to dig deeper and uncover additional opportunities. You wouldn’t want to use them all at once, or even with every customer. Rather, think of them as a set of tools, and choose the tool that fits the task. And, of course, you’ll want to adapt them to fit your personality, the personality of your buyer, the nature of what you sell, and the industry you work in.

  Questions to Uncover Problems

  How many prospects have you called on who were clueless about the problems they were facing? How many were in a state of complacency about their problems? Or in survival mode? Or hoping that if they could wait it out long enough, the problem would eventually fix itself?

  I love finding problems because that means uncovering opportunities. It helps to keep in mind that customers are more motivated to fix their problems than to pursue pleasure. This means that you should dig for problems whenever you can. People are too busy in their everyday lives. They have no time or energy left to step back and assess the actual state they are in because they are caught up in their day-to-day struggles. That is why great salespeople realize the value of becoming trusted business advisers who can help prospects evaluate their current situation and take action before a potential problem erupts.

  We all have a preference to stay put. It is human nature. But as salespeople, we need to ask the right questions to open our prospects’ minds and get them to think about the risks of staying within their comfort zones.

  Be careful about pointing a problem out to your prospects. It’s best if they discover it for themselves as they reflect on the answers they give to your questions.

  Here are some great problem questions to ask:

  •Share with me your three biggest challenges. Of these three, which one is the most pressing?

  •What problems are you currently experiencing? Why?

  •What is causing these problems? Can you give me an example?

  •What barriers are in your way?

  •What’s working? What’s not? Why?

  •What’s this problem costing you, in terms of time, money, resources, lost opportunities, etc.?

  •How long have you been experiencing this problem?

  •Who else besides you is experiencing this problem?

  •Think back to when you originally implemented this process. What were your expectations? What results are you currently getting? What kind of results would you like to get in the future?

  •If you c
ould wind back the clock [or wave a magic wand], what would you change?

  •Everyone has to deal with change. What’s the one change you [department, organization] are encountering? What challenge is this change presenting?

  •What are the biggest gripes you hear from your customers? From your internal customers [bosses, peers, subordinates, or other departments]?

  •On a scale from 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with your current product/vendor/situation? What would you like to see the product/ vendor/situation do/deliver/accomplish in order to achieve a 10?

  •What do you see as the biggest hurdle you face in order to meet your objectives? As you evaluate your current situation, where are the biggest areas or opportunities for improvement?

  •What happens if you decide not to fix this problem? What will be the impact on you and your organization?

  Questions About Your Customers’ (External) Customers

  Surprisingly, not every customer you call on is focused on external customers. Unless your clients have direct contact with external customers, too often you will discover how insensitive to or ignorant they are of their external customers’ needs. Under these circumstances, it is likely that internal customers will have greater influence. This makes your job twice as difficult because you need to convince your customers that their external customers are important, and you need to uncover the wants and needs of those external customers.

  Here are some examples of questions about external customers:

  •Who are your organization’s most valuable customers?

  •Can you give me a profile of your typical client? An ideal client?

  •How do your customers measure success as a result of doing business with you?