Questions that Sell

by Paul Cherry

  “And, by the way, who else at the dealership is facing this problem?”

  Asking questions like these unleashed a torrent of additional business. Bob might be working on one deal, but there are likely to be seven other Bobs at the dealership who are trying to move other pieces of hard-to-sell equipment. And there might be three other branches across the state. By asking for an upsell, a single easy sale becomes a huge opportunity.

  There are just two ways to get a sale: (1) finding new customers and selling something to them, and (2) selling something new to existing customers.

  Of course, the first is necessary if you want sales to grow in the long term. But selling to existing customers is more efficient. Yet in my experience, it often gets less attention from salespeople than it should. Yes, there is something exhilarating about bringing a new buyer aboard. But if you don’t make the most of existing opportunities, you won’t get the best return on your time and effort.

  Upselling and cross-selling leverage the work you’ve already done. (To clarify our terms: In this chapter I refer to “upselling” as selling other goods and services to the same buyer. “Cross-selling” involves selling to another buyer in the same organization.) Buyers know you and understand how you add value. And you know the buyers. All of that knowledge you’ve so painstakingly acquired serves as the foundation for a new sale.

  These opportunities are extraordinarily valuable for another reason as well: The buyer has already made a decision to do business with you. And that’s the biggest decision that any buyer must make: Do I believe in this salesperson? Is she willing and able to help me?

  What’s more, buyers have an emotional and psychological investment in buying from you again, because it validates their previous decision to buy from you. Nobody wants to think he made a mistake. That’s why the best time to explore cross-selling and upselling opportunities is right after you’ve closed a sale. Your buyer’s perception of you is at an all-time high.

  So why do salespeople often fail to make the most of upselling and cross-selling opportunities? The primary reason, I believe, is because they don’t have a plan. All of their thinking and energy is focused on getting that original sale. When they hear that “yes,” they feel a huge sense of relief and elation. They’ve just scored a win, and they want to enjoy it.

  The other reason salespeople hold back is because they don’t want to push their luck. They believe it’s better to get a few crumbs than nothing. Or they don’t want to come across as greedy or ungrateful. That’s a valid concern—a clumsy attempt can tarnish your reputation with a customer and make them leery about buying from you again.

  On the other hand, if you asked great questions to explore the customer’s problems and identify what it’s costing in terms of time, resources, and opportunities, and you have a solution that will not only alleviate their problems but get them to their goals sooner, you’re not being greedy or pushy. If you truly believe you can create more value for the customer, you have an obligation to explore an upsell or cross-sell opportunity. One of the best benefits of cross-selling and upselling is that you position yourself as a partner to your customer, not simply an order taker. Smart buyers will see that you’re thinking one step ahead and helping them get ahead of problems instead of simply reacting to them.

  Laying the Groundwork

  It’s critically important to plan your upsell and cross-sell strategy ahead of time. Think of upselling and cross-selling as an integral part of the original sale, not as an extra tacked on to the end if you happen to remember. And start working on them early—during your initial sales discovery.

  As with any aspect of sales, your success at upselling and cross-selling depends on the quality of the information you collect. And the quality of the information depends on the quality of the questions you ask.

  Here’s an example of a low-quality questioning technique: Your customer has just agreed to order five hundred units of whatever it is you sell. You say, “You know, if you could increase that quantity to a thousand units, I can offer you a discount.” Or, “We’ve got a special this month on ___. Would you be interested in placing an order?” Or, “Do you think any other divisions of your company would be interested in talking to me?”

  Questions like these demonstrate no effort or insight. They’re simply a slightly more professional version of “Would you like fries with that?” Even worse, they’re all about you and what you want. They’re not connected to a buyer’s need, want, or problem. If the buyer needed one thousandunits, she would have said so, and a discount on units she doesn’t need is no bargain. (And even if she does agree to the one thousand units, your selling tactic is forcing you to give up hard-earned margins that you and your company need to remain profitable.) Suggesting that she order an extra five hundred units “just in case” sends a message that you might not be reliable. Fishing around for another division tells the buyer that you don’t understand their organization.

  Effective upsells and cross-sells use the same types of questions we’ve discussed earlier—lock-on questions, impact questions, comparison questions, and so on. The time to ask them is during your initial sales discovery process. That’s when your buyer is eager to help you understand their needs and learn about their organization, so the questions don’t seem pushy or unnatural at all.

  For example, here’s how you might identify an upselling opportunity using lock-on, comparison, and impact questions:

  Buyer: We really need to get a handle on our travel. Last year, my department exceeded the travel budget by 20 percent—mostly because we booked flights at the last minute.

  Salesperson: That’s quite a lot. I’m sure you could find better uses for that money. You mentioned last-minute flights. Is that an issue that’s unique to your department, or do others in your company struggle with it, too?

  Buyer: Oh, we’ve talked about it a lot. It’s a widespread problem.

  Salesperson: If you could help other departments solve this issue, how big an impact might that have, companywide?

  Buyer: It probably adds up to hundreds of thousands of dollars across the entire company.

  Salesperson: And what would that mean for you?

  Buyer: If I could save our company hundreds of thousands of dollars? It wouldn’t hurt my career, that’s for sure.

  And here’s how you might uncover an upselling opportunity using an expansion question:

  Buyer: We’re interested in five hundred units of Product X.

  Salesperson: Great. While I’m pulling up that information, tell me how you arrived at that amount and what you’re hoping to accomplish.

  As you can see, questions like these don’t seem pushy or aggressive. At this stage of the sale, you’re simply gathering information. You may find that your buyer’s department really is the only one that uses Product X, or that the buyer has a good reason for ordering five hundred units. Or you may find that other departments are looking to save money, too, or that the buyer hasn’t really given much thought to how many units they’ll actually need.

  Notice, too, that questions like these are all about adding value. You want to ask a series of questions that are focused on how you can help the buyer with additional needs, not how you can get more money from them. Specifically, you want to ask questions that identify other needs in the buyer’s organization and questions that help establish a personal benefit to the buyer.

  A Question of Timing

  The timing of an upsell or cross-sell depends on your customer. You have to know your buyer.

  For any number of reasons, your buyer may only be interested in solving his immediate problem. He may be risk averse; he may have limited authority or influence. He may not be interested in considering a bigger picture. So does that mean you don’t have an upselling or cross-selling opportunity? Not at all! It simply means you need to solve this buyer’s immediate need first. Get the business—and then ask for the upsell or cross-sell.

  On the other hand, if your buyer thinks
in broader terms, she may see the upsell or a cross-sell as a way to deliver additional value, personally and to her organization. “If I can help reduce travel costs across the board, I’ll be a hero around here,” she may think. Or, “If I can analyze our needs and find out how many units we really should be ordering, my boss will see that I’m more than an order taker.” Or, “If I can hit my performance metrics this year, I’ll be first in line for a management position.”

  In such situations, asking about the upsell or cross-sell early may actually help you close the sale. You’re helping the buyer solve problems—and delivering more value—while your competitors are just taking orders.

  How to Ask

  Since you’ve now gathered the information you need to create a compelling value proposition, asking for the upsell or cross-sell is relatively straightforward. But don’t try to wing it. Decide when and how you’re going to ask.

  Here are step-by-step methods you can follow:

  Asking for an Upsell

  1.Reestablish value. For example: “Let’s go back to what originally led you to choose the solution you went with. How’s it meeting your needs so far?” Or, “How do you see this program benefiting you and your organization?”

  2.Revisit needs. “When we first spoke, you also mentioned some other issues, such as ________. Tell me, is that still something you want to address?” Or, “As we were working on this solution, I also noticed ________. Is that an issue?”

  3.Use vision questions to encourage buyers to think more broadly. “Now that you have a better way to track employee performance, what are your thoughts about leveraging that data to improve your business?” Or, “This program will increase your bottom line by 3 percent. What if we could get that number up to 5 percent?”

  4.Ask permission. “May I share with you some other ideas that might get us there?”

  Asking for a Cross-Sell

  1.Reestablish value. See above.

  2.Be specific.“Earlier, you mentioned that Joe, your counterpart in the Dallas plant, uses a similar production system. Do you think this program might be of interest to Joe as well? . . . Tell me more about his needs.”

  3.Ask for the next step. “Would you be willing to introduce me to . . .?” “Who else should I talk to at . . .?”

  CHAPTER

  17

  Relationship-Building Questions

  Creating Intimacy and Trust

  WHEN YOU SELL, what are you selling? A product? A service? A program?

  If you think your job is to sell “stuff,” you are an endangered species. Nobody needs you. Not your customer, who can buy stuff all day long with the click of a mouse button. Not your employer, who would love to get their stuff in the hands of customers without paying for a very expensive salesperson.

  Are you selling “solutions”? The Internet is bursting at the seams with how-to articles, videos, and tutorials in which experts are willing to solve your customer’s problems for free.

  Are you selling “value”? You’d better hurry up. The easiest way for a customer to “add value” is by shopping around and finding someone who’s willing to sell what you sell for 10 percent less.

  In the final analysis, you really have only one thing to sell: yourself. You are the one thing that can’t be commodified or undercut. Buyers must be confident that by doing business with you, they will experience more success, more satisfaction, and less risk than with anyone else. They must trust you.

  In the opening chapter of this book, I defined a question as a “truth-seeking missile.” Remember that, as humans, we’re deeply conditioned to answer a question, as long as it’s asked with worthy intent. And when we answer questions, we show our true selves—sometimes more than we even realize.

  Curiously, trust begins when buyers reveal themselves to you, not the other way around. That’s why questions are so important to building a relationship. They encourage buyers to reveal themselves.

  When it comes to trust, all of us are faced with two conflicting emotions: On the one hand, we have a deep need to be understood. At the same time, we’re careful about disclosing vulnerabilities, because we worry that they’ll be used against us. When you ask empathetic and insightful questions, you signal that you truly do want to understand the buyer, and that you have their best interests at heart.

  So let’s look at how you can structure relationship-building questions at different stages in the sales process.

  Building New Relationships

  Salespeople tend to be problem-solvers. The minute they see a customer with a problem, they want to roll up their sleeves and get to work on it.

  But you can’t hurry trust. You can’t manipulate a business relationship into your specific time frame. And you can’t solve a customer’s problem until you’ve been given permission to do so.

  So put your solutions away. Take a deep breath, slow down, and invest time in the relationship-forming process by asking the right questions about the customer’s past, present, and future.

  Are there exceptions? Of course. If a customer is ready to place an order or a crisis falls on your lap where the customer needs your solution pronto, you sell & close the opportunity. But for all those other situations where you have to put time and effort into the sale, focus on building the relationship.

  Equally important, listen to the answers. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen salespeople approach relationship-building questions as a necessary task that they want to get through as quickly as possible so they can get to the “real” job of selling something. I’ve listened to countless calls where the salesperson reels off a canned list of “relationship-building” questions—some of which may actually be very good—and then drops the ball when the customer actually responds with something significant. Instead of following up, the salesperson just keeps plowing forward.

  Think about how that looks from the customer’s perspective. He or she has taken a risk by revealing a need or even a vulnerability. Then it becomes obvious that the person asking the question doesn’t really care. Is that someone worthy of their trust?

  Warm-Up Questions

  Another problem I see is that many salespeople are afraid to ask a meaningful question—especially in an initial sales conversation—because it feels emotionally risky. So they never go beyond safe, superficial questions about the weather, sports, the weekend, or what’s happening in the news.

  There’s nothing wrong with asking a few icebreaker questions. It’s a social ritual. But these kinds of questions don’t build value. So after you’ve gotten them out of the way, go ahead and ask some questions that help you gain insight on what your prospects are experiencing on the job and the challenges they and their organizations are facing. The responses may reveal valuable information about the organization and how best to position your solutions (not immediately, but later on when the time is right).

  Of course, you don’t want to pepper new prospects with questions that feel like a cross-examination. The idea is to start a conversational thread that resonates with the buyer and gets them to open up a little. For example:

  Salesperson: So I see you’re in charge of reviewing client contracts for your firm. How long have you been doing that?

  Prospect: Oh, for about the past year.

  Salesperson: So what would you say has surprised you most in the past year?

  Prospect: Hmmm. I guess I was surprised by how many people in the organization think contracts are just routine. I used to think that myself.

  Salesperson: But now you don’t?

  Prospect: No. Every contract is different. It takes a lot more time than I’d imagined.

  At this point, you might be tempted to start solving this “problem.” Resist the temptation. Instead, just make a note of what the buyer told you so you can come back to it later. Your goal for now is to show empathy and insight.

  Salesperson: I can imagine. I think most people just don’t understand how complicated these contracts can get.

  P
rospect: You’re telling me.

  As you can see in this example, the initial question is very general and easy for the customer to answer. And it’s nonthreatening. There’s very little risk involved in telling someone how long you’ve been doing the job. Each follow-up question flows naturally from what the prospect has already revealed, but digs a little deeper.

  In some cases, of course, a buyer’s responses will be more guarded than in this example. But it’s often surprising how quickly buyers will open up. In fact, some seem like they’ve been waiting all day for you to ask. After all, how often do they encounter someone who’s genuinely interested in what they do?

  Here are some other questions you can use to get the ball rolling:

  •So tell me what you like most about _________? What do you like least about it?

  •What would you say is different about your organization (project, job, etc.) today since you started?

  •Could you share with me some past experiences with vendors when it comes to _________.?

  •How are you dealing with [name a current industry issue or problem]?

  •What originally led you to take on this responsibility/project/job/ task, etc.?

  •What were your expectations when you started, and how have they changed as you look at your needs today?

  Evaluating Established Relationships

  It’s all too easy for salespeople to take relationships with their customers for granted. You may think you have a solid relationship—in fact, the customer may tell you so. But there will always be others in the organization who have their own favorite suppliers, or who would like to redeploy your budget toward their pet projects. And other suppliers are constantly knocking at the door, looking for a way in. The reality is that if your customer relationship isn’t moving forward, it will sooner or later start moving backward.