Sales Coaching to Help You to Become a Skilled Questioner

Maybe you aren't asking the right questions in the right order for the right reason? Asking the right questions is definitely a skill and the best sales people are very adept at it. Most sales people ask the easy questions that don't promote their sales success. Are you asking questions that you could easily already know the answer to? If you are that's a big and annoying mistake. Contrary to popular belief not all people just love talking about themselves, and business owners and upper executives have no patience for educating you.

Are you asking irrelevant questions? These are questions that have no bearing on the actual sales conversation. While you may think these questions are helping you to establish rapport they may just be annoying the other person because they aren't giving you an appointment so you can waste their time.

Don't spend a lot of time on background questions when you should be spending your time on questions that help both you and the prospect to gain clarity about their problem. Even though you may be afraid that the prospect won't want to share the answer to these questions with you get over it and ask them. Because that's exactly why they agreed to talk to you.

In order for a sale to occur the buyer must have a perceived problem, and they must believe your product or service is the solution to that problem. The problem solution relationship must exist for any sale to occur whether it's for a high end seemingly unnecessary service or a commodity. The difference is related to the speed of the decision process as a buyer will purchase a commodity with little if any thought, but they will not purchase an expensive product or service as quickly or easily unless you help them to see your solution as being almost a no choice choice.

That means both you and the prospect must have clarity about the prospects perceived problem. The prospect may have agreed to meet with you because they are just in the beginning stages of gathering information to determine if they really want to make this purchase. Your job is to help them to find out exactly why they want to make that purchase, and why they want to make that purchase now.

After you both have clarity about the perceived problem then your questions need to take the prospect beyond the problem and expand on how your solution would benefit them in ways they may not have thought about. The prospects motivation to buy increases as you to this because this sales technique helps them to become emotionally invested in the purchase. Plus you're helping them to develop the logical reason for making the purchase now. There's one more step though that you have to make in your questioning process.

Finally you have to help them determine how your solution is really more valuable to them than the money you're asking them for in exchange. As you expanded on how your solution benefits the prospect in ways they hadn't thought about you began uncovering this on at least a qualitative level. Now through your questioning help them to quantitatively determine the value of your solution. As soon as they realize that the value of your solution is less than the money you're asking for, you have a sale.

About the Author

About the author: Cheryl Clausen can help you get where you want to be. Enhance your Sales Techniques, get her free ecourse. Top producers use Sales Coaching, look here. You can get a unique content version of this article.

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