Sales Coaching to Help You to Become a Skilled Questioner

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Author: Cheryl A. Clausen..

Article source: http://www.articledeshboard.com/. Used with author's permission.

You may be struggling with questions because you aren't asking the right questions in the right order for the right reason? The best sales people are skilled at asking the right questions. Yet you may be focused on asking the easy questions that don't really help you to achieve sales success. Be sure to avoid asking questions that you could easily learn the answer to from publicly available information. Business owners and executives are immediately annoyed if they feel they have to waste their time educating you because you're too lazy to find out back ground information on your own.

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.

Spend very little time on background questions and more of your time on questions that help both you and the prospect to gain clarity about their problem. You should know your solution well enough to know the kinds of problems it will resolve and ask questions that show case your solution. Don't be afraid that the prospect won't want to share the answer to these questions with you because they will.

The reason a sale happens is because the buyer has a perceived problem, and they believe your product or service is a solution to that problem. This is just as true for high end seemingly unnecessary services as it is for commodities. A buyer will purchase a commodity with little if any thought, but they will not purchase an expensive product or service as easily.

A sale won't happen unless both you and the prospect have clarity about the prospect's perceived problem. When you set the appointment the prospect may have agreed to meet with you because they're just in the beginning stages of gathering information to determine if they really want to make this purchase. Whether they're in the information gathering stage or the final selection stage your job is to help them to uncover exactly why they want to make the purchase, and why they want to make the purchase now.

Use additional questions to help the prospect to see beyond the problem and expand on how your solution would benefit them in ways they may not have thought about. There are two benefits to these questions. First, they stimulate the prospects motivation to complete the sale because this sales technique helps them to become emotionally invested in the purchase. And second, it helps them to uncover the logical reason for making the purchase now. But you aren't done yet there is one more step to take in your questioning process.

Now you have to help them to determine how your solution is more valuable than the money you're asking them for in exchange. You began uncovering this as you expanded on how your solution benefits the prospect in ways they hadn't thought about. Help them to quantitatively determine the value of your solution in terms of dollars or emotions. When they can articulate how the value of your solution is less than the money you're asking for, you have a sale.

About the author: Cheryl Clausen can help you get where you want to be. Improve your Sales Techniques, get her free ecourse. Top producers use Sales Coaching, check this out.