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“Success is the
progressive realization of a worthy ideal.” -- Earl Nightingale
I believe that one of the most powerful weapons Titan (one gigantic in size and
power) salespeople have is their ability to ask the right questions. You can --
and should! -- use effective questioning to take your own career to the Titan
level (your next level of success). What’s more, if you don’t learn to ask appropriate questions, you’ll find that
it’s impossible to build deep partnerships -- the kind Titans initiate -- with
prospects and customers.
The right questions allow you to send an essential message (“I’m unlike any
other salesperson you’ve ever met”) to your prospect or customer early on in
the relationship ... and within a very brief period of time. The initial couple
of minutes you spend interacting with your contact -- whether on the phone or in
person -- will determine whether that person decides that you have a good chance
of emerging as a vital resource for his or her business, or not.
If you’re a little uneasy about your own questioning skills, rest assured that
you’re not alone. Salespeople all over the world are intimidated by the task
of learning to ask the right questions at the right time.
Let’s get one thing straight right away. Asking questions simply for the sake
of asking questions doesn’t do anybody any good! Firing off questions that
supposedly “demonstrate value” won’t build trust, but will have quite the
opposite effect. While we were taught in the past to find out who the customer
is using for your type of services, the fact is this question does little to
build trust and gain your customer’s time and attention. You’ll soon find
that there is a right time to ask this question but the very beginning of the
interview is not it!
WHY DO WE AVOID OR MISMANAGE THE QUESTIONING PHASE?
I really do believe that our success or failure as salespeople lies in the
questions we ask -- and that, with just a little practice, virtually any
salesperson can develop an effective questioning routine. But so few of us are
willing to try to improve our questioning skills that I began to ask myself why
so many salespeople fall short in this area. I came up with seven reasons. Here
they are.
1. We think the prospect has no time.
“Show me what you’ve got you’ve got 5 minutes!” Many prospects send
us the signal that they want us to unveil The Solution -- without any delays,
thank you very much. Verbally or through body language, they send us the
message: Time is tight, so get to the point. Regardless of whether or not there
really is a limited amount of time, or the customer is simply using the
“I’m-short-on-time” announcement” as a defense, you should not fall into the trap of telling everything there is to know about
your products and services. If you do, you will lose!
You can rely on this much: If you get the prospect interested enough to
answer relevant questions, you can end up spending half an hour with someone who
swore at the outset of the meeting that she only had five minutes to talk. Once
your intelligent and thought-provoking questions convince prospects that
you’re not going to use the conversation to paint them into a corner, that
supposedly “impossible” schedule becomes easy to rearrange.
An ethical accountant, attorney, physician, or consultant wouldn’t plunge in
and make “recommendations” before learning anything of consequence about a
client. Why should you?
The second approach means you spend more time presenting things that aren’t
relevant .. and you run a greater chance of losing the sale outright. My
experience, and the experience of countless Titan salespeople I’ve worked with
over the years, is that if you spend more time during the front end of a sales
call asking the right questions, you’ll actually spend less time getting to
the close.
2. We’re afraid of coming across as
“the interrogator.”
The way we’re perceived by the prospect or customer depends, not on whether
we ask questions, but on how we
ask them. If you’re asking someone to explain a certain course of action and
you bark out the words, “Why did you
do that?,” that person is going to get defensive. But, if you change your tone
just a little and perhaps rephrase the query (“Please describe what led to the
decision to…”), that makes the question very easy to ask -- and much easier
to answer.
3. We’re afraid of coming across as
less knowledgeable than we should.
Let’s go back to the idea of the professional, the expert. Not long ago, I
went to the doctor’s office because I had a cough that had been keeping me
awake. I said to the doctor, “Hey, Doc, listen. I’ve got a sore throat.
I’ve got to get to the airport. Write me a prescription for some antibiotics,
and we’ll all be happy.”
The doctor smiled; then he felt my neck, asked me to say “ah,” turned on his
little flashlight and peered down my throat. Then he gave me a prescription.
After the appointment, I was driving home, and I wondered to myself, “Now, why
couldn’t he have just done what I said?” I thought about that question for a
moment -- and then I realized why.
Suppose he had listened to my summary, honored my request, written out a
prescription, and said, “Here you go Ron, go ahead.” How would I have felt
about that? On the one hand, I would have been really happy to get out of the
doctor’s office a few minutes early. But on the other hand, I would have
wondered: If he’s really a good doctor, why didn’t he ask me any questions?
That’s what he was trained for. After all, I could have throat cancer -- and
if he’d simply handed me a prescription without examining anything or asking
any questions, he wouldn’t have known anything about it. He would have been
taking my word that it’s a sore throat, and can I really tell the difference
between the symptoms of a sore throat and throat cancer?
The point is that when we go to experts, even when we’re feeling a little
restless and impatient, we expect a certain kind of behavior. Experts are
expected to ask questions and analyze a situation fully. And salespeople, as I
say, are experts -- or, at least, they ought to be.
4. We’re afraid the prospect or
customer will reject us.
Ready for a surprise? A negative answer is probably the best answer you can
get. There are two reasons I say that. First, it’s important to get the
negative answer early on in your relationship with a prospect, because you’ve
got to find out what that person is thinking. How can you build up any
meaningful relationship if you don’t know what the negative thoughts are, what
obstacles face your cntact, or where the objections are going to come from?
The second reason “No” is a good outcome in the early going has to do with
simple arithmetic. You already know that sales isn’t a matter of closing
everyone you talk to -- and that the people who do decide to buy from you are often reticent.
That “no”only means the other person is not yet ready to take the answer of
risk, which is “Yes.” He or she is not ready to take the risk of giving you
a commitment. So all “no” means is that whatever you’re asking for, the
value you’re seen as offering does not yet
justify the next step. (The operative word in that sentence is “yet.”)
5. We’re afraid that the prospect or
customer won’t be able to respond intelligently if we ask questions.
Many of the salespeople I work with tell me that they’re concerned about
“putting the prospect on the spot” by asking questions. Guess what? If you
don’t ask and uncover the information you need, then you will presenting a
solution that is of no value to your prospect or customer. If your contact
doesn’t know what to say or can’t respond to you intelligently, then
there’s either some missing information, or you’re not being clear about
what you’re saying or asking for.
6. We’re afraid we’re going to create
problems.
Obviously, you don’t want to ask questions that offend people, compromise
confidences, or call your own professional competence into question. On the
other hand, if the question is important, and the information it’s designed to
uncover is necessary to your unfolding relationship, then you do need to pose
the question -- because those problems are going to be there when you try to
close the sale!
For instance, if a prospect has had a bad experience with your company in the
past, you’ll want to know about that up front, rather than learning about it
as you attempt to enter the closing phase. The first step in conflict resolution
is to acknowledge the customers pain. Then, and only then, will you be in a
position to address it and move on!
7. We forget to ask.
Often, we simply forget to ask key questions, either because we’re not
listening to what the prospect or customer has to say, or because we’re
fixated on some hypothetical “script” our sales manager (or someone else)
has suggested we memorize.
Before we proceed to the next issue on our
list, we have to be willing to ask ourselves some silent questions about
what’s on the other person’s list. We have to think about what the person
just told us, and then ask ourselves:
Do I have enough information at this point regarding this issue to proceed to a
different topic?
If I don’t, what’s missing? What do I need to know?
All too often, we ask a question and, instead of listening to the response, we
start thinking about our own next question. This is a great strategy for
convincing your prospect that you’re visiting from another dimension, and
don’t have much interest in discussions that are logical to residents of
planet Earth!
WHY QUESTIONS ARE SO POWERFUL
Effective questions get the prospect mentally and physically involved in the
conversation. Prospects and customers are suddenly taking an active part in
building the relationship; they’re not passive observers. That’s vitally
important, because the other person’s time and attention are precious
commodities.
When I use correct questioning to engage you, the chances are that there will be
fewer distracting thoughts in your mind -- which means more time and attention
for our emerging relationship.
Titans only concern themselves with developing relationships with their
customers and prospects where they can assist as an invaluable resource. How do
you make a relationship like that happen? These techniques have the potential to
change your career for the better in an extremely short period of time.
Thousands of salespeople, in organizations all over the country, have benefited
from the ideas you’re about to put to work.
In the old school of selling, salespeople were taught to probe for the “how,
what, when, why and who.” That is, they were trained to find out how things
are done, what was done, when was it done, why it was done, and who was
involved. That approach, I believe, is not enough these days. To become an
invaluable resource for your customers, you need to go further; you need to go
beyond the how, what, when, why and who. You need find the where factor. Where are
your prospects and customers trying to go? That’s probably the most critical
factor behind building the kind of relationships Titans enjoy with their
customers. Once you learn how, you’ll never underestimate the power of
questions again.
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