Tips on Sales Questioning Techniques

Effective questioning combined with effective listening are two key skills any sales or business development person needs to develop fully.

Questioning is undertaken to establish the prospects wants, needs, desires, fears or greed’s and only by fully establishing all of the above can we then fully match the features and more importantly the benefits to satisfy them.

There are effectively two types of questions open and closed, closed questions are ones that typically receive a yes or no response and are used when looking to gain commitment or close the deal.

Open questions however are used to illicit and solicit information about the prospects issues challenges concerns needs etc, an open question typically begins with the following: how, who, when, where, why, what etc.

Often sales and business development people undertake questioning without a great deal of thought and consequently do not derive the maximum value from this activity.

A simple and yet good example of this is when we walk into a store often the sales clerk approaches and asks the following question ” Can I help you” at which point 90% of us respond by saying “No I’m just looking ” therefore the question is flawed it doesn’t engage us as customers and doesn’t provide the sales person with any information about our needs, think now about a better question to ask, using the open ended question format, for example ” I see you are looking at the x,y,z why is that?”

At AIM-Knowledge.com I work with Sales and Business Development people from around the world and I and my colleagues put great emphasis on questioning skills.

One technique we recommend is that sales people create a list of questions they regularly ask of clients and at the end of each presentation simply give the good questions they ask a tick and the questions that did them harm or did not move the sales process along a cross, very quickly you will identify which are the most powerful questions and more importantly our clients often find they habitually ask questions which do them more harm than good, for example how many times have you asked a client or prospect “How’s business” particularly in the current environment the response is often negative and does you far more harm than you would like.

One client I had the pleasure of working with took the development and improvement of his questioning technique very seriously he logged the questions as I suggested above and quickly came to the conclusion that his stronger questions could be developed further.

Eventually after a period of trial and error he developed what he called his million dollar question, in simple terms he asked the client “What is your ideal xxx solution”? and then sat back and listened whilst they told him all the key elements they would require from his offering.

In conclusion therefore take time out to consider the questions you ask, because only by fully understanding the clients needs etc can we match them to our offerings.