Questions are Powerful
It used to be we’d visit a client in order to have an opportunity to “make a presentation”. That always was a silly concept and it’s one whose time has well and truly been and gone!
If you want your “hit” rate to go through the roof, you need to turn the sales process on its head. You are not going to your client to “present”, you are going to “discover”. If you discover enough, you will make the sale. And there’ll be a lot more where that came from. And you’ll get referrals.
Questions to Elicit Your Client’s REAL Reason for Buying
Why do people buy? Most times not for the reasons we thought! Why? Because there has never been a single client who gives a damn about the reasons you think they should buy from you. They always have their own reasons, and you don’t know them until you ask. Don’t guess!
Say you’re in life assurance and you know your client needs to have life assurance in order to secure his/her asset base, or to ensure that his family is able to have financial support should anything happen to him/her. Great. So you launch into the ways your product can do exactly that. You’re really excited, the benefits are obvious, your client can’t afford not to buy ……. And yet you clearly sense you’re not getting through. What’s wrong?
What’s wrong is you presumed you knew what was in your client’s mind. You presumed that what mattered to you also mattered to your client. Often, nothing could be further from the truth. Your client is almost never interested in life assurance, or a new television, or a new car, or a new training program. He or she is after something else altogether and if you want to increase your sales effectiveness, pay attention to the three magic questions I’m about to share with you.
1. What’s important to you about …. (a car, your business, your family, the home you’re looking for).
2. And what does that give you (what outcome do they get when they have the thing that’s actually important to them).
3. And what does that mean to you (what is the greater purpose underneath that outcome).
Eg:
Car Salesperson: Steve, what’s really important to you in a car?
Steve: Well it has to be reliable.
Car Salesperson: And if it’s reliable Steve, what does that give you?
Steve: Well it’s not going to go breaking down on me.
Car Salesperson: And in real terms what does that mean?
Steve: I’m not going to get left on the side of the road and end up late for meetings!
Can you see that what Steve wants is not a new car at all. He wants reliability and he wants it because he is “away from” motivated. To help Steve buy, you need to stress the reliability of the vehicle and how that won’t leave him stuck on the side of the road and he won’t have to worry about being late for meetings.
You would NOT stress how this would give him peace of mind, ensure he got to meetings on time, etc etc etc! You MUST sell to him using his own “away from” meta-program and his own “away from” language! If you resist speaking his language, you may as well speak Dutch instead of English, for all the good it will do.
When you ask these three questions repeatedly during the conversation, you’ll discover not only what it is the customer really wants, but also how he/she wants you to sell it to them. If you will only listen, the client will tell you the very words he or she needs to hear in order to make a decision to buy.
In case you are concerned about asking these types of questions in a selling situation, let me assure you that the overwhelming response of clients is positive. Rarely have they experienced anyone really seeking to understand them in this way, and rather than being offended, most people express gratitude. When you stop being a selling robot, and start really interacting with people in this way, it is a whole different ball game.
Skilled NLPers will notice their clients’ slightly trancing out during this type of questioning, and that’s what actually does happen in many cases because in order to process the question, which involves engaging with higher-order values, we do have to alter our internal state. The level of rapport increases simultaneously, so that if you now deliberately move into a trance state, you deepen the trance state of your client. Certainly this can be used manipulatively, but as I’ve written before, that would be counter-productive and therefore stupid as well as unethical.
It is not smart to manipulate people – it is dumb, because although you may get the sale this time, you sure won’t get ongoing referrals and you have polluted what would otherwise have been a highly beneficial ongoing relationship.
Free help is available to perfect your questioning skills on the professional forums at www.speedbusinessnetworking.com. And in fact there is a vast range of free business development resources for SME's - just click of "Take Me to My Speed Business Network" and take a look.
3 Little Questions that Sell Like Magic - To learn more about this author, visit Christine Sutherland's Website.
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