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How Do I Know Which Sales Questions to Ask?

Guest post by: Linda Schneider

Article Overview: Many sales organizations will prepare lists of questions and hand them out to salespeople. You can even download lists of questions from many websites. The problem with that approach is that you still don't know what to ask when. It would be much better for you to prepare your own guidepost sales questions to fit your typical sales situations. Guidepost questions move the sales conversation the direction you want it to go. And it's always better to use a question to direct a conversation than an explanation.

How Do I Know Which Sales Questions to Ask?

Many sales organizations will prepare lists of questions and hand them out to salespeople. You can even download lists of questions from many websites. The problem with that approach is that you still don't know what to ask when.

It would be much better for you to prepare your own guidepost sales questions to fit your typical sales situations. Guidepost questions move the sales conversation the direction you want it to go. And it's always better to use a question to direct a conversation than an explanation.

Every consultative sales conversation follows pretty much the same basic pattern, from discovery to the formulation of solutions to creating a plan for moving forward.

In fact, there are six stages that come up over and over again and you can prepare questions in advance to help a prospect move from one stage to the next. For example, at the stage where I want the prospect to move into solution, I can ask what's known as the Power Switch question.In my business I could ask: "And when you bring a sales trainer in to address these issues, what would you like to have happen?" or "Our system is really enjoyable to use, but some people feel overwhelmed by implementation. When you look at this, what would you like to have happen?"

Even if you don't know the sales patterns and question formulas, you can create:

• A set of 2 or 3 questions that express curiosity about the prospect's business or situation. You'll learn quite a bit about what might stop someone from buying or motivate them to move forward when you ask them about their business, then shut up and listen.
• A set of 2 or 3 questions that raise the kinds of issues people typically have with you or your product, like I did in the example above. You can address a lot of objections just by asking questions about the kinds of things they're likely to be thinking anyway. "How do you think your broker would react to this program?" "What do you like about other ___ (car dealers, realtors, computers, software packages, etc) you've seen?" "In your environment, what is going to be challengingabout this system?" Raising these questions allows you to help them past hidden concerns.

If you've ever wondered exactly how to DO consultative sales, you're not alone.

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Article Tags: auto sales training sales tips, consultative questions, consultative selling, free sales questions, free sales tips, increase business sales network marketing, life insurance sales tips, network marketing sales tips, sales questions, sales tips



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Re: Online Sales and Marketing vs Traditional - [quote="ltrahan":31w9r2iz]Hi Evan, I am noticing that many of the posts in the Sales/Marketing section deal with online marketing, SEM and and SEO and Affiliates. I was wondering if it might be a good idea to separate that section into two; 1) Online Sales and Marketing; 2) Traditional Sales and Marketing[/quote:31w9r2iz] I second the request...
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