Creating the Best Questions – Sales Series Part V

By Action Coach Dave Beam

One of the most powerful tools that a professional salesperson uses is questions.  Questions keep your prospect engaged with the process.  Great questions can help customers clarify their thinking and help you understand exactly what they want.  Remember, it’s not about what you have to sell; it’s always about what they want!

So how do you create the very best questions?  There are several areas of questioning that are important if you want to understand the whole story.  To fully understand your customer’s wants, you should ask about their frustrations, aggravations, unmet needs, and what they are interested in buying.  You need to know their budget, the steps they will take to make the buying decision, and their timetable for buying.  The questions that you ask should encompass every aspect of the buying experience, not just the product and service.  “Who, other than yourself, will be involved in making this buying decision?”  “When were you planning to make this decision?”  “What are the factors that are most important in your decision?”  These are just a few examples of great questions.

Now I want to share a process I learned from “Action Selling” on how to create the very best questions concerning your product and service.  Step 1: List all of the FEATURES of your product or service.  List as many as you can.  Features are the specifications and the specific descriptive attributes of your product or service.  Step 2: For every feature, list the BENEFITS that feature provides.  Step 3: For each benefit, list what NEED that benefit meets.  STEP 4:  For each need, construct an open-ended question (a question that can’t be answered with yes or no) that reveals that need.  Finally, create a question that addresses the prospect’s personal feelings and outcome concerning that need.

Here is an example:  Suppose the service I am selling is home interior painting.  A feature of my service is that I guarantee the start and finish date of the project.  The benefit of that feature is that the customer can plan their other activities in their home knowing that the project will be finished on a certain date.  The need that is met by this benefit is the need to know the project start and finish date.  A great open ended question to uncover that need is “In the past, when you have used other contractors in your home, how did they schedule their work and what effect did that have on your personal activities and schedule?”  As the prospect answers that question, you ask a few more questions to uncover past frustrations and dissatisfaction.  “Tell me more about how you had to cut your vacation short” etc etc.  Then come to an agreement of need with your prospect: “So George, based on what you are telling me, it sounds like you really want a defined schedule, right?”  “A feature of our service is that we guarantee a start and finish date, which means you can schedule and plan your activities knowing when we will start and finish.  How does that sound to you?”  Follow this process and create some great questions and responses, and watch your conversion rate soar!