The use of questions in sales is extremely important to guarantee closing. But asking sales questions is not just about asking any random question, it is more of a science and art that one has to work on to understand and eventually master. To understand the use of use of questions, you first need to study the types of sales questions and their uses.
An important element about sales questions is to ensure they are both practical and emotional to the client. Your questions must elicit common sense and emotion in your customers to ensure they get close enough to the buying decision.
For your customers, the decision to buy is half made by the time they are talking to you. What is left is the ultimate decision to buy FROM YOU. Your questions should therefore have the ultimate objective of instilling the BUY NOW instinct in your customer. And if not now, they should instill a BUY SOON FROM ME instinct by placing you as an expert in your field.
There are two types of sales questions;
1. Trigger questions
This are questions you use to get the client to start talking about the problem. These give you a lot of insight into what the customer considers the problem and what they assume to be the solution. Trigger questions are also important at giving you an idea into the expectations of the client.
An example of a trigger question,
“A lot of the businesses I work with don’t find it too hard to acquire customers but they do have an issue in keeping them long term, what is your experience with this?”
The point of the trigger question is to get the customer to indirectly give you the information about them that you need without being too forward.
A bad alternative to this question is,
“Do you have a problem with keeping clients long-term?”
The problem with phrasing your question this way is that it demonstrates to the customer or client that you don’t have enough information about him or his industry and you lose control of the discussion because the client can lie to you.
2. Floater questions
Floater questions are questions you can use to get the client to give you an idea of what they need to happen or expect to happen. These are hypothetical questions you can use to get answers to questions you cannot ask directly.
An example of a floater question,
“If you were sure you would get the exact results you were hoping for, how soon would you be ready to start?”
This is a no pressure way of asking the client, when they will be ready to start. The more forward and bad direct question would be,
“How soon can we start the delivery?”
This question assumes that the customer or client knows what is needed to make the final decision. It also assumes that the customer is in charge of the process to make the decision; they most often than not are not, YOU ARE.
By incorporating these types of sales questions in your technique, it is easy to make your customers commit to buy from you and even accelerate their buying decision time by selling themselves to the necessity of your product, through their own answers.
Asking the right questions is one of the most important skills for a sales person to learn. If done right, your clients will buy without you having to do a ridiculous sales pitch and never getting price objections.