The most important part of making a sale, and the one that’s many small business owners major weakness is asking questions. Questions are critical to engage the prospect, find out important information from them, set the mood for the entire meeting and the sale to happen.
What you ask the prospect makes or breaks the sale, simply.
From my experience so far, most small business owners never prepare their opening questions though. They neither research, write nor rehearse them before they meet the prospect. They just go to the next sales call hoping that they will come up with something as they go along. Or that things will go just fine. Unfortunately, as you probably know already, they rarely do.
The good news is though that creating your power questions as they are called is not that difficult. To make the task even easier, I decided to give you 10 killer questions templates you can use on your next sales call.
There are few things you have to remember while creating your own power questions, whether they are based on those templates or not. Your questions should make the prospect think before giving a response. You should be able to qualify his needs from his answers, or find out what he is missing. You should be able to find out about his personal and company goals, they may help you build a better image of the prospect and what his long term plans are. Your questions should also create a buying atmosphere, make the prospect want to buy from you.
Remember that the more engaging your questions are, the greater chance that your prospect will listen and participate fully in meeting. And that in itself is the first step to making the sale.
Templates below are just lead-ins. You should use and modify them to construct a list of at least 25 different questions to use during your sales calls. Remember to be specific and try to make the prospect stop and think before giving an answer.
And the final advice, always make notes of the answers. It proves that you care. Simply.
10 killer power questions templates to use on your next sales call
- What have you found …? i.e. - What have you found frustrating about outsourcing part of your services? - What have you found working well in your stock control system?
- What has been your experience …? i.e. - What has been your experience of using [product or service] for the past year?
- How have you successfully used …? i.e. - How have you successfully used [product or service] in the past?
- How do you determine …? i.e. - How do you determine how happy your customers are? - How do you determine if your staff meets their targets? - How do you determine if your recent promotion increases your sales?
- If you were to … what would you do about …? i.e. - If you were to win a new account, what would you do about managing such a large client? - If you were to open an office in [far distant country] what would you do about your internal communications system? i.e.
- If [something happened], how would you handle …? i.e. - If your husband dies, how would you pay your mortgage? - If your best client called now, how would you get the message?
- What do you like about …? i.e. - What do you like about your stock management system?
- What is the one thing you would improve / change about …? i.e. - What is the one thing you would improve about your stock management system?
- What does your competition do about …? i.e. - What does your competition do about increasing customer demand for X?
- How do your customers react to …? i.e. - How do your customers react to X in your ordering system?
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