Active listening and questioning feedback are essential skills for any salesperson who wants to build rapport, understand customer needs, and overcome objections. In this article, we'll show you some examples of powerful probing questions that can help you close more deals and improve your sales coaching.
Active listening is the ability to pay attention, reflect, and respond to what your customer is saying, without interrupting, judging, or jumping to conclusions. Active listening shows that you care about your customer's situation, challenges, and goals, and that you want to help them find the best solution. Active listening also helps you uncover hidden objections, clarify expectations, and confirm agreements.
Questioning feedback is the practice of asking open-ended, specific, and relevant questions to elicit more information, opinions, and feelings from your customer. Questioning feedback helps you dig deeper into your customer's pain points, motivations, and desires, and to tailor your pitch accordingly. Questioning feedback also helps you check for understanding, test assumptions, and address concerns.
Probing questions are a type of questioning feedback that aim to explore your customer's situation, problem, implication, and need-payoff (SPIN). Probing questions help you move your customer through the stages of the sales cycle, from identifying their needs, to presenting your value proposition, to closing the deal. Probing questions are usually open-ended, starting with words like what, why, how, when, where, and who.
To gauge the authority, influence of the persona you are speaking to, ask questions about competition, - Who do you see as your competition in … (be specific)? - How important is it win vs Competition (state specific names)? What are you doing to win?
Probing questions can be used in various scenarios to gather basic information about a customer's current situation, such as their goals, challenges, budget, and decision-making process. Additionally, probing questions can help identify and quantify the problems or difficulties that the customer is facing and how they affect their performance, results, or satisfaction. Furthermore, probing questions can emphasize the consequences or risks of not solving the problem and create a sense of urgency and motivation for change. Finally, probing questions can highlight the benefits or outcomes that a customer would achieve by using a solution and reinforce their positive feelings and confidence.
To understand the buying process and persona’s role in it, asking questions like, - When did you last make a similar (solution, budgets) purchase? - How did you build a case for it? - What was your role in the process?
To ask effective probing questions, you should listen actively and attentively to your customer's answers, using verbal and non-verbal cues to show your interest. Follow-up questions can help to clarify, confirm, or expand on what the customer said. Reflective questions are great for paraphrasing or summarizing what was said. Funnel questions can be used to start with broad topics and narrow down to more specific ones. Silence and pauses can help give your customer time to think and respond without interruption. Finally, positive feedback and encouragement can be used to acknowledge and appreciate the customer's input while building rapport and trust.
Before you start asking prospects your probing questions, you need to set the agenda by getting their PERMISSION to ask them. This sounds like, "Mr./Ms. Prospect: I'd like to ask you some questions about your situation: where you're at, where you want to get to and what might be getting in your way. That way we can come to an understanding of whether there is a good fit between us, or not. Does that sound OK with you?"
As a sales coach, you can use active listening and questioning feedback to help your sales reps enhance their skills, performance, and confidence. For instance, observe and take notes on your sales reps during their calls or meetings to identify both their strengths and areas for improvement. Provide timely feedback to your reps using probing questions to help them reflect on their actions and results. Additionally, coaching questions can assist in guiding your sales reps to find their own solutions and action plans. Finally, don’t forget to praise and recognize your sales reps’ achievements, progress, and efforts to motivate them to keep improving.