The Best Question to Ask

There are three types of questions you can ask when selling. One works really well and the other two don't.

Questions that don't help you sell more are:

• Rapport building questions. Prospective customers don't care that you are interested enough to ask how good their weekend was - they've got other things to do. You're better off to just get straight to business.
• Generic questions. If you're asking "What can I help you with?" you're making the customer do your job for you. Instead, be useful and bring a solution.

The Better Questions to Ask are focused on solving specific problems. Businesses make money by solving problems for other businesses. If you can help them solve a problem in their business they will be able to solve more problems for their customer which makes them more money.

When you ask questions about solving problems, customers appreciate it. They see that you bring value to their world and will want to see you more often.

As always I'd love your thoughts on this below.

Cheers,

Darren Fleming

A tool to help.

I've recently developed a tool to helps sales managers assess how well their sales staff ask questions. It helps you identify areas of strength as well as areas for improvement so you can help drive sales. You can check it out here.

*They analysed over half-a-million calls to get this data.