The Best Sales Questions That Will Get Your Prospects Talking

Like you, your buyers want a better future, both professionally and personally. They connect emotionally to this better future. 

Quite often, there are obstacles, issues or barriers preventing or delaying this better future.

Your products, services and solutions will enable your buyers to achieve this better future. You sell them on your ability to provide this when you execute a solution sales process with empathy. Your sales process is enabled by great sales questions that allow you to earn the right to proceed along every step of that sales process.

→  Download Now: ITF Best Sales Questions [Free Tool]

Great sales questions enable us to:

1) Identify the buyer’s desired, better future

2) Identify the issues, obstacles or gaps preventing that better future

3) Determine how our products and solutions will help them achieve that desired future

We need to create a list of our best questions that enable an authentic, empathetic, human conversation with prospects.  

These great sales questions will:

1) Provide unique insights into their business

2) Help the buyers look at their business and desired outcomes in a different and unique way

3) Differentiate us as sales professionals from our competitors

4) Earn us the opportunity to showcase how we can enable that better future with our products or services

5) Increase our chances of progressing along each stage of our solution sales process

Traditionally, salespeople were trained to ask questions focused on qualifying prospects and tactically identifying needs for their products. For example: 

? How many users do you have on your CRM systems and when does the contract with the existing vendor expire? 

? How do you make decisions to replace it?

These questions were helpful to the seller but of no value to buyers. This dated approach continues to be one of the main reasons that buyers avoid salespeople. Their impression is that we will not add value.

Prioritizing questions is critical. If we get too tactical too early, we will get commoditized (price). If we “beat around the bush” too long, we will annoy our prospects and they will disengage.

We need to think about both the order and structure of our key sales questions.

ITF Structure For An Effective Sales Question Exchange

Sales questions should include either a point of interest (POI) or a unique insight for our prospect. The POI proves that the discussion is about them and not us (making it more attractive to them) and differentiating us from many other unsophisticated sellers.

This insight proves that we can add value to them and incentivize them to continue the conversation with us.

Next Steps

1) Create a list of your favorite 10-15 sales questions.

→  Download Now: ITF Best Sales Questions [Free Tool]

2) Document the obvious insight and follow on question to each.

3) Determine which questions you plan on asking at each stage of your demand generation process or sales process.

4 ) Document the obvious insight and follow on questions to each.

• One of the “oldies but goodies” in the sales question space is Neil Tackham’s seminal work, “Spin Selling, McGraw-Hill, 1988”