Sales Managers: Asking Good Questions

Three-quarters of the secret to professional, strategic selling boils down to asking the Best Questions and listening carefully to the answers. Most of the Best Questions have to do with uncovering the crucial, underlying needs your products or services might serve. But you also must know how to sell to a particular account. Using the same strategy for all customers is a big mistake. The issue is, how do you compete for this customer's business?

If you haven't had professional sales training offered by The Sales Board, how do you know the right way to sell a customer? You ask.

For instance, you need to know when to time your sales calls, who to call on, what to present to each individual or group who will influence the buying decision, and how the decision ultimately will be made. How do you learn all of this? By asking questions early in the game.

Competition - Who are you competing against for this sale? Once you know, you can ask targeted questions to draw out specific needs that you can resolve but your competitors can't. And when presenting features and benefits of your products, you can lead with your specific competitive strengths.

Time Frame - When does the customer expect to make a buying decision? More importantly, when does the customer want to begin to reap the benefits expected from the purchase?

Buying Influences - Who controls the budget? Who analyzes the technical aspects of your product? Who will be responsible for making your product work correctly in the organization? This information tells you which features and benefits to stress to which audience.

Buying Process - How will the buying decision actually be made? Who must be "sold" before the transaction can be completed? Which criteria will be most important in the decision? By getting clear answers to these questions early in the process, you can develop a strategy that will shorten your sell cycle, allow you to anticipate and defuse objections that otherwise would arise later, and make a lot more sales.

Do you want more information about how to ask the best selling questions? Contact us to learn more about leverage questions.

Sales Management Training

Never "Wing-It"

Research shows that salespeople will never reach their performance potential without a well-defined sales-call procedure that they can follow and learn from. "Winging it" on sales calls has grim consequences - lost sales, extended sell cycles, margin erosion and no clear path to improvement. Bottom line: Your entire sales career can be mediocre if you "wing it."

Performance improves by as much as 50% when salespeople have a consistent game plan for their sales calls.

Most salespeople make the same mistakes over and over without realizing it. Without a logical sales process to follow, they can't even identify specific problems, let alone correct them. A good sales process mirrors the pattern by which customers make buying decisions. The nine acts of the Sales Book Action Selling, break a sales call into its most important components, sequenced in the order of the five key buying decisions every customer makes. By analyzing each segment of a call and testing against the customer's buying decisions, salespeople can quickly recognize problems and adjust their behavior accordingly.

Without a system like Action Selling, the only thing salespeople can look at is whether they won or lost the sale. If you don't know what went wrong or why, you can't improve your performance.

Contact us to learn more about how to stop "winging it" with a process for conducting sales calls.