Reporters, journalists, and political debaters have one thing in common: they fully understand how powerful questions can be. In sales, questions are also an extremely powerful tool for both communications and control of the sales process. Most people are not swayed by sales pitches and the old “telling is selling” paradigm of blathering on about a product is ineffective – most people have learned how to tune out these pitches.
The most effective way to control the sales process and engage the customer is through questions.
Begin the sales process with questions instead of a pitch and you’ll find a much more receptive audience once you actually begin the pitch.
When customers have to ask the questions, they become the ones controlling the process and that usually leads to a no-sale. Asking intelligent, pinpoint questions (instead of generics like “What will it take to earn your business?”) related to the customer is the surest way to engage them and make the sale.
Your first priority should be to learn everything you can about the prospect’s needs. Skip the generic questions and focus on business-related ones instead. Aim to find out things like their business goals, how well their current efforts are working, new things or products they’re interested in trying, changes they might be making to their business model or marketing, etc. Depending on what you’re selling, you can hone your questions to fit within the prospect’s business plans and dynamics to lead them into accepting your pitch as a complement to their goals.
With most proposals and meetings with prospective clients, time is limited. If you spend all of your meeting time talking about you, your company, your products, etc., you waste the time you could be using getting to know the client and building a connection. Those connections are what sell, not the pitch, company or product. Always remember that and remember to use questions to make the sale, not pitches. Questions are powerful.