BRX Pro Tip: 3 Ways to Ask Better Questions in Sales
Stone Payton: Welcome back to Business RadioX Pro Tips, Lee Kantor and Stone Payton here with you. Lee, let’s talk a little bit about asking good, better questions in the sales process.
Lee Kantor: I think better questions is the key to sales. Sales is all about asking questions. Sales is all about making sure that you truly, truly understand what is the greatest pain that the prospect has and how you can best solve it, whether it’s with your service or not.
Lee Kantor: So, number one is you can’t kind of go by the script. You have to know all the stuff, but you can’t just methodically go down a script like it’s a play. It just doesn’t work that way. You got to kind of follow the curiosity. You have to follow kind of the path of the conversations. And the best questions aren’t going to come from a checklist. They’re going to come from actual interest.
Lee Kantor: So, listen for clues, go off script, ask follow up questions. Go, “Oh. Oh, that’s interesting. Tell me more about that” or “That’s interesting. Why’d you do that?” Keep diving deeper and deeper. The more curious you are about your prospect, the more they’re going to trust you, because curiosity builds trust. People feel seen when they feel heard, so start asking more questions and really try to understand what their challenge is and why they’re in the situation they’re in.
Lee Kantor: And then, when you’re asking the questions, you have to ask them like you’re a strategist, not a vendor to sell them something. So, you can’t ask those rote questions of, What’s your budget? When do you want to buy this? Like, you can’t focus in on those kind of things. You want that information to kind of organically come out of a conversation, but you don’t want to just methodically go down a checklist and ask those type of questions. When you’re asking those kind of questions, all you’re doing is saying, I’m a vendor, I have something to sell you, and I’m just going to figure out a way to sell you something.
Lee Kantor: If you focus more on the big picture, How does this initiative tie into your bigger goals this year? Who else will feel the impact if this goes well? It shifts you from being a salesperson to a partner, and that’s where you want to be. You want to be a trusted partner.
Lee Kantor: Number three, zoom out before you zoom in. It’s so important to get context first. Don’t just ask about whatever the software or the service. They’ve seen that, they’ve had a million demos already. That’s not going to get you where you want to go. You want to ask them kind of big picture things first. Why did they even start looking for a solution in the first place? What was the trigger behind that? Why now? Why is this important today?
Lee Kantor: Understand that their story is so much more important than your slide deck. Their story is at the heart of this. All the answers are there. They have it. It’s about you getting it out of them.
Lee Kantor: So, great salespeople aren’t closers per se. They’re more like clarifiers. They want to get more understanding. They want to ask better questions, because better questions don’t just lead to sales, they lead to real partnerships, and that’s where the money is made.
