3 Powerful Sales Questions

Use them on your next sales call to expand your customer relationship

Ever get stuck in a rut with a customer? Maybe you have talked about everything you can talk about and sold them everything you think you can sell them.

What about prospects? Ever call on a prospect several times and feel like you are getting no further into the sales process with them?

If so, try these three questions to dig a bit deeper into their business to see if you can change your sales approach and add more value to their business.

“You have been in business a long time. You’ve had good years and bad. Which was your best?”

The secret to all of these questions is not their answer, but why they gave you that answer. So, you need to be very skilled at questioning their answer. Their short answer to this question might be, “1998, when the economy boomed”. The follow-up question might be, “How good of a year was it for businesses like yours?” “What measure do most businesses like yours use to determine a good or bad year?”

2. “While we’re on the subject of best and worst, you have been called on by hundreds of salespeople over the years. Which was the best one? Which was the worst one?”

The best and worst style questions are great conversation starters. They may not always know the best, but rarely do they forget the worst salesperson they had or the worst product they sold, or the worst company to do business with. Again, their short answer might be “ABC company”. Your follow-up can be, “Really, I thought they were pretty good to their customers. What made them the worst?” This is where you find out keys to how they decide on a vendor…what bothers them…what they want to avoid if they did business with you, etc.

Other follow up questions can focus on what changed. For example, “If ABC was that bad, what ended up happening? Or, whatever happened to Joe? Is he still your salesperson?” You want to know the eventual outcome as it might not be something you want to replicate.

3. “With all of the choices out there in the market, how does a person like yourself make a decision on which one to go with?”

Ultimately, you need to know how your customer makes a decision on your products. You can certainly ask about it directly. For example, “So how do you typically decide on the products you use?”

However, you can soften it and substitute in the typical customer like them. For example, “With all the choices of biologicals on the market today, how does a producer decide which one to use?” This method feels a little less prying into their exact decision process. Yet, they will most likely answer with their decision-making process. And again, it’s the follow-up questions to their answers that are the most important.

In this example, you can ask if they use that process to make their business decisions. If so, how do they know it’s the right or wrong decision? When might they make decisions like that again?

At the speed of a sales call, it’s very easy to run out of good questions to keep the conversation going in the right direction. I encourage you to plan your questions out before getting in front of the customer. Important: Have a good reason for asking the question. You may get a negative response to your questions or maybe silence. If so, you want to quickly jump in with the reason behind your question. Briefly explaining why you are asking this type of question can calm the customer down and show how you use that information to help them.

Lastly, they may have terrible answers to these questions. They may not have even thought about these questions. Please don’t insult their decision-making process or the lack of one at all. Simply pull in some thoughts on how other customers like them have made those decisions. For example, “Most producers are learning about biologicals from their Ag retailer and making their decision based on what their agronomist recommends.” This gives them a baseline of how to begin thinking about their decisions.

Use these three questions to keep your next sales call moving. With prospects, if the conversation seems to be going nowhere, they are likely to end the sales call on you. These are great for expanding the call in a meaningful way.