50 Habits of Top Performing Sales People – Habit #16 – Do You Know What Questions to Ask?

October 30, 2015 Selling Comments Off on 50 Habits of Top Performing Sales People – Habit #16 – Do You Know What Questions to Ask?

Continuing with the twelve Sales Skills, let’s look at Habit #16 – Do you Know What Questions to Ask?

Probe (ask questions) to determine if the target company has problems that your products or your company is likely to be able to solve.

Last month’s newsletter talked about understanding how your customer makes money and the value your company brings to their product/service.  This month, let’s focus on the importance of understanding how the questions you ask your target customer affect the sales process.  When you develop your opportunity plan, do you know what questions to ask?

More importantly, do you prepare a list of questions that you are going to ask at predefined points in the sales cycle?  This might seem weird and some people may ask, “Well, how am I going to do that?”

In previous newsletters, we discussed leveraging your process knowledge by penetrating companies with processes similar to those companies with which you have had success.  Well, if you have had success, then you should know the details of the processes with which you have had success; therefore you should be able to develop a list of questions that would lead you to problems that companies with similar processes would have, right? Right?

Developing this list of questions is critical to your ability to leverage your successes.  These questions, if structured properly, will lead to credibility when asked during initial sales calls with targeted companies.  It beats the heck out of talking about the weather, asking “how’s your business”, or going through a PowerPoint “presentation” and all the general stuff that non-Top Performers do during initial sales calls.

Probing strategies are crucial.  If one of your business strategies is to leverage your successes, then you need to understand the problems that your target industries are likely to have.

Once you are sure you understand their problems, you can structure questions so you can determine if the new targeted companies have similar problems to your existing “success” companies.  Then you are in a position to develop the problem into a need through the determination of the level of pain the prospect is experiencing.  It all ties together: the opportunity plan, the strategy and the list of questions.

“A Habit” is not work, but just a thing that is done every day and probing during your sales calls to determine if your target company has problems that your product or your company is likely to be able to solve, can easily become a Habit.

TIME MANAGEMENT.  For Top Performers, every task is planned and focused on the goals that earn the results.  Top Performers plan and then engage.  They act on their plans, they work hard and they get results.

Coaching these skills is a critical part of what we do.  We are here to help you develop and implement your Strategic Plan and coach and develop the skills to implement the plan successfully.

We are having great success coaching and implementing these methods and skills and our clients love it!

About Strategen, Inc.

Bill has over 25 years of experience in manufacturing organizations.  Bill will go into a company and develop tailored strategies to assist with management and growth and then help implement those strategies.  Visit www.strategen1.com for details.