344 Questioning Skills In Sales

<p>This was very frustrating.  It became obvious from the client’s email response that there was a sizeable gap between what I thought was going on and the reality.  How could that be?  I am an experienced salesperson with a solid track record of sales; I have written two books on selling in Japan, one in English and one in Japanese, I have had a weekly blog on the subject for nearly seven years. I teach selling techniques as part of my job.  What went wrong?  In the email response, he clarified that he was only thinking of a very minimum role for us in the sales training process.  Now that was not obvious to me when we met and had our discussion.  This was perplexing. I have been replaying that sales call in my mind looking for what did I wrong. Where was the bread crumb trail that I missed?</p> <p>The questioning phase of the sales call is crucial because if you don’t know what the buyer wants, how do you satisfy them, how do you fix their issues, solve their problems?  We know many salespeople don’t ask questions because they are too busy going straight into the nitty gritty detail of explaining their solution.  Let’s put it in simple terms. This is the problem of not asking what is the buyer’s favourite colour, which is blue and then just talking endlessly about your awesome range in pink.  It just doesn’t work well to get the sale.</p> <p>What if the buyer’s answer isn’t that clear?  This can happen, of course.  Not every buyer is articulate or well thought through or well considered or smart.  Often, they don’t have a clear picture of what they need.  Operating from a flawed central proposition can also complicate matters, because not every client is sophisticated in understanding their own core underlying issues.</p> <p>As salespeople, we can make the problem worse too.  We ask questions which get them thinking and considering the problem from fresh perspectives.  Normally, this is a good thing because we want to rock them back on their heels and have them thinking, “We haven’t thought about that” or “We h