Questions That Sell: The Powerful Process for Discovering What Your Customer Really Wants

by Paul Cherry

Overview

If you ask the right questions, then you’ll get the sale every time.

As a salesperson, your product knowledge is extensive but that's not enough. If you fail to ask the right questions - the ones that uncover a customer's real needs - you will never close the deal.

Top sales effectiveness expert and author Paul Cherry reveals advanced questioning techniques that will help you sell your products or services based on value to the customer, rather than price, and increase your success rate as a result.

In Questions That Sell, Cherry shares material on how to:

• Discover hidden customer needs and motivations
• Reinvigorate a stale relationship
• Soothe anxious buyers
• Accelerate the decision process
• Upsell and cross-sell so you no longer leave money on the table
• Use questions to qualify prospects (without insulting them)
• And much more

Questions That Sell is packed with powerful examples, exercises, and hundreds of sample questions for a wide range of buyer interactions. Success is yours for the asking. Smart questioning will get you there.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814438701
Publisher:	AMACOM
Publication date:	12/07/2017
Edition description:	Second Edition
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	317,477
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Paul Cherry is founder and president of Performance Based Results, an international sales training organization. An in-demand speaker and sales expert, he has been featured in Investor’s Business Daily, Selling Power, Inc., Kiplinger’s, and other leading publications.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

A Few Questions About ... Questions

Since this is a book about questions, let's start with a few:

What, exactly, is a question? Why do we ask them? Why do we answer them? And why are they such a powerful selling tool?

I like to think of a question as a truth-seeking missile. And that's why a sales strategy that's built on questioning is so powerful. The best way we can create value for our customers, our companies, and ourselves is to get to the truth. Much time and money is wasted by salespeople trying to sell the wrong people the wrong solutions to the wrong problems.

As we all know, buyers don't always tell the truth. Sometimes they hold back on purpose — to be polite, to get rid of you, to gain some perceived advantage over you, or to protect themselves. More often, buyers don't tell you the truth because they don't know it. They haven't done the hard work to truly understand their own wants and needs.

We tend to take questions for granted. But if you stop and think for a moment, something very strange happens when we ask a question: We usually get an answer. In fact, it's hard not to answer a question. People even feel compelled to answer questions when it would be better to remain silent. Consider, for example, the familiar Miranda warning that we all know from police shows: Suspects actually have to be reminded that they don't have to answer the police's questions. Yet many do so anyway.

There's something deeply embedded in the human mind that creates a powerful compulsion to answer questions. If someone asks a reasonable question in a reasonable way, and for reasonable reasons, it's almost unthinkable to refuse to answer. It would be seen as a rude, almost antisocial act.

All human knowledge starts with questions. Nearly every profession and field of knowledge begins with a question. Detectives ask, "Who-dunit?" Journalists ask, "What happened?" Science asks, "How does the world work?" Religion asks, "Why are we here?" Philosophy asks, "What is true?"

Human beings learn, grow, and succeed by exchanging knowledge with other human beings. I believe that questions are rooted so deeply in our psyche because they're the most efficient and effective tool at our disposal for acquiring knowledge. Good questions eliminate the extraneous and get to the heart of things. They allow us to acquire specific, useful, and relevant knowledge from other people. We don't have to download all of the knowledge that another person has kicking around in her brain.

But questions can do more than simply transfer knowledge from one brain to another. The best questions create new knowledge. The person being asked the question doesn't just tell you what he already knows. By considering the question, he discovers something — about his situation, about his values, about his wants and needs — that he hadn't understood before.

That's the transformative power of a question-based selling strategy. Good salespeople use questions to learn something about their buyers. Great salespeople use questions to help buyers learn something about themselves. If you can achieve that, it means you can start solving problems that other salespeople don't even know exist. Even more important, it creates a deep bond between you and your buyer. "This isn't just someone who can sell me stuff," the buyer thinks. "This is someone who helps me grow."

A Hierarchy of Questions

Much of this book is about asking deeper questions — questions that other salespeople might not think to ask, or might even be afraid to ask.

There's nothing wrong with simple, closed-end questions that a buyer can answer with a yes or no — such as, "Did you see an increase in sales last year?" Especially at the beginning of a sales relationship, you need to get some basic information. And simple questions are great for establishing rapport — they're easy for prospects to answer and don't seem threatening.

But that's where many salespeople stop. And if you don't dig any deeper, you'll never have more than a superficial relationship with your buyer. Of course, you have to earn the right to go deep with your buyer. It takes time for buyers to trust you enough to really open up. But when they do, you get to the truth. And a solution that speaks to the truth is a solution your customers will be eager to buy.

Good Questions and Bad Questions

Good questions get you closer to the truth. But some questions can lead you astray. They may create the illusion that you're making progress when at best you're going in circles. At worst, bad questions will drive buyers away. Here are some examples:

• Leading questions. "So wouldn't you agree that quality is the most important consideration?" "Don't you want a secure financial future?" Questions like these aren't designed to get the truth; they're designed to get agreement. We learn nothing and the customer feels manipulated.

• Lazy questions. "What industry are you in?" "Is this your only location?" This is information we could have gotten elsewhere, so questions like these simply waste your buyer's time.

• Self-serving questions. "What do you know about our company?" "Did you get a chance to look over the information I sent you?" "Are there any projects I can quote on?" "How's my pricing?" "Do you have any questions for me?" "Would you like to see a demo?" Although it's important to qualify and gauge a prospect's interest, questions like these can suggest that you are more focused on your own interests than your customer's. Like lazy questions, they can come across as product peddling or poking around for an opportunity in- stead of focusing on value-added solutions.

• Trick questions. "Which one do you want — the red one or the blue one?" "If I could show you a way to save 25 percent on your costs, would you be interested?" Buyers see these questions for what they are — a gimmick to get them to do what you want.

• Hostile or aggressive questions. "Didn't you have a plan in place in case of a service outage?" "Why do you continue to invest in a program that hasn't worked?" There's great value in questions that prompt a buyer to rethink old assumptions or consider new information. But questions that are designed to put buyers on the spot or make them feel stupid — especially in front of others — will prompt buyers to disclose less, not more.

A Plan for Better Sales Questions

One of the key reasons that salespeople don't ask better questions is be- cause they lack a plan. Sales conversations can be stressful and a wrong turn can be disastrous. So salespeople often fall back on approaches that seem safe. They ask the usual sales questions in the usual way, as if they're reading them off a list. They hesitate to dig deeper, because then they don't know where the conversation will go. And they're eager to move on to the thing they know best: talking about their products or services. If you have a plan — a set of tools — you can manage the questioning process with confidence. In the chapters that follow, we primarily focus on six types of questions that are specifically designed for sales. We'll discuss them in greater depth in the chapters that follow, but here's a quick overview:

1. Educational questions. These are questions designed to enlarge a customer's knowledge.

2. Lock-on questions. These are questions that build on what buyers have told you, which allows you to extend the conversation and dig deeper into the issues they face.

3. Impact questions. These are questions designed to explore the impact of challenges that the customer is facing.

4. Expansion questions. These are questions designed to get buyers to enlarge on what they've told you, giving you greater insight into their needs.

5. Comparison questions. These are questions that get buyers to compare one thing to another — an especially useful tool for identifying priorities and for gaining greater clarity.

6. Vision questions. These are questions that invite the buyer to see what they stand to gain, and how you can help them achieve their goals, hopes, and dreams.

Each of these question types is a powerful tool that allows you to engage your buyer on a deep level, while keeping the conversation on track and moving toward a sale. Once you master these six types, they'll become second nature and you'll know how to apply them in virtually any sales situation.

And that leads to one more question: Are you ready to start digging deeper with customers and understanding their truths? If so, let's get started.

CHAPTER 2

Deadly Questions

Are Your Questions Costing You Business, Leaving Money on the Table, and Putting Prospects to Sleep?

You probably already have a number of questions you ask your clients during a sales call. For example:

• What do you know about our company?

• How can we help you?

• Whom are you currently working with?

• How long have you been with your current vendor?

• What do you like about them?

• What do you dislike about them?

• What's your budget?

• What are your goals?

• How much are you paying now?

• What if I could give you a better solution for a cheaper price? Would you be interested?

• When are you looking to make a change?

• Are you the decisionmaker?

• Can I put together a proposal for you?

• Are you ready to get started?

• May I have your business?

• How are we doing?

• Any problems?

You may feel good about a meeting during which you've asked these questions. After all, you've garnered lots of useful information about the buyer — what they need, what they're currently using, what they like and don't like. You may feel you've moved the sale forward considerably. In fact, questions like these may be setting you back — because they add no value to the buyer.

There's a term for this kind of interaction: an interrogation.

Imagine yourself sitting in a small room in a police station, while a burly detective pounds you with questions. It's clear what the detective stands to gain from this exchange, but what's in it for you?

Ask too many of these types of questions and your buyers will start to feel like they're in that little room. They can see how you will benefit from these kinds of questions. But they've gained nothing for themselves. They learn nothing from your questions, because they already know the answers. So to the buyer, your questions are at best boring and at worst overbearing.

Yes, you'll eventually need to gather answers to these questions and more to make an effective recommendation to your buyer. But these are the least effective questions you can ask of a buyer because they only deliver value to you.

If your buyer is a kind and patient soul, she may politely answer all of your obviously self-serving questions, all the while hoping that at some point you're going to stop sounding like every other salesperson who's ever tried to get her business and say something valuable.

But if you don't offer any value, buyers — unlike crime suspects — possess a powerful weapon. They can end the interrogation any time they like — usually by saying something like: "I have to run to a meeting. Why don't you leave me some product literature so I can take time to digest the information and then get back to you?"

Digging Deeper

Are you a problem solver?

Of course you are. All salespeople present themselves as problem solvers.

Yet in my experience, very few salespeople ask buyers to vividly describe the problems they are experiencing. Rarely do they ask how the clients themselves are affected by those problems.

Problem-oriented questions give you, the salesperson, valuable information. But they also create value to the buyer. They invite the buyer to think more deeply about what he is trying to achieve, and what's keeping him from it. He has the opportunity to open up and vent his frustrations. And in the process, he may learn something about himself and his situation that he didn't know.

In truth, any salesperson can gather facts. But the outstanding salesperson ignites the emotions of prospective customers and uncovers what motivates them to act. Unfortunately, most salespeople don't know how to spur people on to action. Either they're afraid to get to the real emotions or unclear about what to do once those emotions come to the surface.

Although your usual list of questions might help you collect facts, the questioning techniques presented in the following chapters will help you go beyond mere facts and gain a deeper understanding of what your buyer needs and wants, and how you can deliver it.

Asking engaging questions will not guarantee a positive outcome. Some prospective customers will not yet be ready to admit they need help. And sometimes a buyer simply won't have a real need for your service or product. Even in these cases, engaging questions will allow you to get to the truth more quickly (or conclude it's not a good fit and move on).

So are you asking questions that dig deep? That tap into buyers' emotions and motivations? To get an honest self-appraisal of your questioning skills, let's start with two simple exercises:

Exercise 1

Take a moment to write down all of the questions you typically ask during an initial sales call to a prospective customer. List as many questions as possible.

Exercise 2

Contact a prospective client and ask some of the questions on your list. Keep track of which questions you ask, as well as how much time you spend talking during the call. Consider recording the conversation; this will help keep you honest with yourself. (Keep in mind that, depending on the state you're in, you may need the customer's permission to record the call.)

Immediately after the call ends, write up a "call report" for your own review, answering the following questions:

1. Which questions did you ask?

2. Approximately how long was the conversation?

3. What percentage of the time did you spend talking, versus your customer?

4. Did you find yourself talking more than you meant to?

5. Did your questions serve primarily your needs or the needs of your prospective customer?

6. After this call, do you have a sense of the problems your prospective client is currently facing? If so, what exactly are those problems?

7. Are you aware of the future goals of this prospective client? If so, what is her vision for the future?

8. Do you think you set yourself apart from other salespeople during this conversation? If so, state specifically how you think your questions set you apart from other salespeople in your field.

9. Are you any closer to completing the sale than you were before the call?

10. Do you have a commitment from the prospective client to pursue the next step in the sale? If so, what is it?

11. What do you think the prospective client's impression of you was after the first call?

Most likely you found several areas that you need to work on to improve your questioning techniques. That's good news — because now you've identified some areas where you can make your questioning technique better.

Inside the Buyer's Mind

Getting into the psyche of your prospective clients will allow you to ask better questions and get higher-quality information. To do this, you need to know what drives your buyer's behavior and what pushes his buttons. Here are some areas that your questions should explore:

Who is an influencer? Salespeople often talk about finding the "decisionmaker." That may even be one of the questions you ask prospects. But it's a dangerous and misguided question, and can quickly lead you down the wrong path.

Decisions — especially in complex business-to-business sales — are rarely made by one person. Organizations have safeguards to ensure that decisions aren't made until all possible factors are considered.

So asking "Who's the decisionmaker?" is based on a false assumption. Your prospective customer must report to numerous people, such as bosses, other departments within the company, colleagues on the team, stockholders, and board members, as well as customers who depend on the company to deliver a product.

What you should be looking to understand is (1) Who are all of the people influencing the decision to buy? (2) How much influence does each one wield? (3) What buying criteria are important to each person?

Figure 2-1 illustrates the different factors prospective customers must deal with when making a decision about whether or not to do business with you.

Who are all of these people shown in Figure 2-1? The category of "internal customers" includes bosses, board members, colleagues, and coworkers in other divisions. Internal customers set limits for how much money your prospective client can spend and may even erect obstacles to block the completion of a sale. Internal customers have their own agendas — agendas that you need to learn about as soon as possible in the course of the sale. Many times these agendas conflict with each other and lead to disputes among workers in the same company. If you can uncover the motivations and concerns of your prospective client's internal customers, you will be able to defuse the situation and move on with the sale.

(Continues…)

---

Excerpted from "Questions That Sell"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Paul Cherry.
Excerpted by permission of AMACOM.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Preface to the Second Edition xi

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 A Few Questions About . . . Questions 9

Chapter 2 Deadly Questions: Are Your Questions Costing You Business, Leaving Money on the Table, and Putting Prospects to Sleep? 13

Chapter 3 Are You a Partner or a Product Peddler? The Educational Question 21

Chapter 4 Lock-On Questions and Impact Questions: How to Uncover What Your Buyer Won't—or Can't—Tell You 31

Chapter 5 Opening the Floodgates: The Power of Expansion Questions 49

Chapter 6 Comparison Questions: Getting Customers to Think Sideways 55

Chapter 7 Vision Questions: Understanding Your Buyer's Hopes, Dreams, and Desires 63

Chapter 8 Putting It All Together: From Prospect to Close 73

Chapter 9 Try It Yourself: A Sales Scenario to Sharpen Your Questioning Skills 85

Chapter 10 Qualifying Questions: Get Prospects to Tell You Why You Should Do Business with Them 95

Chapter 11 Alien Encounters: Questions for the First Meeting That Get Buyers to Open Up 117

Chapter 12 More Problems = More Sales: Questions That Enlarge the Need 125

Chapter 13 Questions About BANT: Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing 135

Chapter 14 For Future Sales, Ask About the Past 145

Chapter 15 Getting to Yes Without All the Stress: Anxiety-Free Closing Questions 149

Chapter 16 Upselling and Cross-Selling Questions: Stop Leaving Money on the Table and Get Your Full Share of the Customers' Business 157

Chapter 17 Relationship-Building Questions: Creating Intimacy and Trust 163

Chapter 18 Accountability Questions: Hold Buyers' Feet to the Fire—and Have Them Love You for It 171

Chapter 19 Cold Calling Questions That Get Prospects Talking 177

Chapter 20 Shots in the Dark: Voice Mail and Email Questions 183

Chapter 21 Your Very Best Prospects: Using Referral Questions to Build Your Own Pipeline 191

Chapter 22 Social Selling: Adapting Tried-and-True Questions for a New Medium 197

Chapter 23 The Keys to the Castle: Questions for Gatekeepers 205

Chapter 24 C-Suite Questions: How to Connect with Top-Level Executives 209

Chapter 25 Presentation Questions: How to Keep Buyers Awake, Engaged, and Wanting to Hear More 217

Index 223

Editorial Reviews

Cherry gives readers key questions that get orders and a process to uncover the real needs of their customers.”

-CRM Magazine

From the Publisher