Quality Questions – The Secret to Success

Questions are a vital weapon in a sales person’s arsenal.  They help establish the needs of the customer and uncover further information that can be used not only to close today’s sale but future sales as well.  Questions help establish a report and make the customer feel at ease.  It is the ability to dig deep and discover a customer’s hidden needs and desires that separate good sales people from great.  With this in mind I want to take a minute and go over some of the basics of questions.

There are essentially two essential types of questions that are ever asked: Open ended and closed ended.

Opened ended questions are designed to put the buyer at ease and get them to open up and be perceptive of your product. You want them to tell you about themselves, their company, and their needs.  When used properly not only will a customer give you all the information you need to emotionally attach them to your product but they will supply you with the answers you need when handling their objections.  Using opened ended questions shows them your interest in helping them or their company.  It establishes trust in the business relationship.

Examples of opened ended questions are:

Tell me what you’re looking for in my product?

                Explain to me your companies needs?

                What would the perfect product or service do for you?

Closed ended questions are simple questions designed to be answered with one word, usually a “yes” or “no.”  Use these questions when trying to gain agreement with the customer. Only ask closed ended question you know the answer to and have the customer saying “yes” repeatedly.  The more the mind says “yes” the harder it is for it to say “no.”  You are not trying to trick a customer; you are simply getting them to agree with what they already told you they need.

Examples of closed ended questions are:

                Do you agree?

                Does that make sense?

                Do you have any more questions?

I realize that some of this is elementary; the truth is that far too many people in sales lose sight of what is important to their customer.  They jump right into what their product offers without even knowing if it will fill their customers’ needs.    By asking too few questions and talking nonstop about their product the sales professional can come off pushy and indifferent to the consumers wants. 

Potential customers want to buy from someone they can trust and believe cares about their needs and desires.  Great sales professionals ask their customers, prospects, and clients plenty of questions to fully determine their personal or companies buying needs.  The most effective way to present their product is as a solution to a customers objectives or goals.  Both of which can be discovered with a few well worded quality questions.  

Higher quality questions allow the sales professional to effectively discuss the features and benefits of their product or service and position it in a way that their prospect can relate to. It solidifies what they are offering as a legitimate solution.  That is all most clients or prospects are interested in.  In other words the question they ask themselves is “Will this solve my problem?”

How do you get better at questioning?  That is simple, practice.  Practice on friends and family or anyone you feel comfortable with.  Seek out those around you that are excelling and find out the type of questions they are asking.  Ask if you can shadow them on a sales call or sit in on a sales meeting.  You can get better at asking good quality questions by expanding your product knowledge and knowing how your product or service can fulfill a want, need, or desire.

It might feel awkward at first but the more you practice the easier it will get.  The easier it gets the easier you will be able to position your company or product as the only solution to your prospects problem.  

The Art of Active Listening

Active listening is according to Wikipedia, “is a communication technique that requires the listener to understand, interpret, and evaluate what they hear. The ability to listen actively can improve personal relationships through reducing conflicts, strengthening cooperation, and fostering understanding.”  In its essence it allows the receiver to pay closer attention to what the sender is communicating.   Most people hear what someone else is saying, it does not mean they are listening.

What does this mean to clients, prospects, and customers?   Sales people are regular people; the vast majority of them are waiting for the other person to stop talking so they can start.  There is a rush to spill all the wonderful advantages their product has without listening and evaluating whether or not it will fit into the customer’s life style.

Active listening will slow down the sales process for the good.  For the customer it means feeling like someone actually cared about their needs (which you should anyway).  We live in a fast paced world, people notice when time and care are paid to them.  Its makes them feel special and makes them want to look to you for their questions.

The benefits for sales professional are twofold: First, it eliminates miscommunications between yourself and your customer by cleaning up the channels of communications and double checking the dialect.  Two, it bond the customer to you in more than a client/sales definition.  They will start to look at you as a friend and a source of good information not just someone set on taking their money.

 To be effective active listening requires three things from sales professionals: Concentrate, Repeat, and Position.

One.  Concentrate on the customer/client/prospect is saying.

Give them your undivided attention, smile and nod to encourage them to keep speaking.  Don’t interrupt.  The longer the customers talks the more they will tell you what you need to know to sell to them.  Interruptions can cause resets, the “what was I just saying,” type of reset that gets a sale off track.  Then you have to basically start at the beginning.  Just listen and absorb what is being said.

Two. Repeat in your words what the customer/client/prospect just said.

You were just given all this information.  It is important to retain it during the sale.   The easiest way, and to make sure you heard everything correctly, is to repeat what they just told you.  “You’re saying you need…?”  By gaining agreement on the want/need/desire it will be easier to position your product or service as the solution the customer has been looking for all along.  It’s a lot easier to connect the dots than to draw a picture on a blank page.

Three. Position your product/service as the answer they have been looking for.

 Now that you have concentrated on the customer and repeated their words back to them the third step is positioning your sale.  There may be a thousand benefits to what you’re selling but you don’t have to worry about telling them all to your customer now.  Since you actively listened to them all you need  to do is pick out three to five benefits that fits your product or service into their life like a missing puzzle piece.  

Example: “Now Mr. Smith you and I agree that … and … is very important to you, correct?  Well my product solves that problem by … etc.”  You get the picture.

In sales there is a huge benefit to individuals that can truly listen and evaluate objectively what the other party is communicating.  It is the ability to not just understand but to be able to rephrase a customer’s wants, needs, and desires, in a manner that gains mutual agreement that solidifies deals.   This is not just good for business but will serve you well in your personal relationships too.  Active listening requires patience that once gained and understood you will wonder how you ever did without.

Goal Oriented Selling

Goals 

Recently I heard a startling static on sales professionals.  An overwhelming majority of career sales people have never read a book on sales or had any training other than what their company provides for them.  I found that shocking since I assumed that most people in sales were like me, interested in getting better, making more money, and developing better communications skills.  So my Goal with this blog is to address Sales, Sales Management, and Technique through bite sized pieces of information that is easy to understand and extremely useful.   I am going to start with what I have found to be a fundamental building block of all sales: Clear Goals.

As sales professionals it is important to set clear goals.  Your goals will help you determine the direction you will need to take with your prospects or clients.  I have been astonished by the amount of sales people I have seen over the years that are given goals or quotas and they don’t bother to break those goals down to what they should be achieving daily or weekly.  They know where they want to go but they have no clear map on how to get there, how to check their progress, or how to improve. 

Goals have to be several things in order to be effective.  

Fist they have to be clear.  It is not enough to just say I want to sell more.  You will need specific numbers with a plan as to how to get to those numbers.  For example, “I want to sell more widgets” is way too vague.  In order to motivate yourself and measure your success you need to know where you are at now.  If you wish to sell ten widgets a month and currently only sell eight a clear and precise goal would be:  “I want to sell ten widgets a month.”

Second it has to be achievable and believable.  Without either of those you might as well not even set a goal.  If you are currently selling eight widgets a month to suddenly state your goal as thirty is as unrealistic as saying “I want to make a billion kagillion dollars” or “fly to the moon by flapping my arms.”   I have not only seen sales people state such preposterous goals but I have seen sales managers assign those type goals (you can’t help if your sales manager is assigning goals that are way too high). 

The argument is always, “Aim for the moon, shoot towards the stars.”  Motivation is derived by being able to accomplish what one sets out to do.  If the goals are set so high they are not achievable.  Without achievement is there is no way to celebrate victory or accomplishment which turns out to be discouraging and lowers the overall moral of the individual or team.  Unless you were born with that attitude most people want to be able to measure their improvement (I am assuming you are one of those people).

Personal Note: I worked for a company whose stated goals on a particular item were 100 a month.  This goal was achievable although not everyone hit this target most were right around where should be.  After a new area sales manager was assigned to the region he set the goal at 25 per day.  Consequently monthly numbers dropped off.

In order to measure improvement I have always like the percentage rule.  It works by assigning an increase of 1 to 10 percent.  This makes almost all goals achievable and believable the two things needed for moral and victory.  Let’s apply it to our widget example.

Last month you only sold 8 widgets. Apply the percentage rule by 10% and you only want to sell .8 more widgets this month, rounded up is 1.  Clearly 9 should be an achievable goal.  By the sixth month you should be selling 13 to 14 widgets and after a year around 20 which is more than 125% more than you were selling at the start of the year. 

Now the example is overly simplistic and but you get the point, which is easier to conceive selling just 1 more widget a month or to go from 8 widgets to 20 in a month.  Incremental improvements are much easier to achieve than massive steps.  There are those among us who can see the impossible and go after it with all their might.  The majority of us need to measure our improvement.  We need to be able to gauge where we are at.  That is why goals are so important in sales. 

Welcome to the Psychology of Sales

Introduction

Hello, my name is Matthew Shank and what do I know about sales?  Well to start off with I never wanted to be in sales, but looking back on my career sales is exactly what I have been in.  I still can’t think of myself as a “sales man” or “sales person” if you want to be politically correct about it.  Instead I have always thought of myself as helping whoever I’m supposed to be selling to thus, I don't sell, I solve problems.

A Brief History

I started in sales right out of high school.  Then I was calling myself a “computer technician.”  A friend and I began working for a guy who owned a popular electronic franchise and had a vision of having an army of well trained computer guru’s who could fix about anything, a kind of “squad” of experts if you get my drift.  There was one problem.  Not enough work for two people.  So one of us had to drum up more work and since I had a better gift for gab that would be me. 

By the time I was done I had talked to dozens of small businesses giving, unrealized to me, dozens of sales presentations consisting of what we could do for their business.  Clients included car dealerships, local banks, book stores, etc.  I was successful at sales and presentations but I was not in sales (so I told myself).

Next I was hired by a communications company to do technical support in a call center but when they found out that I had business to business experience they included business sales calls to my cue (you know voice prompts, Para Espanol Uno, for Business sales two) so I handled internet sales and support for most of the Midwest from Montana to Arizona and later the greater Atlanta metro area. Again I sold to everything from mom and pop stores in nowhere Utah to accounts on Holoman Air Force base and the German Air Force Tactical Training center in New Mexico.

The next step was to go into business for myself as a general contractor (I know what your thinking, “That’s completely different” but my grandfather was in heavy construction and my father was a carpenter so it kind of makes sense, right?).  In addition to selling my Handyman capabilities I also worked with another company that I got the majority of my work from doing Home Expo’s, setting up a company website, creating fliers, prospecting and so on.  Bottom line though was I thought of myself as general contractor and carpenter not sales and marketing.  Construction can make a body old quick so I changed career directions.

I got into the travel industry facilitating and managing corporate meeting all over the world for fortune 500 companies. And wouldn’t you know it the balk majority of these meeting were training for company sales forces.  I can’t get away from sales and believe me I have tried.  I have sat in rooms for countless hours listening to sales strategies, witnessing sales presentations, seeing how fortune 100 companies train and motivate their sales forces.  From finance to pharmaceuticals to technology I have seen it all.  I have heard motivational speeches from some of the biggest names including Colon Powell, Mike Eruzione, Tony Robbins, and so on.

In Conclusion

Now over a decade and a half later I have witnessed many sales professional in many different industries from technology to pharmaceuticals and have realized that every one of them looks at sales in a different manner.  For some it’s a game, for others serious business. Some experience easy success, others struggle day in and day out to define themselves.  I have sat in on countless hours of sales trainings and have coached dozens of individuals and have realized that sales psychology is not an exact science but an art. A person can be given a formula but it is how they execute that formula that determines success.

Currently, in addition to my travel duties,  I work for a fortune 100 company, an electronics retailer.  I was hired into their management training program, but due to my background I found myself not only in sales but training and coaching their sales force.  I took my department from a ranking in the bottom 60% to the top 15% in the nation. Several times we have cracked the top 10% and have been ranked as high as the top 5%. 

Of everything I have learned and experience in sales one thing is constant: Sales is purely in the mind.  Success or failure begins and ends between the ears.  What Henry Ford said could not be more true, “Whether You Think You Can or think you can't, You are Right"

Thus the title of my Blog, “The Psychology of Sales.”