Sales Skills

Questions

Control the listener’s attention

Your questioning skills are at the heart of your selling. We’ll look at the psychology later, but first let’s decide which class of questions are going to be most useful to us.

The most common grouping is that of Open and Closed.

Open questions begin with `Who, what, where, how, when, and why’. It is difficult to answer one of these with a Yes or a No, so they invariably give us a whole range of information. (If someone does answer one of these with a yes or no, then it’s time to make your excuses and leave).

Closed questions might bring you open responses, but best to play safe and only use open ones. And a barrage of closed questions can seem like an interrogation, when what you really want is a conversation.

The rule is: only ask a Closed Question when you KNOW what the answer’s going to be.

The psychology behind questioning is very powerful

Open questions:

• build rapport by involving the customer
• show that you’re interested in them
• prove that you’re there to listen to them, not talk at them
• demonstrate your credibility – anyone ever said to you “That’s a good question”?
• put you in CONTROL (even though the customer, who’s doing the talking, thinks they’re in charge), because you decide what the next question’s going to be

Used with specific words like `decide, plan, going to, intend, agree, mean to, propose, recommend, commit`, they can help us measure the level of the customer’s commitment to us.

Coupled with words like `opinion, react, feel, attitude, concern, think` they can uncover underlying subjective factors influencing the buying decision.

Q. What’s the first thing you do AFTER you’ve asked an Open Question?

A. SHUT UP!

We don’t like silence, and there’s an overwhelming urge to fill it, unless we’re aware of what’s going on. And what’s going on is that if you’ve asked a half-decent question then your customer is thinking about the answer! Of course there’s going to be a silence, it might even be a long one if the question’s a searching one. The last thing you must do is fill it, and anyway, what on earth are you going to say? You might end up by answering your own question – how daft is that?

Get used to The Sound of Silence, it’s a very powerful tool in your sales kitbox.

So, the image of the glib, silver-tongued, smooth-talking salesperson is a poor one. The real professionals invest their time in asking the right questions, and listening to the answers.

Question Matrix