Too often, sales and marketing professionals focus on having the right answer, instead of considering the right question. In fact, the use of effective questioning applies to all phases of the sales process and is a fundamental element of successful marketing and sales campaigns.
Once a meeting is set, the first challenge salespeople face is establishing rapport with a customer. Many are trained to immediately and boldly establish their expertise or experience to impress the customer. But with the explosion of Internet sources, information about a product or service is fast becoming a commodity. What will remain most valuable is the human ability to discern customers’ unique requirements, identify the best solutions, and ensure everything is delivered and performs as promised.
Opening up an honest discussion and listening to a customer’s problems, needs and concerns is the foundation on which all successful sales opportunities are built. Your product or service cannot meet the customer’s needs unless you know what they are. In fact, customers often admit, after they have made a purchase decision, that the winner understood them better and the product or service chosen most closely met their specific needs.
Whether the customer’s view is factually accurate is irrelevant. How the customer felt will always determine the outcome.
The fact is neither your expertise, experience, nor your products or services satisfy all customers’ needs. If they did, customers would be calling you.
Saying, “I may be able to help you, if I can understand your needs and objectives” is not only more honest, but it also places the focus on what is most important, the customer’s needs. This approach pre-supposes nothing and establishes the importance of asking questions to understand what the customer is looking for and whether the salesperson and the products or services he represents can best meet their needs. It is also the great “leveler” for new salespeople who must confront an array of experienced and comfortable competitors.
No one has a monopoly on listening and learning, and it is what customers value most.
Questions are also valuable later in the sales process, because they are one of the best tools for handling the sales person’s other major challenge – objections. Anticipating likely objections and turning them into questions is one of the most effective ways of building customer confidence in you.
It was once said that being able to step into another’s shoes and see what he sees is the first step in effective communications. Asking the customer whether you correctly understand what they are concerned about and what they seek to achieve places you squarely in their shoes, figuratively putting you and the customer on one side of the table and the problem on the other side.
You are truly exploring “whether you may be able to help them.”
Questions are a key tool in identifying and resolving objections, because they seek to understand, not overcome.
On the strategy level, the value of questions is one of the keys to sustainable marketing and sales success. Many advertising and marketing strategies use the power of questions, often building their market position on a fundamental question customers are asked to answer. From McDonald’s “Super-size it?” to Ameritrade’s “Are you ready to declare your independence?” many national brands and services use questions as a way of establishing competitive differentiation.
As authors Jack Trout and Al Reis described in their first hit business book, “Positioning,” “mind share” is often more important for strategists to consider than market share. Trout and Reis explain that the mind can focus on only one product at a time. Thus, the company that dominates mind share will ultimately command market share.
The best way to achieve this leading position is to ask the questions that will ensure your product or service emerges as the best answer.
Questions are so effective because the customers reach conclusions themselves; they are in control, not being told what to conclude.
Presenting your customers with questions that clarify and confirm their priorities often have the effect of reinforcing what they value most.
By clarifying and reinforcing value in this way, higher quality, and often higher cost, products may become the customer’s preferred solution. Why? Because the customer has decided what matters most and what best fits their needs.
Catchy marketing copy, innovative pricing and packaging tactics or testimonials from other customers are unlikely to sway a customer if their core values and needs are not specifically understood and addressed. Establishing you own customer “mind share” by developing and posing the questions you believe the customer should be asking of all competitors is a powerful strategy, because if you sell the question, you are often already in the lead to sell the answer.
From day-to-day sales tactics to sales and marketing strategy, selling the question is a powerful approach to success. It also ensures your product or services are the best answers to real needs, not solutions in search of a problem.
Christopher B. Coyle is senior director, bid strategy and planning for Providence-based GTECH Corp., a global provider of technology and services for the regulated gaming markets.
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