Sales Leadership with Jim Pancero
Sales Leadership with Jim Pancero
Do your reps understand (and use) the 3 basic structures of asking questions?
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Effective questioning skills are the foundation of all persuasive communications. There are three questioning structures your team needs to be utilizing:
1st - Ask open-ended questions then moving to more close-ended questions. Open-ended questions (“What are your business goals for this year?”) encourage your buyer to talk. Asking Closed-ended questions (“How many employees do you have?”) ask about specific points with much briefer responses.
2nd - Make it easier for your buyers to say yes by first asking “Big Picture” questions (“Which model do you think will work best for you?”) before moving onto more “Detailed” questions (“What color do you want?”).
3rd questioning structure to improve is to focus on your buyer, their pain and their needs, instead of just talking about how and why your stuff is so great.
Today’s video talks about these three structures of asking questions…and how, by improving your team’s questioning skills, they can sell even more!
Are your salespeople taking full advantage of the questioning structures available to help them be more persuasive today? Hi, I'm Jim Pancero, helping you and your team be more effective in sales today. And one of the ways we can do that is to make sure that our salespeople have the maximum impact with the questioning they're asking. Because questioning and selling is the key to being able to be persuasive and winning business. There are three structures you might want to make sure your team is aware of and they're actually implementing. They've been around for a while. Problem is, most people don't talk to them as much anymore. And the three structures, the first one is to make sure that the questioning structure you follow starts with open-ended questions moving to close-ended. Open-ended questions are, so what are your goals for this year with your business? where a closedended question would be asking a specific point of how many employees do you have, how many products do you use, how many square foot feet do you have in your building, any of those kind of questions. The second set of questioning to talk about is going from big picture to detail. We want to start off talking in more grandiose terms, but then getting down to specific details of color, of choice, of models in the questioning process. By doing in that order, we start the customer talking early with the idea then they're more responsive and likely to answer our later questions that are very specific into the details. And the third goal is to make sure that our questioning is focusing on customers and their needs, not on us and what we have and why it's so great. The reality of selling today is success in selling is based on focusing on pain and bringing solutions to that pain by understanding the challenges the customers are having. What can we do to make sure that your people are following more of the structures of questioning to make them more consistent in front of a customer even when they don't have that much time? Because if we can improve our questioning, we're going to sell even more.