Persuasion Sales

Questions

Did you know that asking questions of your customers is one of the most powerful ways to persuade them? In fact asking questions is the most powerful way to change anybody’s focus.

Simply by asking a question we can control a person’s focus and we can direct them to look or focus on one particular issue that we want them to think about.

People are asking questions in their heads all the time, to be able to think is in fact the process of asking questions and giving answers to those questions.

Think about it at the moment you are asking a number of questions inside your head. You are asking “is what Sam saying true or not? Does it really fit with my experiences in the world or doesn’t it?” All those are questions. You are continually asking questions.

Your customers are continually asking questions when they see you as well. The types of questions they are asking themselves about you are questions like “can I trust this person? Does this sales person have my best interests at heart? Are they trying to scare me? It is something that will really work like they say it does? Is it something that is good value for money?” All these questions are going on in their head as you are talking to them. So what I want you to do is to start asking your customers questions that control their focus.

So lets look at some of the questions that you can ask them. 1. You can ask them about their wants and needs, you can find out what they are really after, not particularly what product they are after but what benefits they are after.

In the last article we talked about benefits vs. features so stop and ask what are the challenges they are facing at the moment and what are the benefits they have been are looking for in a particular product? Remember people buy solutions they don’t buy products, people are looking for solutions to their problems. The reason the customer has come to you is because they believe that they have a problem that maybe you have a solution to, so ask them questions what their problems are, what their current challenges are and direct their focus to how your product could be the solution for those problems and challenges.

The second type of question is an important one; I have talked a lot about rapport. The second sets of questions are questions for building rapport. It is simply where we ask question where we know the know the answer that we want, we want them to say ‘yes’ or to say ‘me too’, For example if I ask you the question have you ever been using the computer and you just felt that its so annoying because it was so slow and you wish you could find a faster way? Now almost everybody who has used a computer has felt that sometime, by asking that type of question you are building rapport because you are basically saying that this is what I’ve felt like in the past and what the listener is thinking is “me too, this guy is like me”.

Remember when we covered the section about building rapport and I talked about being like someone makes that person likes you. So asking rapport questions can also be ways of finding out information. For example, we want to find out information like what sort of industry the person’s in. You might want to find out which particular company the person work at. All these things that will help us in the long run to get rapport ones we know them we can then match experience.

The Third type of question are questions for putting people into a particular state. Remember we talked about the state is made up of two parts, it consists of physiology and focus so this particular question is a question to control their focus and often we use this kind of question to bring some hurt to the sales situation.

We want them to feel a little bit of pain with their current situation, with the problem that they are experiencing, so you might ask questions like “gee! How bad is it that you have to sit there for fifteen minutes waiting for your computer? Wow what other things could you do if you weren’t sitting there waiting for your computer?” All these questions are ways of getting the person to focus on the fact that they have got some pain there that they have got a problem and it also makes them more open to our solution when we go on later to present our solutions in the form of a particular product or idea.

The fourth type of question that we can ask is about finding out a person’s objection before they actually come up as an objection. So here we can actually ask them something and get information by finding out whether this is going to be a big problem or not.

The good thing is that it’s not an objection at this stage. they haven’t raised it as an objection, we might ask them something such as “I see you are looking at the computers. Is the budget a concern for you?” By using a question like that we can find out if the person is looking for a low, mid or a high level computer. If they say that yes it is my budget is $2000 to buy this computer so we know that anything above $2000 will meet with resistance and its one of the rejections that we need to prepare for later on in the sales situation.

So go through those four types of questions again and think about how they will apply to your particular sales situation. Questions are such a powerful tool that you have got to learn how to use them consistently and fluently. What I tell people in my seminars is to write a lists of them. You really should be making a list of questions that you can ask people that you can gather information, to build rapport and to get ready for possible objections. Use this list of questions on a daily basis in your sales situations and you will find that your results improve dramatically.