Advanced Questioning Techniques

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The successful sales professional exhibits not only product specific expertise, but is also a master at a number of highly refined selling skills. While the business-to-business selling environment is strategic in nature, the skill sets required are highly tactical. The skill sets are not manipulative or technique oriented; they focus on understanding versus controlling; on the client’s needs versus the product’s features; on the buying cycle versus the selling cycle.

Buying desire is in direct proportion to the intensity of the buyer’s need on one hand and the clarity of the solution represented by your product or service on the other. This technique of taking the process from cold to lukewarm to hot is accomplished by the skillful use of questions that uncover the gap and then expand it to the point where the customer feels impelled to take buying action.

In a sales conversation, the person who asks the questions has the control. The best salespeople are invariable those who confidently and deliberately control the sales process, leading rather than following. The quality of the sales consultant’s questions and his/her ability to ask them in a logical sequence is what demonstrates to the prospect that they are a complete professional, knowing what they are doing every step of the way.

Workshop Agenda

  • Challenges of Selling Today: Quality Parity, Differentiation and Time Poverty
  • Old Model/New Model of Selling: Understanding vs. Persuading
  • Different Types of Questions: Open, Closed, Hypothetical and Penetrating Questions
  • Sales Performance Formula: Sales Efficiency and Sales Effectiveness
  • Stages of the Sales Call and the Buying Cycle
  • Sales Call Outcomes: Advances and Continuations
  • Fact Finding Questions: How Many is Too Many?
  • Problems Our Products Solve: Focus on Problems not Objections
  • Impact of Problem on the Client: Developing Urgency
  • Value of Solving the Implied Need: Insuring Commitment
  • Customized Case Study: Your Sales Executives Approach XYZ Corp.