Chapter 12

Using Smart Questions

Sales Rep: “Boss, I can lead them to water, but I can’t make them drink.”

Manager: “You don’t want to make them do anything. Just help them realize they are thirsty.”

You now have a prospect on the phone whose interest has been piqued by your Smart opening statement. You have accomplished your opening statement objectives to:

• Put them in a positive, receptive state of mind.
• Move them to the questions.

Yikes! They’re waiting. What now?

What you do not want to do is to begin talking about your product, service, yourself, or your company. That would be presenting. Do it here, and it will create objections. Yet, it is what many sales reps do that causes calls to fail.

Instead, we will ask questions that serve several purposes:

• To help us better understand the prospect’s possible needs, problems, pains, and desires.
• To move them further into a state of mind where they better understand, see, and feel their needs, problems, pains, and desires.
• To provide us with the prospect’s own words and terms they use to describe their needs and problems, which we will then later use in our recommendation.

Let’s look at what to ask, what to avoid—and what to do when we get answers.

Use Your Possible Benefits to Create Questions

If you have a list of benefits that you are supposed to recite on calls, you may want to throw it away right now. Every time I see one of these goofy things, it reminds me of what I shared with you earlier in the section on your Possible Value Propositions: “A benefit is only a benefit if the person hearing it perceives it to be a benefit . . . at that very instant.”

Otherwise, a benefit is nothing more than something you think they should care about, and what you think is worthless without their concurrence.

But actually—don’t throw that benefit list away. We will build on it and use it to compile a question list, which will determine if the benefit indeed is meaningful. Here is the process:

Let’s use an example.

Smart Caller: “Tell me about your plumbing department and what lines you are stocking.”j

Then, he’d ask a few more questions about who the dealer buys from, his regular ordering patterns, and how much inventory the dealer stocks. Again, knowing this information in advance helps; it is easier to prepare the questions when you know the answers. I know this will not always be possible, but you can see how beneficial it is when you do get that information first.

In any event, he’d then pose an assumptive problem question: one that assumes the prospect experiences the problem and asks him or her to talk about it. For example:

There are several strategies and techniques at work in this process. We’ll explore those to make sure your questions elicit the best information.

Not All Questions Are Good Ones: How to Use Assumptive Problem Questions

Not all questions are good questions; some actually lead us to a dead end. Try to avoid asking questions like these of prospects and customers:

These questions force the listener to do too much thinking. They assume that the prospect was just sitting there pondering a problem, when your call just happened to arrive at that moment so they can vent their frustration! Fat chance. Besides, the words problems, needs, and satisfied are vague. If their problem was major—or if they were unsatisfied to the point of discomfort—they would have acted on it by now.

This is not to say that they may not be dissatisfied or have a problem; they very likely could. They just aren’t aware of it at the second you ask them, or they don’t perceive it as being an immediate concern. Your job is to help them realize it—you don’t tell them, though.

Instead, you ask assumptive problem questions. These are questions that assume rather than outright ask whether your prospect has a problem and gets them to think about it, visualize it, and describe it. Let’s say, for example, that you know your competitor has slower delivery times than you, and that you carry time-sensitive products. Assume they have the problem, and instead of asking your prospect if they have any delivery issues, paint a picture of the results of poor delivery: “What happens when you have had to stop the production line waiting for a parts delivery?”

Now the same person who says they don’t have a problem is flashing back to the day she caught heat from her boss for paying people to stand around—all because of one replacement part that didn’t arrive.

How to Create Assumptive Problem Questions

Here’s a simple way to structure these questions: Make a list of all the situations regarding loss or pain that could result by not using your product. Then, frame questions that very explicitly paint an emotional portrait of those feelings. For example:

Not: “Do you ever have a need for temporary help?”

Try: “How often do you find your department with more work than you have time to complete it in, and trouble staring at you if you don’t meet the deadline?”

Not: “Are you happy with your advertising?”

Try: “When have you spent money on any promotions where the results didn’t bring the phone calls you expected?”

You can begin these questions with

The Loaded Benefit Question

Similarly, this is a question that implies a benefit of your product or service by stating a problem you’ve solved for someone else. It then asks prospects about their experience regarding the situation or predicament. For example:

This type of question paints the picture of inconvenience in listeners’ minds, and they are better equipped to visualize and feel it. If and when they agree, you have the opportunity to tell them how you can come to the rescue. The real power here lies in using a third-party example; it’s much better than blatantly telling prospects that they have probably experienced the problem you can solve.

Practice the Iceberg Theory of Questioning with the Next Questions to Get Better Information

Several years ago, I coined the term the iceberg theory of questioning to illustrate what we need to do on calls to get the best information. When you see an iceberg glistening in the water, what do you really see? You see just the tip, only a small portion of the iceberg. The bulk of it is below the water level.

The same is true when you ask a question: The first answer you hear is the tip of the iceberg. Everything below the water level is the good stuff, the information you really can use, the reason behind the initial answer. People do not buy because of the first answer they give; they buy because of the reasons behind it. The problem is that many salespeople ask the first questions and quit after they have the tip information without bothering to ask the next question, the one that provides the information below the water level, which will tell them why, precisely, the prospects or customers say what they do. And that’s the information we need to help them buy.

The next question is the one that many fail to ask but that has the greatest payoff. Remember the old detective TV show Columbo? He always asked, “One more question.” Let’s look at a sales rep who does not ask the next question.

Sales Rep: “What criteria will you use in awarding the proposal?”

Prospect: “We’re going to heavily weight the on-time delivery projections.”

Sales Rep: “Oh, let me tell you about our performance in that area.”

Instead, let’s look at the next question that lowers the water level on the iceberg:

Sales Rep: “Please tell me why that’s the most important factor, and what you’re looking for.”

In the first scenario, the rep jumped in and presented prematurely, talking about what he wanted to discuss. And after the next question, he would probably ask a few more next questions to dig deeper, magnify the pain in the prospect’s mind, and gather better information. This would, in turn, help him make a laserlike presentation that would stir more emotions—and have a better chance at getting the sale.

Here’s another example: A sales rep for a human resources personality assessment testing service finds out through some social engineering that the company he’s calling on wants to implement employee personality testing for new hires. In his questioning, he asks, “Why are you looking to do employee testing?”

The prospect responds, “We feel that we need to do a better job of screening our applicants so that we don’t make hiring mistakes.”

The sales rep—who has been selling this service for several years and feels he has been there and done that—thinks he has a grasp on the situation and begins a presentation on the testing service.

The prospect responds by saying, “Okay, that sounds interesting. Send me out whatever information you have, and we’ll give it some consideration.”

The sales rep complies. He schedules a follow-up for seven days later. He keeps getting voice mail on repeated attempts, with no return calls from the prospect. The cycle continues. And oh, by the way, this experienced sales rep has a problem with lots of prospects in his pipeline and complains about prospects not buying and how he can’t reach them.

Let’s look at another sales rep who knows how to lower the water level and learn more of the reasons behind what people say.

Prospect:“We feel that we need to do a better job of screening our applicants so we that don’t make hiring mistakes.”

Sales Rep:“Tell me more.”

Prospect:“Well, we’ve hired a few people over the past year that just didn’t work out. They seemed good in the initial interviews, but apparently we were missing something.”

Sales Rep:“What do you mean?”

Prospect:“They were able to talk a good game, but when it came time to actually do the work, they lacked what it took.”

Sales Rep:“That’s not uncommon. What does it take to do well at your organization?”

Prospect:“We need people in our customer service positions who can handle repetitive tasks all day long without becoming bored, remain calm under pressure from irate callers, and be able to think quickly on their feet to resolve problems that involve some math calculations.”

Sales Rep:“I believe we can help you with that. Tell me a bit more about your past experiences. About how many people have you hired that didn’t work out?”

Prospect:“Almost embarrassed to say . . . probably 10 out of 20.”

Sales Rep:“Wow. Any idea of what it costs to hire and train someone for that position?”

Prospect:“I hate to even think about it. After newspaper advertising, our interviewing, two weeks of product training and their wages, it’s got to be a few thousand dollars per person.

As you saw, the sales rep pretty much got out of the prospect’s way as he replied to the prospect’s statements with the next question each time, continuing to lower the water level on the iceberg.

Keep your prospects talking about their needs, desires, and concerns; you want the real reasons behind their initial answers to surface. The first important step in achieving this is discipline. Resist the tendency to jump in and present; instead, use instructional statements such as:

And when they touch on a need, embellish it, quantify it, and have them discuss its implications (particularly the financial ones).

More on Quantifying Needs, Pains, Problems, and Desires

A goal of your next questions should be to attach numbers to pains, problems, needs, and desires. Whenever you can, prompt them to provide you with details for situations like:

• How much money they are losing because of their problem.
• How much extra time it takes to perform a task and the related pain that causes.
• How much more it costs them to get products delivered from another supplier.
• How much larger their sales numbers could be with a better solution.

It is much easier for you to show a potential return on investment, build value, and preempt any looming price objection when you have information like this.

(In their book The Dollarization Discipline: How Smart Companies Create Customer Value . . . and Profit from It, authors Jeffrey J. Fox and Richard C. Gregory go into great detail on this topic. If you are serious about sales, I highly recommend this book.)

Avoid Questions That Scream “I Just Picked Up an Old Sales Book”

There are some questions that have been around forever and really have been worn out to the point where they sound cheesy. For example: “If you could wave a magic wand, what would you want?”

Uh, I dunno. How about you off the phone?

Here’s a better alternative that accomplishes the same information objective: “What would you like to get that you might not have now?”

Another tired question: “What keeps you up at night?” While the premise here is solid—identifying their major pain—the technique is, well, a technique.

Better alternative: “What’s the top concern you’re facing right now as it relates to____?”

Questions to Learn about the Decision-Making Hierarchy and Process

It should go without saying that you do not want to ask: “So, are you the decision maker there?” But what do you say to learn who ultimately makes the decision to buy what you sell? I like questions like these:

Asking about the decision-making process depersonalizes it, which can make it less threatening to answer for the prospect:

Determine What Annoys Them

Who isn’t overworked and underpaid? Certainly not your prospects and customers, and they’re always interested in ways they can ease their workload, especially clearing their docket of those time-gobbling mundane tasks. Find out what sticks in their craw and annoys them. Ask questions like:

A Questioning Mistake

A mistake I see reps make is asking questions like “Did you know that we offer____?” or “Are you aware that we sell____?” They use these questions during the fact-finding phase of the call and assume that these are actually good questions when, in fact, they are more like presentations. The problem occurs when you present before getting adequate information—because you run the risk of talking about details the listener doesn’t care about. For example, asking, “Did you know we offer six different lines of printers?” could elicit a great big yawn and a “So what?” from the listener. A better question would be “What features do you require in printers?”

Clarify the Fuzzy Phrases

One of my many pet peeves is when someone says, “We’ll have to talk about that sometime,” “At some point, we’ll need to get together and discuss . . .,” or “Let’s get together sometime and go over . . .”

If it’s something that needs to be done or discussed, and if I want to do it, I’ll always say, “Okay, let’s do it now.” Otherwise—and you know this—it isn’t going to happen. The fuzzy phrase strikes again.

When you hear a statement that is vague or wishy-washy, ask for clarification.

Fuzzy Phrase:“Let’s stay in touch.”

Response:“Great idea. So you eventually plan to move forward with this? When?”

Fuzzy Phrase:“We’ll give it some consideration.”

Response:“Great! Which aspects will you weight most heavily?”

Fuzzy Phrase:“I’ll look it over, and we’ll go from there.”

Response:“On what criteria will you base your decision?”

Fuzzy Phrase:“I’ll bounce the idea around.”

Response:“Good. Does that mean you personally are sold on it?”

The Quality of Your Question Determines the Quality of Your Answer

Want better information? Review your call recordings, and analyze the questions you ask. Avoid using questions like:

Think about if a customer answered yes or no to those questions. You wouldn’t really know any more than before you asked. Instead, get better information by asking for specific information: “How often has that happened in the past three months?” “What has been the impact on your department in terms of increased sales?”

Don’t Ask What They Like Best about Their Present Supplier

An oft-suggested response when a prospect says, “We’re happy with our present supplier” is “What do you like best about them?” I suggest not wording it that way, and my reasoning for this was formed while listening to a particular sales rep ask that question on a call. The prospect went into a long explanation of why his supplier was the greatest company ever formed, how he would never leave them, and how their service was excellent. He sounded like he was becoming a bit weepy in his adulation.

Since the intent of the question is to find out their ideal requirements and desires from a vendor, let’s ask in different ways:

Ask About Them

For most people, their favorite subject is them. When you get them talking about themselves, their jobs, their personal experiences, fears, wants, needs, and desires, you not only acquire valuable sales information, you position yourself as an interesting person. All because you show interest in them as a person.

My friend and fellow sales trainer, Jim Meisenheimer, www.meisenheimer.com, wrote the book, The 12 Best Questions to Ask Customers. One of those questions asks about them, personally: “What are your responsibilities?” Ask that question, sit back, and listen to the valuable information they will provide you about how to sell to them.

Use Benefit Questions Instead of Inane Leading Ones

Many hard-sell salespeople and trainers suggest the use of leading questions to evoke a positive response, such as

Don’t use them. These questions are inane, and they put listeners on the spot. They’re backed into a corner where they look and feel like an idiot unless they answer the way the questioner wants them to. You might as well just say, “Of course you don’t want to be stupid, do you?”

However, the premise behind the inane questions—to prompt prospects to agree that they might be interested in what you have to offer—shouldn’t be discarded. One way to accomplish this is to present a beneficial situation from another customer’s perspective, and then ask prospects if that appeals to them. For example:

Using questions according to this formula is less threatening than the inane questions and opens up the conversation to deeper questioning and a further examination of their specific needs.

Economize Your Questions

Don’t use two or three questions when one will do. For example,

Here’s another:

Smart Calling Action Steps

What else will you commit to do as a result of this chapter?