Time for a Sales Refresh? Growth Starts With Selling!

ByMatt

There is a scene from the movie The 40 Year Old Virgin where the main character is given the advice that when trying to flirt successfully he should always answer a question with a question.

This being a movie, and the character in question being Steve Carrell of The Office TV series fame, he of course takes it to extremes and turns a normal conversation into something ridiculous and entertaining to watch even though it would never happen in real life.

Having seen this again recently though it reminded me of one of the tenets of selling and how powerful it is and how it can be easy to forget to follow through on the idea.

When you are speaking with a potential client, attempting to sell them your product or service, it is helpful to remember that the person asking the questions is generally the one in charge.

If you are selling house painting, for example, the conversation could happen two ways:

First Version: The potential customer asks “How long does it normally take to paint the outside of a house this size”? You might then respond, well normally we can get it done in a week, sometimes a little faster, or sometimes it takes longer depending on the color you selected or the number of coats you want. But we’re busy right now, so it will be two weeks before we can start.

At this point, the customer might be comparing your answer with other quotes they’ve gotten or else some internal expectations they have or an external deadline they’re dealing with that you don’t know about.

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Second Version: The potential customer asks, “How long does it normally take to paint the outside of a house this size”? You respond with, do you have a particular timeline you’re looking to meet? And they say, “We have guests coming to stay in two weeks and we’d like to have it done by next Friday if possible.” To which you can respond, if I can give you a quote that works and also guarantee if you sign today, we can get the job done by your deadline, will I have earned your business?

By asking a question to determine their need and then asking a follow-up question they will need to address with either a positive response or additional objection, you have set yourself up for a much greater likelihood of a sale.

Not only have you uncovered one of their key criteria for buying (meeting their deadline) that they hadn’t shared but you’ve asked in a way that either gets a positive response or asks them to share any other reason they still wouldn’t be ready to say yes.So, when was the last time you reviewed your sales process and made sure you’re closing as well as you should?

How to Improve Your Sales Success With Questions

Like many business owners, much of the sales effort likely falls to you. If you’ve been doing it a while you probably feel pretty comfortable doing it but you may not have evaluated your process lately or you may never have been as good as you could be if you spent some more time learning to do this better.

This may also be the case if you have other people in the business who do some selling or all the selling. It’s a learnable skill but if you’ve never been trained or never had enough training or the right training, you may not be having as much success as you could.

Either way, if you are working hard to bring in leads but then not converting them as well as you could you’re not going to be able to grow as much as you otherwise would.

One of the easiest ways to improve your selling process is to add more questions into the mix and be ready to ask specific follow-up questions to questions that potential buyers may ask you. The natural response of course is to just provide an immediate answer but that might not address their real concern or it might let them steer the conversation away from where you want it.

The best way to practice this is to come up with a list of the most common objections, questions, and topics that customers ask and then figure out the best responses. Then do some mock sales interactions with one person playing the role of the customer and the other person doing the selling.

As you work through these it becomes more and more automatic to ask the right questions to get to the heart of their buying motivation and be prepared to address their true concerns and objectives rather than just answering questions and hoping you have the right answers.

If your selling gets better, you can then make the most of every single interaction with your sales leads and grow the business faster with fewer leads needed and without having to compete just on price (because price is rarely the only thing that buyers buy on if they are properly sold!).

Everything in your business starts with a sale so make sure you’re making the most of your sales opportunities by being as good as possible at selling! 

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