Sales Blog with Sales Tips

Fact: You need information about the customer or prospect. You’ve got to have it, and plenty of it, in order to sell. It’s especially important when prospecting. What is an effective way to get information from a customer or prospect? By asking well directed questions, of course. What is the best technique for asking these questions? By asking open ended questions.

What is an open ended question? Here’s my definition: An open ended question is any question that requires an explanation to answer. The classic definition of an open ended question is any question that does not require a “yes” or “no” answer. I like my definition better. Why? How much do you really learn when you ask the following “open ended” (classic definition) question, “When will your current contracts expire?” Compare that question to what I would consider a true open ended question, “How are your current contracts being managed?” I think we would all agree that the latter is going to provide much more information.

Open ended questioning techniques are something that I am regularly called on to teach to new and experienced salespeople. I’ve found that most salespeople, new and experienced, are very deficient in their open ended questioning abilities. Fact is, they can hardly even give an example in many cases.

So, what’s so great about open ended questions? Two things. Open ended questions get you a lot more information to every question that you ask and they help to build the relationship with the prospect or customer. Getting people to talk and explain is a great way to start building a relationship and to get more information.

I get a lot of sales calls each week and almost every one of them is nothing but a series of closed ended questions. It’s unbelievably annoying and the salesperson learns little. Here’s how they almost always go.

Are you in charge of sales training?
Who do you report to?
Do you buy outside training content?
What did you last purchase?
Do you anticipate buying any outside training content in the next six months?
Do you anticipate buying any outside training content in the next 12 months?
Can I contact you again in three months?
Is this a good number to reach you?
What is your email?

You get the idea; they are all closed ended questions. The salesperson on the other end of the line not only hasn’t learned anything, but they’ve annoyed me instead of building a relationship. Think of the difference it would have made if they had asked, “How is your sales training program organized?”

Actively asking open ended questions to your prospects and customers will yield more information and help to build the relationship. The key is to practice this extremely important sales skill; you are probably more rusty than you think. Of the truly top tier sales professionals that I have had the pleasure of working with over the years, I am convinced that one of the key reasons for their success is their finely tuned ability to ask open ended questions.

In my last post we talked about the two primary things we need to get from prospects. The first thing is information and the second is relationship. A relationship with the prospect is almost always going to have to be established before they will buy from you. Unfortunately, relationships take time and we don’t have a lot of time as sales professionals with ridiculously high sales budgets to meet.

Virtually every study that has ever been done (and there have been many) shows that on average it takes about six contacts with a prospect before they start buying from you. Do you honestly think you have worn down the prospect with your repeated phone calls and appointments with them and that is why they start to buy from you? Do you think it’s just your fantastic persistence that is doing the trick? This is only partially true. The real fact is that you have created a relationship with the prospect over an average of six contacts. People buy from people they are comfortable with and that they feel they can trust. There is no shortcut for this.

Instead of thinking of prospecting as a “numbers” game where you need to wear down the prospect, and yourself, think of it as a relationship game. Every type of contact you have with the prospect is helping to build the relationship with the prospect. Focus on relationship building and information gathering when prospecting. Prospecting is more than just seeing how many prospects you can call and how many times you can call each one before they start to buy.

There are two things that we are trying to obtain when we are talking with prospects. There are actually many things we are trying to get, but there are two that stand out. The first thing is information. That’s right, just plain information. You aren’t going to sell that prospect unless you know a lot of things about them (e.g., budgets, product fit, decision makers, timeframes, competition, etc.). This is especially true if you are selling in a consultative environment.

My daughter, for better or worse, has followed in my footsteps and has started her career in sales and marketing. She is selling big ticket services to her customers. It was a fun surprise recently when one of her prospects just happened to be a company where I had worked many years ago. She was smart enough to get with me for the “scoop” before her first meeting. She went into that first call fully armed with information that might have taken her months to get through her own efforts. By using good sales skills and the information she had gained she was able to quickly turn that prospect into a profitable customer. The power of information in sales is everything.

What if you don’t have the advantage of “inside information” with a prospect? You will need to gain information about the prospect the old fashioned way, discovery. Researching the prospect, asking good open ended questions and getting to the right people are ways to get the information you need. The more information you have, the better.

The best investment of your time with prospects, at least initially, is getting information about them. Don’t concern yourself too much with things like getting them collateral material and inviting them to your trade show booth, at least not at first. The foundation of a realistic approach to a prospect is information. The salesperson with the most information about the prospect is almost always the one that will win the business.

Scripting. If you have spent any time in telemarketing then you know all about scripting. Scripting in sales is exactly what its name implies, a script. The employer provides the salesperson with the exact words to say when they are talking to a customer or prospect. Typically the scripts apply to outbound telemarketers, but you see them in all phases of the sales cycle and in all types of selling environments.

I think it is without a doubt one of the worst things to ever come out of sales training. Scripting is really only a slight improvement on automated calling machines. The problem with scripting is that it wrongly assumes the following:

1. That every customer or prospect is the same.
2. That the salesperson’s personality must be suppressed at all costs.
3. That the salesperson that was just hired is not smart enough to put together a dialogue with the customer or prospect.
4. That the customer or prospect is always 100% predictable.
5. That the customer or prospect will actually not know that the salesperson is reading from a script. Think of those scripted telemarketing calls you get at home.
6. That the salesperson will really be able to shine and be comfortable when reciting someone else’s words.

One argument for scripting is that it’s difficult to find salespeople that are good enough to navigate the sales process without scripting. Here’s a response to that argument; spend more money to get better sales people and train them better. This will result in a much more effective sales force. In short, even with fewer people your total sales will probably skyrocket.

Does the basic idea of scripting have any merit? Well, yes. Just don’t write a dialogue word for word. I have no problem with sales managers and trainers providing guidelines for a sales dialogue, but don’t remove the salesperson and their personality from the selling process.