The simple act of asking questions can transform how you interact with your clients. Lisa Wight shares just how powerful she believes questions are.
Have you ever been to a sales meeting where the person who is trying to sell you something just jumps straight into their sales pitch before asking you one single question? They know nothing about your business, what you’re trying to achieve, what you’re looking for or what challenges you need to solve. They just go straight into telling you about themselves, as if everybody listening is exactly the same.
The mark of a good salesperson, of course, is someone who listens before they speak. We all probably appreciate that on paper. But when it comes to putting it into practice, it can be hard to stop talking and start listening. So here are my top tips.
Frustrations
I’ve sat there so many times where no interest has been given to me at all, despite the fact this person is trying to convince me to buy their products or services. The truth is this turns prospects off.
When this happened to me recently, it was about 15 minutes into the meeting when the man finally finished his spiel. He then turned to me and said, “But anyway, Lisa, tell me about you.” But by now he’d frustrated me so much.
All I could think was, if this is how he behaves in a sales meeting, how’s he going to be if we actually work together? Is he going to be making assumptions? Will he ever check in with me? Ultimately, by making it all about him, he had completely lost me. He’d lost me a few minutes into it. And even by the time he finally asked his first question, all I could think was there’s really no point in me wasting my time now because I don’t want to work with you. I’d rather find someone else who I think I’m going to have a better working relationship with.
Business Coaches
Listening to and caring about your prospects is obviously best practice for anyone in sales. But for business coaches, the decision to work with you is very personal. More so than a lot of other decisions we make in a business.
That means that in your sales meetings you really have to make a connection with your prospect. You have to really understand them – and understand them quickly – in order to show them that you are interested in them, that you are credible, and that you are going to have a profitable and positive working relationship.
And how do you do that? You ask questions.
Questions
The first step, before you tell them anything about how you can help them, is to find out what help they’re looking for. It seems so obvious, but when we’re under pressure to make a sale it can be so hard to get it right.
I advise that you ask them clarifying questions on such things as what does their business do. Who do they serve? What are they trying to achieve? What’s the pain point for them? Then even move on to ask things like what keeps them up at night. What are the challenges they’re dealing with?
One of the most important questions to ask, maybe after you’ve established a lot of the basic foundations, is how can I be of service to you. Maybe don’t ask them it bluntly. Instead, think to yourself: if I want them to leave this meeting with value from me, how can I deliver that in this conversation? Can I make an introduction to someone? Can I recommend a book or a podcast or a TED talk? What can I do so that they leave this interaction in a positive way?
Here comes the most powerful bit: when you’ve asked questions and listened to a lot of information, you can then tweak what you want to say to them. When it gets to the point in the conversation where you need to tell them about what you do, you have the right information to tailor what you say, highlighting the areas of your service that you know would help with the challenges and the pain points that they’ve described.
You can make sure that everything you tell them really hits on their pain buttons. From stories to statistics, and anything else you want to share, you can make it very relevant to what they’re going through.
For example, if they told you they were struggling with cash flow, you could share a story of a client you’ve worked with where you’ve guided them through the cash flow process and as a result they’ve gone from having a net profit of 5% to 35%. That would be incredibly effective, but you couldn’t do that if you didn’t know what challenges they were facing.
My Advice
Asking questions shows that you care. It gives you all of the information you need to be able to show the client or the prospect how you can best serve them. It enables you to share the right stories and the right statistics that builds your credibility.
If it helps, here are the top five questions I’d always ask in sales meetings. Feel free to use these, or why not craft your own?
- What keeps you up at night?
- What obstacles are you trying to overcome?
- What’s the big goal that you’re trying to achieve in the next 18 to 24 months?
- What’s getting in your way?
- If you could wave a magic wand what would you have in your life?
Moving Forward
Questions aren’t just relevant in sales meetings. Questions are vital through the whole process of working with your client. hubbix is built on the idea that questions have a lot of power. The system has hundreds of pre-loaded questions within it broken down into five key markets. This helps you to shape your client meetings in a really efficient way, but still makes sure that you are getting the information you need from clients in order to support them effectively.
If you’d like to find out more about how hubbix could transform your client meetings, drop us an email to find out more, or why not start your 30 day free trial to give it a go yourself?