37 B2B Sales Questions

Nothing is quite as important when you’re talking to a prospect as the questions you ask. Here are 37 customer-focused, non-manipulative, open-ended questions. I've included a mix of problem-resolution questions, agitation questions, solution questions, needs-based questions, feature-benefit questions, objection testing questions, and even a few feeling questions. They're all designed to help you gain a sense of what your prospect is looking to accomplish.  Of course, some of them require building more trust and rapport than others. And some might not be relevant to your environment. But, using a few of these will definitely help you understand exactly how to present your offering…

Here they are, in no particular order:

1. What do you like about your current supplier?
2. What kind of time frame are you working within?
3. What would solving your problem mean to you personally?
4. If we were able to solve your problem, what would this mean to your organization?
5. How severely has your department been affected by these problems?
6. How do you describe your company to your prospects?
7. How do you describe your company to your friends?
8. When will you be ready to implement a solution?
9. How much support for addressing this problem do you have from your supervisors?
10. How much support is there from your direct reports?
11. How can I help you gain support?
12. How did you select your current provider?
13. How did you discover your current supplier?
14. How much of your time, each day, is spent working on this project?
15. How much of your time, each day, would you like to spend working on this project?
16. What are some of the major challenges within your business in the past 12 months?
17. What impact have these challenges had on your profits?
18. What impact have these challenges had on your morale?
19. What impact have these challenges had on your success?
20. How receptive is your company to looking at an alternative supplier?
21. How else might we improve your effectiveness?
22. What steps, if any, have you taken to alleviate this problem?
23. What sort of budget do you have in mind?
24. What’s your top priority in approaching this decision?
25. How has your industry been impacted by changes in the economy?
26. How pleased are you with your current level of productivity?
27. What do you mean by that?
28. How broad a search are you conducting for this purchase?
29. How does this problem affect your customers?
30. What will the end-result look like to you?
31. If you were to rank, in order of importance to you, benefit 1, benefit 2, and benefit 3, how would you do that?
32. What will serve as a “deal breaker”?
33. What general expectations do have for your vendors?
34. What’s your top priority in approaching this decision?
35. What implications does this decision have for your career?
36. How would you like to move ahead?
37. What is your deadline for making this decision?

We have been training salespeople on proper questioning for more than thirty years. We continue that tradition in all of our sales training programs.

- @JebBrooks

For more articles like this, sign up for our free monthly newsletter: