Your prospects probably want two, seemingly contradictory things.

1. They want to feel in complete control of their buying process.
2. They secretly want to be led through their buying process.

In other words, prospects want control and a leader.

Let me give you a personal example. Last year, I was placed in charge of a committee tasked with buying a new healthcare plan for the staff here at The Brooks Group. Admittedly, I’m no expert on buying a corporate healthcare plan. I didn’t really know what I wanted (other than to be sure my coworkers and I were covered), but I certainly didn’t want a salesperson to instruct me. I wanted control and a leader!

How do you, as a salesperson maximize your sales effectiveness in a situation like that? That’s the art of selling.

As our founder (and my father), Bill Brooks said,

“People don’t want to get sold, but they desperately want to buy from people who understand what they want.”

~ You're Working too Hard to Make the Sale

The secret of balancing those two points comes from your ability to effectively understand what your prospects want.

Most salespeople focus on the needs their prospects express. Needs are features-based. They’re things like color, size, output. The need to obtain healthcare coverage is a great example. They’re easily expressed, surface-level requirements.

The salespeople who allow their prospects to maintain control while at the same time leading them, focus on wants. "Wants" are below the surface, they’re much deeper than needs. Often your prospects have trouble expressing them. In my healthcare example, a great salesperson helped me realize that I wanted a plan that helped us recruit great talent and required less of my time to maintain. "Wants" relate directly to the fact that your prospects secretly want to be led.

Here’s another example: The surface reason for needing a new car is to get to and from work. A below-the-surface reason for wanting a convertible are the glances it offers the driver. These wants are not product-specific. After all, a Rolls Royce would also deliver glances to its driver.

Implementing this into your sales efforts is more than sales motivation. Again, it's the art of selling.

Ask yourself these questions about your prospects. What’s the surface need your product or service provides? Now, what’s a deeper want your offering can fulfill? Why would a prospect want what you sell?

• Ego?
• Recognition?
• Reputation?
• Status?
• Savings?
• Budget impact?
• Because their competitor has it?
• Because their competitor doesn’t have it?
• Others...

Then, come up with questions that allow you to understand whether these wants exist. After you uncover them, you must use those questions in your efforts closing the sale.

How have you discovered wants before? What are some wants your prospects have?

-@JebBrooks

I have been thinking a lot about sales questions lately. Here at The Brooks Group, we teach salespeople how to use nine, different types of sales questions.

Here they are:

1. Problem-Resolution Questions.
2. Agitation Questions.
3. Solution- and Feeling-Based Questions.
4. Needs-Based Questions.
5. Feature-Benefit Questions.
6. Objection-Testing Questions.
7. Yes/No Questions.
8. Level-1, -2, and -3 Questions.
9. Silver Bullet Questions.

Of course, virtually anyone can learn a string of questions. That's the science of sales. The art? How to deploy them in a way that allows two things to occur simultaneously:

• Your prospect or customer provides you information and feels as though they're in control.
• You obtain information while actually maintaining control of the buying process.

The success of the IMPACT Selling System lies in its ability to allow prospects to feel like they're leading the process (this is especially important in today's selling environment where customers have more information then ever before) while, at the same time, allowing the salesperson to move the sales interaction forward, toward a conclusion.

Learn how to capitalize on questions in order to move a sales interaction forward by implementing the IMPACT Selling System.

@JebBrooks

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

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The conclusion of good questioning skills. Have you studied up for the second part?

Download audio file (059-Questioning_Skills2.mp3)
Click the green play button (twice) above to play the audio

OK. Good job! You got the appointment with this important prospect. Now what?

You better plan carefully and intelligently. No winging it - you're better than that. You're a professional salesperson - a value resource, a consultant to your prospect, not a product pusher or a data dumper.

So - be PREPARED. But how?

Start with the critical questions that every prospect wants answered when you show up for a sales call:

• Who are you?
• What do you want?
• Why are you here?
• Who do you represent?
• What's in it for me?

Here's how you can do it:

"I'm (your name) from (your company) and the purpose of our meeting today is to meet you, get to know you better, talk with you about (whatever your product/service is) and to discuss anything you might like to discuss with me."

NOW SHUT UP AND LISTEN TO YOUR PROSPECT'S RESPONSE

You'll be amazed at how this simple, direct way of approaching your prospect takes the tension out of those first few seconds of your encounter. Notice that the wording of this phrase gets to the point and answers all of your prospect's unspoken questions quickly - AND you're putting the focus on the prospect..."Get to know you, talk with you, and discuss anything you might like to discuss..."...That last point is critical because you're letting the prospect know that you're interested in talking about THEIR concerns.

Next, you can use a "bonding statement" like this one:

"We work hard to make sure our customers get exactly what they want, and that's how I'd like to work with you. In order to see if I can do that, do you mind if I ask you some questions?"

NOW SHUT UP AND LISTEN TO YOUR PROSPECT'S RESPONSE

Usually you'll hear, "OK, go ahead."

So let your prospect do the talking (if they choose to). The best way to encourage talking is to ask reflective, open-ended, easy-to-answer questions in a conversational way.

But sometimes you might hear, "I don't have time to answer questions."

In that case, you can ask, "When would be a good time to continue?" After all, the reality is simple: If a prospect won't talk to you, they probably won't buy from you either!

The word pitch offends me. I hope you'll help me eliminate it.

Why?

Would you want to get pitched? When I hear that word, I'm confident some prospect is about to suffer from an attack of sleaze.

Anyone in sales knows that the opportunity to meet (in person or over the phone) with a prospect or customer is a rare treat. Give it the respect it deserves. Don't demean your prospect by hurling an unending stream of canned or memorized words at them. Don't pitch. Instead, carefully choose your questions, observations and tailor your presentation. Then remember to reserve any recommendation until you:

• Understand exactly what your prospect wants and
• Are certain you can provide it.

Stop calling a professional sales presentation a "pitch." I, for one, believe that word is one of the reasons our profession has a bad reputation. Help me eliminate it.

If other professions want to continue to use the word (PR, advertising, etc.), that's their problem. Let them suffer the fallout. Frankly, they already have.

Listening is one of the most important skills to be a successful seller. But if you don't have good questioning skills it's difficult to listen to the answer from your prospect. This week Bill uncovers the first part of his presentation of good questioning skills.

Download audio file (057-Questioning_Skills1.mp3)
Click the green play button above to play the audio

Last week I talked about preparing questions that allow your prospect to verbalize, identify, their chief, dominant needs, desires and wishes - the source of their pain, their greatest challenge, their primary issue etc. - the "heart" of what they need.

Yes "needs" here, because our products are "need specific" - products do specific things that only they are designed to do. So, we say products are "need specific" and we also say, "If you can't sell to a need then go do something else." With all due respect, this is the essence though not the totality of selling. Because people still buy what they want! (Another blog!)

Let's look at some questions that invite your prospect to verbalize:

• What specifically do you want / need to accomplish?
• What are you looking for that you haven't been able to find?
• What do you like most about your current provider?
• What have your seen that's particularly interesting to you?
• Why would you consider another vendor?
• What time frame do you have in mind?
• What budget do you have established?
• How soon would you like to get started?
• Who else other then you of course, in involved with this decision?
• And on and on...you could easily think of 500 more questions just like these.

Your preparation determines which questions you ask. Did you notice all of the questions were open-ended? All encourage dialogue. All help the prospect verbalize THEIR concerns. And require you to give them your undivided attention (listen).

Some will talk more than others. Be patient! Listen! Prospects buy at their pace, not necessarily ours. Let them do that with your guidance, not your domination. And enjoy the results.

Submitted by: Richard Dickerson

Last week we had a fairly large crowd in our Conference Center for the IMPACT Selling Open Seminar - 43 salespeople - all from different industries, different areas of the country and three from the Ukraine. But after spending time with this group of salespeople and countless others over the last 13 years, I've noticed 3 mistakes that seem almost universal in selling...

1. Too little research and groundwork to really understand the prospect's business BEFORE meeting with them
2. Too few probing questions to get the prospect verbalizing their needs and wants
3. And the perennial sales mistake of too much talking and too little listening

All of these problems are symptoms of a larger disease that plagues salespeople and eats away at their ability to succeed - Not focusing on the customer. If you can't take the time to understand their business, uncover their needs and wants and listen to their concerns, why should your customers and prospects trust you or believe that you have anything valuable to offer?

So here's my advice: Try taking just 5 more minutes...

• Spend 5 more minutes on research and investigation before meeting your prospect
• Spend 5 more minutes preparing questions that will uncover information you need to make the sale
• Spend 5 more minutes asking questions and listening to your prospect before you jump in speak again

Yes, I know that salespeople often think, "I'm not paid to sit in front of my computer and do research...I'm not paid to hang around listening to prospects yak all day...I've got to get in there and sell something and move on to the next one." That's why I'm suggesting you take just 5 more minutes in these three key areas - that's 15 minutes more per sale - invested entirely in focusing on your customer. You'll be amazed at how well those 15 minutes pay off.

Next Monday, I'll give you some specific suggestions on how to use those extra 5 minutes to increase your chances of making the sale.

Submitted by: Richard Dickerson

Remember:

• People buy for their reasons...not yours! You need to learn why they'll buy.
• You need to ask questions to determine why they'll buy.
• In a more complex sale - multiple motivations/reasons/choices to buy abound.
• Ask yourself, "What needs do I fill?" Then develop questions to get them telling you what they need.
• Ask yourself, "What benefits do they seek - then ask questions relative to the benefits your product/service delivers."
• Conduct a best question audit and use those questions.
• Master the art of follow-up questions (ex. "Why do you say that?" or "Could you tell me more."
• Answers will tell you exactly what and how to preset your product or service.

Is it that simple? Yes, it is. Just figure it out!