Believe it or not, you can easily alienate, disengage and confuse your prospects within the first few seconds of a sales call.
How you open a conversation with a prospect can truly make or break your chances for success with them. Unfortunately, most salespeople start sales calls in ways that repel prospects and clients.
It doesn’t matter if it’s during the opening, qualification or closing process, if you’re asking bad questions you will end up with bad results.
Avoid opening your sales calls with:
- How are you?
- Are you the person in charge of…?
- Who makes the decisions about…?
- What do you guys do?
- The buyer has been difficult to reach. Do they have an underling I can speak to?
- Are you looking to save money on your…?
- Who should I call to…?
Avoid asking these questions during qualification:
- How’s business?
- Tell me more about your business?
- Are you looking to save money on…?
- Who do you currently use to…?
- Who do you compete with?
- Who are your customers?
- Who else should I be speaking to about this?
Avoid closing your call with:
- How is your credit?
- Can I send you information?
- Can I send you a proposal?
- Will you call me when you are ready?
- Should I leave this information / presentation with you?
- Can I bid on? or Can I provide a quote to…?
Smart questioning requires you to be thought provoking. Most of the questions outlined above are either inappropriate to ask or can easily be answered with a little bit of research on your end. When you ask questions that you should already know the answer to, it shows a lack of preparation, care and knowledge.
The above questions only serve to annoy, bore and offend your prospects. Avoid asking them at all costs.
Of course, asking the right questions are at the heart of any good sales approach. Your questions need to be open ended, close ended, diagnostic and exploring. I recommend creating
a playbook of the right questions that you can review as a team regularly when preparing for sales calls.
What do you think the best questions are to ask during a sales call?
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