Developing Questions: Three Guidelines

by Stephen E. Heiman, Diane Sanchez with Tad Tuleja

Asking questions, learning to listen, getting information. Effective selling is all about establishing a dialogue. It's about knowing what your customers want, what they expect from your product and service, and what you can do to fulfill their expectations.

In a previous Sales.com article, we've outlined a proven Questioning Process. In that article, we highlight seven steps to getting the information you need to improve the relationship between you and your customers. If you haven't had a chance to read that article, please do. It explains why we believe in using a questioning process rather than using questioning techniques. It illustrates the difference between getting useful information as opposed to using a series of manipulative tricks designed to make statements sound like questions. Remember, an effective sales professional asks questions to help him or her better serve the customer. It's not a ploy to trick customers into a false sense of security, into thinking that you care more about them than you really do.

The first order of business on every sales call should be to seek out the information you need to better manage the call. But don't ask just any questions. We recommend that you follow three criteria in developing questions for an upcoming sales call. You can improve the quality of your calls 100 percent just by spending five minutes before each call thinking about these three points. The questions you ask must:

• Elicit the information you need. We mean the most urgent and important facts. Obviously, not every person you contact is going to have the time, interest or knowledge to fill in every gap on your checklist—at least not in a single sales call. That's why, as you're focusing on what you need to find out, you should narrow the gaps down to a manageable five or six. Choose missing pieces of information that you can reasonably expect to get and that are urgent in terms of the way you perceive the sale to be going. By "urgent" we mean something you need to know now—something you need to know before you can move the call toward the next level of commitment.
• Be phrased effectively. You can identify very precisely what you need to find out, but you'll still fail to get that information if you phrase your questions badly. In developing questions it's important to word them so that you don't get loaded, self–serving, or defensive answers.
• Be presented in an appropriate sequence. What would happen in a sales call if the first question you presented to the customer was "How about signing this order?" Or if the last one was "How do you do?" No matter how appropriate your questions, and no matter how well they are phrased, you can still come up dry on the needed information if you ask the questions in the wrong order.

Using these three simple guidelines, along with our Questioning Process, will help you find a better fit between your product or service and the customer's expectations. And that will help you close more sales.

From The New Strategic Selling by Stephen E. Heiman and Diane Sanchez with Tad Tuleja. © 1999 by Miller Heiman Inc. All rights reserved by permission of William Morrow & Co., Inc.