The Sales Call: Getting Information

by Miller Heiman

Contrary to popular opinion, the great salesperson is very seldom the person with the fastest mouth in the West. In the vast majority of cases, selling success begins with the ability to ask good questions and then listen--really listen--to the answers.

There are plenty of reasons for asking good questions on a sales call. To mention only the most important:

1. Good questioning allows you to identify clearly, and to qualify early in the selling process, not only the individual people you deal with, but also their companies; it helps you get a handle at the outset on whether or not a given company is an appropriate prospect at all.
2. It helps you to understand the current customer situation. Good questions can uncover the fact, for example, that a given customer, although a good bet in general, is not an appropriate prospect at the present time, or for your current proposal. Therefore, good questioning helps you to schedule your calls more effectively.
3. Good questioning, at the outset of a sales call, helps to establish the rapport that is so helpful in fostering fluid communication between buyer and seller: it helps to establish a "comfort level" between the two that is critical to all interactive selling.
4. Good questioning lets you determine where you do, and where you do not, understand the decision-making process of a given corporate customer. It helps you avoid the all too common selling error of wasting your own and your customers' time by making the perfect presentation to the wrong person, in the wrong place, or at the wrong time.
5. It enables you to identify significant differences between your own capabilities and those of your competition. Good questioning can help you uncover your competitors' weaknesses and highlight your own strengths.
6. Good questioning can reinforce your credibility with a customer by demonstrating to him or her that you are in fact interested in his or her needs and opinions, and not just in pushing your product.
7. Finally, and arguably most important, good questioning can motivate and sustain your customer's interest, stimulate his thinking, and modify his attitudes regarding you and your product or service. In other words, it can generate a fluid communication process that gives both you and your customer the information that needs to be laid on the table to get you to a win-win conclusion.

Given these obvious advantages of good questioning, you'd think that sales professionals would typically spend the bulk of their time developing good questions, learning how to phrase questions properly, and in general focusing on getting information. But that isn't what happens. In fact, just the opposite occurs. Our observation and experience with thousands of sales professionals tells us that on most sales calls, there is a kind of "80 Percent Syndrome" at work.

Imagine popping your head in at random on any given hundred sales calls. The focus of the call might be a thirty dollar pair of shoes or a three million-dollar computer system. The call might be an opening call on a new prospect or the salesperson might be two minutes from getting the contract. Whatever the situation, we'll bet that 80 percent of the time, the person who's going to be talking when you pop in will be not the customer but the salesperson. That's a typical pattern in sales calls: four out of every five minutes the seller and the buyer are together, it's the seller's gums that will be flapping.

Moreover, 80 percent of the time that the seller is talking, guess what he's going to be saying? Is he going to be focusing on the customer. Not on your life. The pattern we've found is very clear: 80 percent of the time the seller is talking, he is telling the customer something--in other words, he's making statements, not asking questions.

It gets worse. To take the 80 Percent Syndrome to its last fatal step, we'll make this observation: 80 percent of the time, the statements the seller is making have to do not with the customer's interests or needs, but with the virtues of the seller's product or service. It's usually the product pitch with a vengeance: the seller spends the bulk of his or her time pointing to bells and whistles. Whether or not the prospect wants to see them.

What does this mean in terms of the average sales call? Suppose you have an hour to spend with a given customer, and you fall into the common 80 Percent Syndrome with him. In that precious hour, your time will be divided in the following way:

• About thirty-one minutes will be spent in telling the customer about your product or service.
• Another eight minutes will be spent in telling him something else--that is, in making other statements.
• About nine minutes will be spent in asking him questions.
• The remaining twelve minutes will be spent in listening to the customer talk.

In fact, the less time the average salesperson has to spend with the prospect or client, the greater chance there will be that he will spend the bulk of that time talking. If you've only got twenty minutes to tell your story and you've got a head full of data to deliver, the natural temptation is to talk nonstop, to be sure you get it all in. The result of this can be disastrous. If you only allow a customer one minute out of every five to get a word in edgewise, the information you get from him is naturally going to be inferior to what you would be able to get if you said less and listened more.

Why? Because it's a physiological fact that you cannot talk and listen at the same time. You may be able to vaguely "hear" background noise; you may convince yourself that you're picking up on body language and nonverbal cues; but if you're honest with yourself you'll admit that you can't really listen intelligently when you're trying for the motor mouth trophy. If you doubt that, ask a friend to read you a newspaper article while you're reading him or her another one. The only words that either one of you will hear will be those that sneak through when you pause for breath.

It's inevitable, therefore, when you fall into the 80 Percent Syndrome, that you will miss out on information that you need in order to make the sale work. Good selling begins not with Show and Tell, but with Getting Information--in other words, with learning. And you cannot learn effectively when you're talking.

From Conceptual Selling by Robert B. Miller and Stephen E. Heiman with Tad Tuleja. © 1987 by Miller Heiman, Inc. All rights reserved by permission of Warner Books, Inc.