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Selling Techniques – Open Ended Probing
Questions
© 2007 David Peterson
You will not get anywhere in sales if you can’t find out
what your prospects needs and how you can turn those needs
into sales.
Regardless of if you are working with an MLM prospect that
is trying to fill a business opportunity need or if you are
answering an RFI (Request for Information) that someone has
filled out on your product pages you have to ask probing
questions if you want to succeed in sales.
Probing questions are the mechanism that gets your prospect
talking to you about their needs. Probing questions gets the
conversation flowing. They are always open ended questions
that are used to find out if a need actually exist for your
product for this particular prospect.
NEWSFLASH – Not everyone needs your product!
Not every prospect needs your product but I can just about
guarantee that a lot of prospects do need the product you are
offering!
Your job after your opening statement is to ask a series of
questions that can quickly get your prospect involved in the
sales process.
Your job is to get the prospect talking.
How do you know if you have a HOT prospect? It really boils
down to who is doing the talking. If you find that the
prospect is doing all of the talking then you have a hot lead.
If you find yourself doing all of the talking then you are in
trouble.
Please re-read the last paragraph. If you cannot get the
prospect engaged into answering open ended questions then you
will not get them engaged into the sales process.
The sales process is the ability to move someone from a
suspect to a prospect, and ultimately to a customer. The sales
process is open, probe, pitch, and close.
So what is an open ended question? An open ended question
is a question that does not take a yes or a no to answer. It
is one that requires the prospect to elaborate on their
answers.
Asking open ended questions takes practice. You will not
get a good question and answering session on every call. Some
people just don’t want to talk to you.
Don’t take it personal!
The best way to get a person engaged in the sales process
is to keep two things in mind on every call.
#1 People like to talk about themselves.
#2 People like to talk about their business.
Let’s face it we are all human. We have a strong desire
to tell the person next to us what we do well. That is why we
talk about ourselves and our business.
Give it a shot on your next call. Read these next two
statements, which one do you think will get the prospect
speaking to you?
A. Our product has a five year guarantee and rarely if
ever gets returned. On top of that we have a 50% affiliate
payout and have paid out over $250,000 last month alone.
Do you have a website up and running that could promote
this product today? Do you think that you have the web
traffic that could bring about multiple sales?
B. I see in the request for information that you filled
out that you have a website already up and running. Can
you tell me how you came about to setup that website and
why do you think that website would be a good fit for our
product?
The second statement above is designed to get the prospect
speaking to you about his or her website and about why they
put the website up in the first place.
There are no offers or closing statements in the 2nd
example.
You have to get your prospect talking to you before you can
pitch. You have to get your prospect engaged in a conversation
before you can decide if you will be moving this person to the
next step.
It is your job to decide if this prospect deserves your
attention and your time to move them to the next step. Find
out all you can about the prospect before trying to turn them
into a customer.
Why not try to pitch to everyone? Why not try to close
everyone?
This is very simple: If you sell to someone that doesn’t
need you product it will be returned! If you don’t follow
the sales process of open, probe, pitch, and then close you
will find yourself wasting your own time and your own money
working with suspects – not prospects.
Not everyone needs your product. Use open ended questions
designed to get your prospects engaged into the sales process.
Once you get them engaged then you can make the decision if it
warrants taking that prospect to the next step.
Sincerely,
David
Peterson
Author
of:
Been There - Done That
David
Peterson's Search Engine Optimization Guide
Please
send all correspondence to: questions@usreference.com
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