Asking the Right Sales Questions: A Customer Focused Sales Approach

Many salespeople as well as customer service representatives tend to wander all over the map in a conversation with customers without asking the right questions to be truly helpful.

Think about the last purchase you made. It’s possible your choice was made when the salesperson asked just the right question to prompt you to think differently about the need for the product or its value. Mark Twain said the difference in using the right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug! So it is in asking the right question in sales or customer service environments. The right question is a powerful tool to close sales and make customers feel valued and cared for.

Asking the right questions means being able to get into the mind of the customer and see things from his/her perspective. To empathize. To argue the customer’s case better than he can himself.  The ability to do this is a learned skill, something sales and customer service personnel can master with training that brings out their best, most thoughtful self.

Sales and customer service reps who know how to Ask the Right Sales Questions help your business achieve important benefits:

• loyal customers who trust your recommendations
• satisfying customer interactions in which both parties feel good
• trusting customers who feel their interests were respected and heard
• repeat business from customers who “drive by the competition” to get to you
• a reputation for integrity in every customer interaction

Asking the Right Sales Questions Training highlights:

• What do we mean by asking the right customer focused sales questions and why is this so critical to good customer interactions?
• How to ask the right questions to put customers at ease and build trust
• Creative techniques to put yourself in the customer’s seat
• How to use questions to understand the customer’s underlying interests and goals
• Why the wrong question can set the process back and lose valuable progress
• How to use “expansive” questioning to build rapport and develop a more complete customer profile
• How to use targeted questions to “fill in the picture” and prompt action
• How to use questions to influence the customer’s perspective
• How to get key issues on the table without offending

Asking the Right Sales Questions Methodology

Participants in Asking the Right Sales Questions spend most of their workshop time in practices with coaching and feedback in P2P Videolabs™ – AlexanderHancock’s trademarked process for rapid development of business communication skills. They bring their own real situations to use in the practice sessions.

Participants in Asking the Right Sales Questions practice actual sales/service interactions and receive feedback from the facilitator and peers.  They gain insight and skills through customized exercises and case studies.

Asking the Right Sales Questions Customized Solutions

To ensure that training is not just an “event,” but instead produces enduring results, we customize Asking the Right Sales Questions to fit your unique situation, business strategy, culture, and people.  After discussion with you and other experts within your organization, we select the emphasis, specific skills to be developed, key learning points, exercises, and case studies for practice to create a solution tailored just for you.

Asking the Right Sales Questions Applications

The following are some of the ways our clients have used custom versions of Asking the Right Sales Questions

• To change a sales culture to a more emotionally intelligent, consultative selling approach
• To train new sales/customer service recruits and create a new norm for handling customer service issues
• To enable sales reps to create detailed customer profiles
• To develop best practices for increasing sales through cross-selling and add-on selling
• To improve negotiation outcomes in larger sales and make customers feel valued
• To test assumptions in negotiations before finalizing details

Return To Main Training Page