Questioning skills

Questioning skills course

The pandemic has made sales success even tougher for buyers and sellers, so when sales people do have an opportunity to have a quality conversation with a buyer, its more crucial than ever that they use this time to prove their value and their ability to solve the right problems for their buyers. Gartner has shown that 80% of B2B decision makers believe sales reps weren’t prepared for the meeting. Poor questioning is one of the key areas that shows a lack of preparation and understanding from the sales person. sales success will not be achieved without effective questioning.

Many sales people have had old-school training in questioning just once in their career. Often, they will be asking habitual questions that they think equate to a need’s analysis which is strong enough to convince their buyer. However, what they don’t realise is that they are asking mostly generic, non-strategic questions that their buyers hear from many other sales people. Identifying some basic needs is not enough for a buyer who is stuck in their status quo; fearing change and due to current circumstances, faced with unprecedented levels of risk when considering a new solution. Buyers need to be personally motivated and their current thinking may need to be disrupted in order to drive change. Questioning that fails to do this means the conversation will never reach its full potential. The buyer is likely to disengage – unable to see the value of working with that sales person, and the sales person won’t have gained or generated any insight from the buyer that results in a call to action. Neither buyer nor seller are anywhere closer to a deal.