CIM Article
Success in selling:
Strategic questioning to WIN sales orders

This article describes a powerful strategy to maximise success in selling and sales orders by using a well-proven series of key questions that you can ask a sales prospect during a meeting or presentation to find out the information you need to exercise persuasion and influence effectively. The answers will reveal precisely the wants and needs of each prospective customer, which you can then match with the most relevant benefits and features of your products and services. This then enables you to present the most compelling solution to win sales orders consistently and in the shortest period time.

The Strategic Questioning Strategy will provide you with new confidence and a significant competitive advantage. You can find out and resolve what are often hidden or unstated desires and issues for the client that might relate, for example, to earlier experiences of buying similar products and services as well as organisational issues for making purchases.

The answers to these questions will define the optimal ‘sales process’ you can adopt for each prospective customer - the specific purchasing criteria and preferences that you can address progressively and to great effect during the course of a sales meeting and in any subsequent follow-up. This strategy will often eliminate the need for any ‘hard selling’ or ‘closing’, so you can simply and successfully ask for the order at the conclusion of the meeting, as the next logical step in the sales process.

This strategy enables you to direct the course of the sales meeting, to demonstrate your professionalism and to make the most of the allotted time during the session, which will also help ensure the shortest possible sales-cycle. It opens up two-way communication as the start of a continuing relationship, based upon your interest in and understanding of the prospect’s needs and the key issues for the business.

In this article we set out the seven questions that are proven to be most effective in strategic questioning. You can learn and practice the questions, which represent a ‘template’ for each presentation, to develop the confidence and fluency to incorporate the strategy into your usual conversational practices and respond flexibly to any sales situation and the opportunities that are presented.

Each specified question is ’open-ended’, requiring more than a ‘yes/no’ answer. This encourages the sales prospect to speak freely and openly on purchasing issues that are important to him – rather than imposing your own pre-suppositions of buyer needs, which may be inappropriate. The questions are also short, so require little ‘processing’ by the prospect – her attention can be quickly focused on formulating an answer each time.

Sales people consistently find that this strategy offers a far higher ratio of success than attempting to just ‘wing it’, relying on just ‘gut instinct’ and ‘personal chemistry’ to win a sale. This ‘intuitive’ approach is highly unreliable, and bad habits and poor phraseology can become habitual. By adopting the questioning strategy, you can refine and develop your approach from feedback and use the most successful elements of the strategy, based on your own experiences, to ensure long term success.

There are two distinct and progressive categories of sales questioning in this strategy. The first is designed to identify the key purchasing criteria and priorities that motivate the prospect in relation to buying your type of product/service. The second category enables you to find out the type of communication that the prospect requires in order to be convinced.

The first two questions are the most important of all in generating the primary data that you require to make a sale. You can add the other questions progressively to your own personal use of the sales strategy as your experience grows.

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