Sales Questions for Every Client Meeting
Salespeople used to be trained how to present their offerings as persuasively as possible. Today, sales presentation skills are less important than being proficient at researching, preparing, and identifying sales questions for every client meeting that matter most.
What Sales Experts Say
Rather than touting what your solutions can do for the customer, high performing solution sellers have four simple, but powerful sales goals to:
Sales is About Them, Not You
In other words, when you meet with a target client, you should not focus on what you can do but on THEM — what they need and how you can help them to succeed. In essence, the questions come before the plan — the information gathering and building of trust come before the solution and your unique value proposition.
Sales Preparation Equals Sales Success
Any good sales management training for sales leaders knows that your sales team should be fully prepared for every client meeting. You should know as much as possible about the customer, their industry, their market and their challenges. If you are unprepared, you will not be ready to ask intelligent, thoughtful questions or be able to offer relevant, valuable insights.
Three Sales Questions for Every Client Meeting
You will need to ask insightful sales questions for every client meeting — plenty of them — but keep in mind that this meeting should not feel like an interrogation but more like a conversation. The way you ask the sales questions should demonstrate that you are genuinely interested in learning about your customer’s situation so that you can eventually provide the exact solution to their problem.
Ask permission to take notes. You don’t want to forget what they’ve said and how they said it.
Some examples are: Have you tried to solve this problem before? How high in priority is this project compared to other initiatives on your plate? What would happen if you didn’t solve the problem?
The Bottom Line
The best solution sellers use business sales training best practices to ask the best sales questions for every client meeting. They ask them skillfully, they listen well, and they impress upon the prospect their sincere interest in helping them succeed personally and professionally. Their questions have purpose, add value, and are insightful.
To learn more about asking the best sales questions for every client meeting, download The 30 Most Effective Sales Questions to Get Right When Selling Solutions
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