This Type of Question Will Increase Your Sales Overnight
Far too often customers dread the sales call as they expect the sales person to come in and feature and benefit them to death. Sales conversations can easily drift into “feature dumping”, listing all the bells and whistles of the product, but customers don’t buy features. They buy to satisfy their needs and outcomes.
Until I started utilizing a certain type of questions in my conversations with customers, it was a slog with mostly no’s at the end of the sales call. This different type of questioning really gets the customers to sit up with an engaging posture and they really start feeling like they are being heard. I have had customers still call me from time to time that I have not called on in years because of these questions.
The great thing about these questions is that they don’t take a certain degree, silver tongue to articulate, or some kind of super power. Anyone can use these questions and start accelerating their wins.
These kinds of questions are called tie-back questions. The tie back questions and the process I teach students is something so simple that I even witnessed my son do it to my mother asking about chocolate ice cream. Imagine my shock when a six-year old looked at me as my mother served him up a heaping bowl of ice cream as he looked at me and winked!
I guess he does listen from time to time!
Tie-back questions are questions that we structure using our product offering and we formulate questions from what our product offering does. It’s really simple once we start breaking this process down to take whatever product / service we are selling.
Imagine a customer says, “We’re frustrated with how long onboarding takes.” Instead of nodding and moving on, you ask:
· “If we cut onboarding time in half, how would that help your team hit results faster?”
This does two things:
1. It shows you were listening.
2. It invites the customer to link your product’s benefit directly to their business need in order to move forward.
Suddenly, onboarding isn’t just a feature, it’s a solution tied to performance, time savings, and team morale.
Next week we will discuss how tie back questions build higher levels of trust.
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