Episode #344: Questioning Skills In Sales

This was very frustrating. It became obvious from the client’s email response that there was a sizeable gap between what I thought was going on and the reality. How could that be? I am an experienced salesperson with a solid track record of sales; I have written two books on selling in Japan, one in English and one in Japanese, I have had a weekly blog on the subject for nearly seven years. I teach selling techniques as part of my job. What went wrong? In the email response, he clarified that he was only thinking of a very minimum role for us in the sales training process. Now that was not obvious to me when we met and had our discussion. This was perplexing. I have been replaying that sales call in my mind looking for what did I wrong. Where was the bread crumb trail that I missed?

The questioning phase of the sales call is crucial because if you don’t know what the buyer wants, how do you satisfy them, how do you fix their issues, solve their problems? We know many salespeople don’t ask questions because they are too busy going straight into the nitty gritty detail of explaining their solution. Let’s put it in simple terms. This is the problem of not asking what is the buyer’s favourite colour, which is blue and then just talking endlessly about your awesome range in pink. It just doesn’t work well to get the sale.

What if the buyer’s answer isn’t that clear? This can happen, of course. Not every buyer is articulate or well thought through or well considered or smart. Often, they don’t have a clear picture of what they need. Operating from a flawed central proposition can also complicate matters, because not every client is sophisticated in understanding their own core underlying issues.

As salespeople, we can make the problem worse too. We ask questions which get them thinking and considering the problem from fresh perspectives. Normally, this is a good thing because we want to rock them back on their heels and have them thinking, “We haven’t thought about that” or “We haven’t prepared for that”. This is where we establish ourselves as the trusted partner with the buyer, by bringing greater value and a fresh angle to the issue. However, we may also trigger some concerns they haven’t thought about as yet and raise issues which until now have lay quietly dormant.

Thinking back to that sales meeting, I realise I didn’t dig in deep enough on the issues they were facing. Our solution was a good fit for them and I fell in love with that idea. Unfortunately, that email showed me they hadn’t fallen in love with it. I should have stopped talking and should have looked for additional barriers, especially internal barriers within the company, which would prevent this deal from happening.

Sitting right in front of me, across the meeting room table, I could see the wheels of the Swiss watch inside his brain whizzing around as he was obviously processing a lot of information and possibilities. Instead of just noticing that he was just doing a lot of thinking, I should have asked him what he was thinking about. I needed to do this, to flesh out where he was in the internal conversation he was having with himself, which was going on silently in his mind. If I had said, “What is going through your mind at the moment?”, that would have been a very disarming way of tapping into his thought process at that point. He may have shared what was holding him back from accepting my proposition, instead of getting the rejection later in an email as part of the meeting follow-up. I could have dealt with it on the spot, while we were face-to-face.

I should also have dug in for areas where he had concerns about this solution I was offering. As I have noted, I fell in love with my solution for him, because I could see how this would really help him. I was convinced myself and that just led me down the path of more detail on how the solution would help him. He was sitting there thinking why this wouldn’t work in their situation, because he felt they could do it themselves, to a great enough extent. Grant Cardone, the well-known American sales trainer, is very good at this. He challenges the buyer to justify making the investment to buy Grant’s subscription video courses. He says things like, “How could you justify spending $10,000 to buy this subscription for your people?”.

It is quite clever, because now the buyer has to become an advocate for Grant’s business. They have to justify the rationale and the pricing. He is flushing out resistance on the spot, so that he can deal with it. Maybe this wouldn’t work in every case in Japan, but this buyer was quite Westernised and educated overseas, so he could have deal with this approach. Maybe a more local Japanese buyer would have been simply confused by the proposition.

I am still annoyed this one got away. Not for the size of the deal, but because I couldn’t read the buyer well enough during the meeting and I made too many assumptions about what was going on. I pushed him to do something about starting the training in my follow-up email and this generated his blunt assessment that they could do it themselves and didn’t need me. Ouch! I will be more observant from now on and will question my assumptions more closely, while I am sitting across the table from the buyers in future.