Episode #109: Forensic Sales Questioning Skills

The idea of asking questions of buyers during sales calls is actually ancient. For at least eighty years, we have known this is the most effective way of getting agreements to our offers. If this key insight has been around for so long, how come there are so few salespeople who have discovered it yet? Salespeople turn up to see clients and launch forth straight into their pitch. They do this without having asked even one question about what the buyer wants, needs or has some interest in. “You can’t easily hit a target you are not aiming for” is obvious. If the target is a sale, there must be a need the client has in place, in order to convince them to hand over their money. If you are not aiming your conversation with the buyer around their need, then you are not aiming for the target, which will trigger the buyer action.

Conceptually the idea of asking buyers questions is not complex. Japan throws up the curve ball that asking questions of buyers is considered rude here, so salespeople decline the chance and go straight into their pitch instead. This is a religious difficulty here. The buyer is GOD in Japan and GOD brooks no questions from mere mortals. The buyer will answer them though and willingly, if we ask them the right way.

We simply use a four step approach: (1) tell them what we do in general terms. (2) note a specific case where we have provided value to a buyer, with concrete numbers attached. (3) suggest that perhaps we could do the same for them. (4) mention that in order for us to know if that was possible or not, would they mind if we asked them a few questions? Yes, there may be some rare holdouts among Japanese buyer Gods who demand our pitch, but for the vast majority of cases the permission to ask questions will be granted.

Okay, so now we have been granted permission to ask questions, where do we start? In fact, we start way before the actual meeting, when we are planning the call. Planning the call? Again, for some strange and mysterious reason, there are many salespeople who don’t plan their calls. I guess if you are just presenting your canned pitch, then not much planning ahead is required. If you are going to be successful in sales, then planning your call is a must. You need to do some hard thinking about the client and their business before you turn up at their door.

Research the industry, if you are not that familiar with its details, first find out who are the major competitors and what do they offer. Look at the on-line annual report if it is a listed company. If it is unlisted, do a search on them to see what information is available from the public domain. None of this should take massive amounts of time. We are just trying to get an idea of what things we need to ask the buyer during our meeting.

For example, in the annual report there will usually be glossy photos of the President in the corner office. There is usually an accompanying article on the leadership’s strategy and vision for the enterprise. This is useful because we can ask about how the global strategy is working out here in Japan, or what changes they had to make to the global strategy to fit the Japan reality?

In the case of an unlisted company, we may have trouble finding out any concrete information, but we can ask about their competitors. They may be listed firms or maybe not. It doesn’t matter. We can ask how these rival companies are affecting the buyer’s business? This is a nice oblique question to help us gain intelligence on what is going on with this company at this moment.

What we are trying to do is get the buyer to tell us key details about the current state of play in their company. This is the “As Is” question to gauge their current reality. We need to know this because we want to find out where they would like to be going forward, or what we call the “Should Be” question. Unless there is a nice big gap between where they are now and where they want to be, we may have no hope of making a sale. Small gaps are bad news.

They may feel they have enough internal resources or time or manpower to get to where they want to be, without our help. The way we find that out is by asking the “Barrier” question. We ask what is stopping them from achieving their vision? Finally, we ask the “Payoff” question about what success would mean to them individually, so that we can personalize our solution presentation later in the conversation.

The key in the questioning process is to keep going and dig deep. When we teach sales training to our class participants, I notice that many skim over the questions part. They ask a question, get an answer and then simply move on to the next question. They have often just passed up a golden opportunity to go much deeper.

Asking a further “why” question when we are told things by the buyer is a great way to better understand what they are thinking. By this I mean asking more than just one “why” here. We need to keep going with asking why, why, why to get more forensic clarity around the situation. Now we have to do this in a way that is very soft and well constructed. That is why our planning is so key. Asking a series of why questions can feel intrusive and rude very quickly unless we ask them in a polite, gentle, curious way.

Asking deep why questions also has the added benefit, in many instances, of crystalising the buyer’s thinking on a topic. We invite them to go further into their own analysis of the situation or to review the strategy or to reflect on a past decision. Gaps, inconsistencies, possible future problems are often hidden from their daily view.

This is because everyone is super busy putting out fires and beating off crocodiles with their oars, so that they can’t easily grapple with these problems. By asking “why” so many times, we challenge the buyer to think again about what they are doing, why they are doing it and to go deeper in their approach to the problem.

This enables us to provide more comprehensive solutions to the buyer’s problems, surface greater needs and expose the opportunity costs of taking no action. That sounds to me like a pretty good menu with which to make a sale, compared to the shotgun spray of just going into a canned pitch and blathering on at length about your widget’s spec.