Top Sales Questions – Shelle’s Top Tips – Shelle Rose Charvet

If you’re a salesperson, there are five questions that will let you know exactly what your customer wants, what they don’t want, and how to propose and position what it is you have to offer.

If you’re not a salesperson these questions will be useful every time you really need to understand what’s important to someone.

So here they are.

Questions #1 & 2 – What Do You Want? and What’s Important To You?

Many salespeople just forget to ask these questions.  A while ago, I went to buy a new luxury car. I decided to abandon my old mommy-mobile and get a new car for me. My kids were grown up.  It’s my turn for a beautiful luxury car.  We went to seven dealerships.

Out of those seven dealerships only one salesperson said, “Shelle, what do you want? What’s important to you about this car?” How are you going to position anything to me or show me a car, for example, if you don’t know that one of the things that’s important to me is that when I drive my new luxury car up to my prospective client’s place of business that they’d be impressed by my new car.

Now, I know that sounds superficial but that’s one of the things that was important to me.

I felt a little bit sorry for one of the younger salespersons and I said to him, “You didn’t ask me what was important to me.” Okay, he got a little defensive. I would have gotten defensive too. He said, “Well, I tried to find it out in the conversation. I think I did okay.” I said, “Oh, really? So what do I want? What’s important to me?” and he didn’t know.

Now, all of those salespeople asked me, “What car are you presently driving?” I said, “I don’t want to talk about it.” So it’s hidden in the back somewhere.

Write down what they say because the words the customer uses are the words that have a resonance for them.

If you want more information on Top Sales Questions and how to use them, check out my
Sales Booster Package – Increase Sales, Marketing & Customer Retention »

Question #3: Why Is That Important?

 Here what we’re trying to find out is one of the important motivations for you. Is the person trying to achieve or gain something from that or are they trying to prevent or solve a problem?

So if you say, “Shelle, why is it important for you to impress your customers?” I might say, “Because I want to feel successful” or “Because I want to look successful.” Those are things I want to gain. The Toward trigger.

Or I might say, “Well, I don’t want to look like I’m not successful,” and that would be moving Away From, and you may have heard me say this before, the trigger that’s moving away from what I don’t want.

This gives you an indication of how to speak to your customer. Either you show them what they’ll gain, this will enable you to look more successful with your customers, or what they’re trying to avoid. This way you won’t look like you’re unsuccessful with your customers.

Question #4 – How Will You Know if You’ve Made The Right Decision?

 “Excellent question,” you say.  With this question you’re trying to find out does the person decide for themselves, by their own criteria and their own judgments and we call that Internal or did they decide based on outside criteria or outside influences?  

“So Shelle, how will you know you’ve made the right decision about your car?” Shelle might say, “When it feels good. When I’m behind the wheel and I love it.” Well, that’s clearly Internal. So although I did seem to have some external influences, I know I’ve made the right decision myself.

Now, I could have answered the question, “Shelle, how will you know if you’ve made the right decision?” by saying, “When all those people I’m driving by smile at me and look like they’re impressed.” That’s more External.

So this gives you more information about what’s going to help that person decide or buy.

Question #5 – Why Did You Choose To Look For A Car Now?

The question, “Why did you choose..?” is going to give you two kinds of answers.

If the person gives you a list of reasons: an old car was rotten; I want a new car; I want something that fits me; as a salesperson you need to talk to them about all of the options that the car you are selling comes with.

If they don’t tell you why but instead they tell you the story of how it happened that they ended up needing a car, so for example, they’ll say, “Well, my old car broke down for the last time and it was going to cost a lot of money to fix it. So then I realized it probably wasn’t worth my while to fix it so I ended up having to look for a new car.” If they give you one of these stories that has all these events in it, they’re not so interested in all of the options with the car. They want to know how does it work and what do you have to do to buy it, what are the steps in the buying process.

So those are the top sales questions. What do you want? What’s important to you? Why is that important? How you know you made the right decision? And why did you choose to look for or to search for this thing now?

If you want more information on Top Sales Questions and how to use them, check out my
Sales Booster Package – Increase Sales, Marketing & Customer Retention »

For more “Shelle’s Top Tips” visit
http://www.ShellesTopTips.com »

I’d love to hear your feedback.  How was this article useful to you?  You can leave a comment below or message me directly at [email protected]

Hope to hear from you.

Cheers,
Shelle