Selling Skills Training | Key Strategies to Get Feedback from Customers
Checking, one of the six critical sales skills, is the process of asking your customer how he or she feels about what you have said before either of you move on to another point. Although it’s important to summarize needs concisely and accurately, summaries do not provide what you can get from checking. Many salespeople recap (tell); far fewer check (ask).
Checking for feedback is an essential sales skill for salespeople who really want to know where they stand in meeting customer needs. It helps you gauge how you are progressing and gives you the information you need to navigate the sale and make adjustments. It keeps you from assuming that the customer understands or accepts what you have said. (Silence from the customer does not mean agreement.)
It keeps the sales call interactive: continuously asking for feedback keeps your customer involved, active, and interested. Most important, feedback from checking lets you refine your message and makes you more confident to close because you understand how the customer is likely to respond.
Checking also helps you identify obstacles and opportunities so you can address them. For example, during the dialogue you might ask the customer, “Which sounds better at first glance, X or Y?” and “What system do you have?” These questions will let you save time, focus the dialogue, and help you tailor your message.
Each time you position a major point of your message, answer a question, or respond to an objection, check for feedback to gauge the customer’s reaction. If the customer understands and agrees, your checking question will save you time, because you’ll know that you don’t have to address that point further. If feedback from your checking shows the customer still has a question, you can backtrack, ask questions yourself, make adjustments, and/or reset your objective.
Checking is the skill that salespeople resist the most—initially. They see it as risky because the feedback may be negative—objections, complaints, requests, demands. But with practice, they find that checking is indispensable—a virtual secret weapon.
Don’t confuse checking with high-pressure or manipulative tac- tics. Checking is neither. Checking questions are open-ended—what, how, to what extent. They are not leading questions like “Don’t you want to save money?” or “Don’t you agree this benefits you?” Leading questions force the customer to say yes and be pushed to buy. Checking is different, because it seeks all feedback.
Checking is the opposite of summarizing. Summarizing gives information: for example, “I think X will work well in your structure because it meets your objective to ....” Checking gets information: for example, “How do you think X will work in your structure to meet your objective to …?” After all, it is not what you think that counts, but what the customer thinks.
