How to Ask Good Questions to Uncover Problems | Professional Selling Skills | Sales Training Vietnam
There is a major difference between good questions and average questions. Many sales experts advise you to ask “open-ended” questions. That is good advice, so long as the questions are related to a problem. To encourage prospects to tell you their problems, you may have to design powerful questions that demonstrate you are a person worthy of the answers. I like dialog questions.
Dialog Questions
Have you watched Barbara Walters interview people? She uses dialog questions to show knowledge, empathy, and sincerity, and to encourage interviewees to tell intimate details they may have never told anyone before. Asking good dialog questions is easy once you have the framework down.
A dialog questions contains three parts:
An observation
A contrast or comparison
A request for an opinion
Here is an example: “Mr. Jones, I noticed that you have 15 people in your accounting department [Observation]. We have other clients in your industry of similar size who only have 8 to 10 people working in accounting [Comparison]. In what ways do you find the additional people to be helpful? [Opinion]”
Dialog questions that confirm or eliminate problems are good questions for discovering problems. For example, “Mr. Jones, I was reading an article in Manufacturing Today about the companies that are moving their production to other countries. When we came in this morning, we noticed you were adding on to your facility. How are you successfully fighting the trend to- ward moving production offshore?”
Conclusion
Being informed enough to ask the right questions is the professional way to develop a sales relationship. Dialog questions will give you a way to ask good questions in a comfortable manner.
