Sales Training Blog

The Best Salespeople Distinguish Themselves by Asking Clever Questions!

Quite simply, the best salespeople ask better questions than average sellers do. This month's blog will focus on clever questions that successful salespeople ask. In total, these questions can help sales professionals to do the following things:

• To identify all the decision makers and influencers
• To explore for a potential sales opportunity with a customer who is satisfied with their current provider/supplier
• To gauge the urgency of the customer's desire to take action
• To assess which product or service is most appropriate for a particular customer
• To surface any unexpressed objections

Clever Questions
“Who else is involved in this decision?”
“If you could change one thing about your current situation, what would it be?”
“What have you already done about resolving this problem or issue?”
“Which of these three product lines (or services) would work out best for you?”
“What if we do the following…?”

The above questions are taught as part of STAR's trademarked IDEAL ® Questioning Model which is featured in many of our workshops, including our Questioning and Listening for Sales Opportunities online webinar. Watch for our next issue of the STAR Newsletter where we'll discuss more on the topic of “clever questions”.

We'd like to hear from you about the questions you ask during sales calls. What are your favorite questions to ask and why? We'd love to see this blog full of your responses and suggestions for even more successful and clever sales questions.

What Are the Three Most Critical Success Factors When Writing RFPs? 

Consider how much time and effort you and your sales team spend preparing RFPs (Requests For Proposals). What if you could do this faster and improve your success rate?

I think that three of the most important success factors can be summarized by these questions:

1. How can you write the most powerful executive overview? The executive overview can make a huge difference in terms of your success rate in winning more RFPs.  Many decision makers will only read the executive overview, and will ignore the rest of your RFP.
   
2. How can you set your company, service/product, and yourself apart? In other words, what differentiates you? State your differentiators as concisely as possible, for example, "The breadth and depth of our offerings allows you to reduce the number of your suppliers."
   
3. What information should you include, and what should you purposely leave out? A simple guideline to follow is “If in doubt, leave it out”.

When writing and responding to RFPs, if you keep these three questions in mind, you’ll end up winning more RFPs and spending less time on actually writing them.  Win more, work less is a great outcome.

We’d like to hear from you. Which of the three success factors have you been using? What else would you recommend when writing and responding to RFPs?
If you’re interested in learning more about the RFP process, STAR just introduced a new workshop titled Writing a Winning RFP.

 

 

NEW WORKSHOP FROM STAR
With the start of the new business year, Sales Training And Results, Inc. (STAR) is pleased to announce that we are introducing a new workshop titled Communication Skills.  The purpose of the new workshop is to improve your ability to communicate in person, over the phone, and via email. 

Because email has become a preferred way to communicate in the business world, the new workshop teaches many practical tips about how to write and use email more effectively, as well as to provide some advice about when email is not appropriate. 

Email No-No's:
Email is not the best communication method for every situation. Another common mistake is to rely on email when telephone or face-to-face communication should be used instead.  Here are some common business situations when email should NOT be used:

• When you are negotiating with the other person
• When you need to ask a lot of questions to the other person
• When the situation is emotionally charged or likely to become emotional
• When you want to ensure that the message will remain confidential (keep in mind that no email is private)

We'd love to hear some of your best email tips so we can all learn from each other to improve our communication skills.