Thursday, May 2, 2013

High Impact Sales Questions

High performing sales reps ask high impact questions early in the sales cycle. They are quick at identifying opportunities that will NOT close anytime soon. They attend to the ones that indeed will. Customers appreciate working with such sales people/teams simply because both parties mean serious business.

But it's hard to identify such questions and even harder to present them to customers. It takes practice, confidence and a few bad deals you did (for lack of this step), in your bag. The good thing is that high impact questions are more or less universal in all sales situations. Enterprise sales is a team sport. The entire account team should be comfortable asking them and should strive to elicit a predictable response from the customer.

Here's my list... Please note you don't have to ask all questions or ask in any particular order.. Most of these should be asked once a problem use case is defined by the customer. Lastly, don't try and memorize this. Feel the impact as you read this and make it a part of your sales lingo!


1.    Who in the business is impacted the most, by this problem?
[HK intent] Understand who’s ultimately going to pay the $$$.

2.    Who in senior management is aware of this problem?
[HK intent] How big is the problem? Does it have management attention? 

3.    Is this issue impacting other parts of the organization?
[HK intent] Who else will get involved in the buying process..

4.    What is the extent of the impact of the problem on you?
[HK intent] How important is this to you? Will you loose your job if this isn’t done quickly? 

5.    Who else will benefit most from this solution and to what extent?
[HK intent] who will loose his/her job if the project isn’t successful?

6.    How will solving this issue impact you personally?
[HK intent] Get personal.. Check out the pathos

7.    How do you solve this problem now?
[HK intent] If it’s really important then they must have some clunky solution in place.. What are the short comings.. Use the answer to build a value proposition in a business proposal. It will help you with procurement :-).

8.    Have you tried to solve this problem in the past?
[HK Intent] What should I do such that differentiates my approach from the past failure? Who is my ghost competition?

9.    Is someone trying to address this problem now?
[HK Intent] Is there a parallel initiative I'm competing with? 

2 comments:

  1. Great questions,

    I might add :

    1. What is this costing you?
    2. Is doing nothing an option ?
    3. How do you feel about this problem ?

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    Replies
    1. Well said... It's amazing how simple these questions sound on paper but how scared some sales teams are of bringing these up :-)

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