Three questions that let prospects sell themselves: what's the single outcome that matters most, who else decides, and when do you need it. Ask these instead of pitching.
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In this episode, you will learn the three sales questions that are so good prospects close themselves. Welcome to sales Process Made simple. The show helping seven to eight figure industry construction and trade. Sales and business leaders finally end the stress of inconsistent sales by simplifying your sales systems so your team can close more deals and grow faster. I'm your host, Ben Wright, a leader who has been building businesses and sales teams just like you for the last 20 years. In this episode, you're going to learn the three sales questions that are so good that prospects will close themselves. They are, number one, all about understanding what the signature piece is for the customer. Number two, who else needs to be buying in and how we engage them. And number three, when do they need to do this buy? We're going to unpack each of those three questions to make sure that your team are closing more deals than they were before today. Okay. So most sales teams in my experience are not asking enough questions. I have worked with hundreds and hundreds of salespeople over the last couple of years and thousands across my career, and one thing that I have seen happen consistently is not enough time on asking great questions. And when we're not asking great questions, we're typically talking a lot, which means that our customers aren't necessarily getting to have their say, but but are instead listening to us. And we all know that just because a customer's listening doesn't mean they're necessarily taking it in. We live in an economy where attention spans are shortening. I fear for my 5 year old daughter when she gets to be a 20 to 30 year old person in her career, just how short attention spans are going to be then? So we work really hard on increasing her attention span and we do that by asking questions that try to get her engagement back. So what are three sales questions that are so good we can get prospects closing themselves? Let's have a look at those. For me, the first one is trying to get an outcome around what the most important delivery item that they want from dealing with us. And I call this the signature piece. So it's asking the questions that will ensure we get from our customer. What is the absolute number one thing that we need to deliver? And it can go along the lines of quite simply asking the customer from where we are today to where you want to be, what's the most important thing that needs to happen? What's the most important thing that needs to change? What's the best result that you can get from this project? At the end of the day, what will make you unbelievably happy that this project has delivered a great outcome. And sometimes this question needs a little bit of expansion or, or working or maneuvering into what's really important, because we don't always get the clear answer the first time from our customer. But if we approach question one here as a theme that says we need to understand through our sales question around what the number one big ticket item is for our customer, then we know that we can go and align what we're delivering with that big ticket outcome, focus on it really heavily, and the customer can simply close themselves because we're ticking off the boxes around what's important to them. So that's number one. The second question here that is so good we can get prospects closing themselves is to understand exactly who is going to be making the decision when it comes to our product or service. Is it just them? Is it themselves and their husband or wife? Is it themselves and a business partner? Is it themselves and a gm? Is it a board? Is it themselves? On their own? But there's a few people that they might lean on importantly to ask advice from. Because when we understand exactly who's making the decision, we can then step back to question one and find out what's also most important to them. And that may mean that we end up with more than one really important outcome. But if we're clear who's making the decisions and how they're making them, that is what's important to them. We can then again line up exactly what we're presenting. So we're ticking off exactly what the customer's asked for and they can close themselves. So that's number two. Number three is all about time frames, all about understanding how urgent or not so urgent this project is so that we can line up delivery of what they want with when they need it. It's not just about knowing what a customer wants or how they're going to be making that decision. It's also about knowing when we need to deliver by if it's super urgent, let's get it done really quickly. If it's not super urgent, how do we keep their engagement along that entire journey so that they don't suddenly stop thinking about what we're doing and fall into the hands of one of our competitors, or even worse, inertia. So just to recap that, if we can get really clear on when they want a product or service buy, we can line up all of our activities around that and deliver at the time when they're ready. So we're not just meeting them with the right product at the right price. We're also meeting them at the right time when they're ready to buy. So recap. There three sales questions that are so good that prospects will close themselves. And number one, getting abundantly clear on exactly what that signature piece is for them. Number two, understanding who else is involved and if there's more than one person in this decision, also understanding what their signature piece is the most important outcome for them. And number three, is aligning all of our activities around exactly when they need this buy. Because if we can do that, we're delivering right when they are ready. So that's it for today. As you leave this episode, as you're driving, as you're walking, as you're at the gym, as you're chilling out on the couch, the question I want you to ask yourself is in your gut, do you feel like when you're in front of customers, either yourself or your team, that you are bottoming out questions that are so good they will close themselves? Are you spending enough time talking to your customers about what's important? But then are you expanding on that to make sure that they have set their own framework around what will close the deal, what's most important, who's involved and when they're going to do it by? If you're doing that, fantastic. If you're not, what's the 1% better approach you can take to really driving that forward? What's one of those things that you can work on to be a little bit better each and every day and close more sales for your business? So we're dropping episodes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Super grateful to have you here as always. Keep up that 1% better approach. It will grow your sales. That's it for today. Look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Bye for now. Are you struggling to grow your monthly sales numbers? Feel like you've reached a sales ceiling, are involved in every deal, or have no real sales system in place to help you grow? And is that causing a level of worry or stress about how you can get more sales in the future? If that's you, that's exactly why we could created the Sold Out Sales Teams program to help you get month on month sales growth with less stress. In just the first week, we will lock down your quoting process to grow sales by 25 to 30%. And that's just week one. And for the first three podcast listeners that we speak to this week, we'll offer you a bonus one on one strategy session with me to make sure you can pay off your investment even faster. Which by the way, for most businesses businesses is only one or two extra sales. To book in, click the link in our show notes. It's a direct calendar link so you can instantly confirm your meeting time.
