Brian Tracy explains why asking good questions matters in sales. Most customers don't know what they want, so salespeople should prepare five to seven questions on letterhead before meetings to uncover problems and goals. Questions about current situation, effectiveness, and desired changes work best.
I'm Tracy and I want to talk to you today about the power of asking. When you go into a sales situation, it may be that the customer knows exactly what they want and need and is ready to make a buying decision. But this is what we call a miracle. And it's not that miracles don't happen, it's just that you can depend upon them. So you have to be able to ask good questions. And the power is on the side of the person who can ask the best questions. You need to ask the customer about his real problems and needs. You need to ask the customer about his goals that your product or service can help him achieve. You need to ask about problems that your product or service can help him solve. And you need to ask politely, you need to ask confidently, you need to ask warmly, you need to ask cheerfully. And one of the best things that you can do is think through some of the questions that you're going to ask before you go into a sales situation. Sometimes we call this the agenda close, where you write up an agenda of a series of questions, either five or seven, and you write them on a page and you use your own letterhead, your company's letterhead, and it says agenda for meeting with. And you put the customer's name and then the time of the meeting and. And you say, Mr. Prospect, I know how busy you are. So I've prepared an agenda for our meeting and I brought some questions that you and I can go over and it will determine whether or not we can help you in a cost effective way. And then you give them the agenda and you have a copy, and they have a copy. Always space the questions, so there's lots of room on the page for the customer to write. And then what you do is you just go down the questions one by one. And every time I've spoken to my sales audiences and I say, does anybody here use this method of closing, closing on the customer, listening to? Everybody says, not everybody, but a few people raise their hand and say, yes, I use it. I say, what kind of reaction do you get? They say, the customers love it when you come with a series of questions prepared to ask. And also it helps you organize your thinking as well. So you need to be prepared to ask, what are they doing now? How's it working? What are their plans for the future? What do they want more of or less of? What are their key concerns? Sa. Sam.
