Ryan Dohrn says salespeople ask too many generic questions that alienate prospects. He shares his "15 Critical Questions" framework and pushes you to rewrite your usual questions from fresh angles, starting with why a prospect agreed to meet and what problem they want to solve.
Hey friends, Ryan Dohrn here, your global sales coach, and this is your sales training tip of the week. Stop asking questions just to ask questions. If you're going to ask questions, you need to ask questions with a purpose, you need to ask questions with a passion, you need to ask questions that have some type of point. See, a lot of times sales trainers out there or sales gurus out there will teach you to ask open-ended questions to get the conversation going. Hey friends, do you think you're the first salesperson that's actually called on that customer? Trust me, salespeople good and bad have called on your customers for months, for years, or whatever the circumstance is. Here's my challenge to you, to you if I could be so bold. Write down all the questions you typically ask on a sales call, then rewrite them. Ask them in a different way. Ask them from a different angle. Put a different flavor on it. Put a different color to it. Friends, If you're still asking the same questions you were asking before COVID hit, I'm telling you, you probably need to revamp your questions. Make the questions you ask on a sales call highly relevant. Make them airtight. And then just recognize there's 3 questions that have been rated over and over again as some of the worst to ask. Like this one, hey, you know, Bill, what keeps you up at night? Watch out for that one. How about this one that makes millennial buyers crazy? So, Bonnie, tell me about your business. Makes people crazy because you should have done some research. Think about questions like that, what you might do to rewrite those. How about this one? You know, Bob, tell me, what are your goals and desires for next quarter? These questions are overused. They're trite. They've been asked hundreds and thousands of times. You're better than that. If you want to get bigger, badder, and better, ask better questions. I like to call it my 15 critical questions. One of my favorites is, when you decided to take this meeting with me, was there something you were hoping I could help you solve or a problem you were hoping I could help you solve? Some version of that. Friends, rewrite your questions. If you're going to be bigger, badder, and better, you might just need to go back to the question vault and rethink those questions you ask on your sales call. Remember, friends, if sales was easy, everybody'd be doing it, and they're not. So we're either all crazy, which is possible, or we found careers that'll feed our families for a lifetime. All right, friends, I'm Ryan Dohrn. We'll see you next week for another sales tip right here.
