Sales Probing Questions to Qualify and Close More Sales

Good questions to ask in a sales situation include: -What are you working on? -What are your goals? -What are your challenges? -What are you looking for? -How can I help you? -How do you feel about this? -What do you think? -What are your thoughts? -Tell me more. -Can you help me understand?

The strategies in this book will help you to influenced potential buyers, changing their perception of what is possible. This will help you progress the sale and avoid any potential problems that could occur.

Great sales questions help you win sales.

* What are some powerful sales questions that can help me build rapport with buyers, understand their wants and needs, and close the sale?

Questions That’ll Make Your Sales Process More Efficient

1) Have you defined your ideal buyer profile?

One of the main reasons why small businesses have low sales efficiency is because they try to please everyone. This means that every sales approach is different, which makes it difficult to build a sales process and marketing strategy that works for everyone. It’s better to focus on one type of buyer at a time.

Consider these questions as you define your personas:

• Do you have a document that describes your ideal buyer?
• Do you define characteristics of your ideal buyer like company size and industry?
• Does it include other firmographic information that might be unique to your typical buyer?
• If you sell larger deals to B2B companies and have multiple contacts you approach when selling your service, what are their typical titles and departments?
• What else is unique about them? Are they usually male or female, junior or senior, managers or individual contributors?

2) Do you have a sales process?

That doesn’t mean over-engineering things. Too many people try to over-engineer their sales process and end up making things more complicated than they need to be. The second most common mistake I’ve seen is not having a sales process. Every sales pursuit ends up being a bit different. But similar things have to happen in most of them. Figure out what those similar steps are and build a process. That doesn’t mean over-engineering things.

Here are some questions to consider when you are building your process:

• Have you defined the different types of sales calls you normally have at different stages of a prospect’s buying process?
• Do you have a prospecting process for getting prospects on the phone that involves researching them using email, voicemail, and social?
• Do you have a process for identifying their goals and priorities?
• Do you have a process for ensuring you can help them and get their buy-in to do so?
• Do you have a standard method (such as a presentation, demonstration, or contract) that lays out a typical agreement?
• Do you have a process for getting buy-in on contract details?
• Do you have a process for helping your new clients or customers take advantage of your services?
• Do you have a process for managing your existing accounts?
• The above steps are table stakes for most companies. But they might not be enough for your business. If you’re in a services business, you might need a step-by-step process for delivering your services, reporting and reviewing results with clients, as well as renewing and upselling clients. If you sell a physical product, you’ll need a process for delivery and installation.

If you’re finding it difficult to get started, why not try adapting the process shown in HubSpot’s free sales training video course to suit your own needs? It might just be what you need to get the ball rolling.

3) Is your sales process documented?

The only way to ensure that your process can be scaled is to document it. This means creating actual documents that describe how to run each call in your sales process, as well as what happens before and afterwards. When selling new accounts, you need to have a clear set of questions to ask, when to tell certain stories, and the criteria that must be met in order to move a deal from one stage to the next.

If you want to manage your sales process effectively, use an internal wiki or Google Docs. Google Docs is especially helpful because it allows others to login, leave comments, suggest edits, and ask questions. This way, you can change your sales process over time.

Your team should constantly be improving the sales process by brainstorming new ways of approaching and acquiring customers. This way, your process can change to reflect these improvements and stay up-to-date with the latest revision.

The best processes come from collaboration between front line representatives, managers, and a sales consultant who has implemented a strong sales methodology in multiple scenarios. A sales consultant can help improve processes by bringing experience from other companies as well as widely applicable, off-the-shelf sales methodologies and frameworks. It is also important to involve front line sales representatives so they can test processes and provide feedback. This also ensures their buy-in – frontline representatives are more likely to follow a process if they have a hand in building it. Finally, make sure sales managers are involved to ensure effective execution of the process.

4) Do you have an efficient way for identifying best-fit leads?

After you have determined who your ideal buyer is, find companies that they work for and reach out to those people who match your buyer persona. In order to do this effectively, use inbound marketing. People who respond well to inbound marketing should be your top priority, as long as they match your ideal buyer profile. According to small businesses, the best sources of qualified leads are networking, referrals, and word-of-mouth. Lastly, you can use data sources to find more information on companies that fit your buyer profile.

Be sure to have views of your most promising and best leads within your CRM so you don’t have to search for leads every time you prospect. (You can create custom views conveniently in HubSpot CRM.)

5) Do you have an efficient system for researching your leads before you reach out?

In order to start effectively reaching out to leads, it is important to do research on the companies and individuals that you plan on contacting.

If someone arrives on your website from an external source, take a look at what brought them there and what content they read. This will give you an idea of their interests, which will be useful information for your first point of contact with them. If someone arrives on your website from an internal source, do some research to find potential conversation starters that you can use in your emails, voicemails, and actual conversation.

6) Do you make up your voicemail script as you leave it?

If you want to succeed in leaving a tailored voicemail when reaching out to prospects, you should have a script that incorporates your research, avoids talking about yourself, and is practiced, recorded, and reviewed by others.

7) Do you write emails from scratch every time you pursue a new prospect?

Make sure to personalize your email templates based on the research you’ve gathered so that you can connect with prospects quickly.

Here are five more questions to ask when creating email templates:

• Are you using standardized templates that are easily customized?
• Does your template management system automatically populate your messages with CRM data so you don’t have to type your prospect’s name and company name over and over again?
• Are your templates so focused on yourself (and not your prospects) that you’ll get ignored by most of the people you send it to — or do they reference what you’ve discovered about your prospect so they will be more likely to conclude that you’re interested in getting to know them?
• Do you personalize your email templates based on the research you’ve gathered?
• Do your templates include standard places to input your research?

Make sure to take note of which emails have the highest open and click rates so you can better understand what sort of content your subscribers are most interested in. Also, make sure to track which emails help you establish a connection with your subscribers so you can replicate that content and improve your engagement.

8) Do you have a system that reminds you when to follow up with a prospect who hasn’t returned your email or voicemail?

Is there a way to easily create a task when you first reach out to someone? Most prospects won’t respond to the first few emails or voicemails, so it’s important to create a task to follow up. This is how you would create a task in HubSpot CRM.

When you have an opportunity, create a task for yourself to follow up. Also, create tasks for referral partners and existing clients.

9) Have you created at least five email templates and voicemail scripts that you can use in a sequence?

If you want to be successful in reaching your prospects, it’s important to have multiple templates with different messages that you can send. Prospects are busy, so your first message might not resonate. To make things easier on yourself, try crafting a few messages at once and scheduling them to send on future days.

Don’t send a new message to the prospect after they respond.

Can’t just rely on email sequences for new leads, gotta keep in touch with existing customers too. You might have to chase them up for something or check in to see how they’re progressing – either way, set up an email sequence and you won’t have to worry as much.

You can automatically send emails to referral partners on a monthly basis to keep them updated on your availability.

Sales Questions to Discover Aspirations and Afflictions

Most sales advice suggests that you must first uncover what the customer is struggling with before selling them a product or service.

This advice encourages sellers to find out what is wrong and fix it.

What does the buyer want? What does the buyer fear? The sellers who are the most successful at creating opportunities also focus on the positives—the buyer’s goals, aspirations, and possibilities the buyer doesn’t even know exist. You must ask questions that uncover both aspirations and afflictions. What does the buyer want? What does the buyer fear?

10 Open-Ended Sales Questions to Uncover Aspirations and Afflictions

• If, at the end of this hour, you looked back and thought ‘that was an hour well spent’ what would we have covered?
  What better way to run a meeting than to make sure you cover exactly what matters to the buyer? Plus, this question gets to aspirations and afflictions for the meeting, which ensures you’re not only focusing on pain points.
• Why isn’t this particular technology/service/product/situation/issue working for you right now?
  Many buyers are willing to talk to sellers because something they’re doing or using right now isn’t working for them. It’s important to know what you’re up against.
• Many of our clients report problems with A, B, and C. How are these areas affecting you? What do you think about them?
  This is another great way to establish expertise and industry credibility. It also asks the buyer to think about their challenges in a different way or consider challenges they hadn’t identified previously. The idea is to ask specific open-ended questions that show you know the area well.
• What’s holding you back from reaching your revenue (or profit, or other) goals?
  Learning about obstacles early in the conversation is imperative. If the buyer believes an obstacle is insurmountable, it’s up to you to show them why it’s not and how to get past it.
• What goals and objectives do you have in general for your business? For this particular area?
  Finding out about your buyer’s hopes, goals, and aspirations allows you to focus on the positives during your conversations and uncover needs the buyer hadn’t previously considered but should.
• (Assuming they set the meeting) Why did you ask me to talk with you today?
  You may already know why the buyer set the meeting, but it doesn’t hurt to revisit the question to make sure you’re on the same page. It’s also possible there have been developments since the meeting was set, so it’s useful to see if there are any updates.
• (Assuming you set the meeting) As I mentioned earlier, I’d like to share a few ideas that have helped our clients succeed in the X, Y, and Z areas. Before we get going, by the time we’re done with this meeting, what else might you like to cover?
  It’s possible the buyer had something else in mind when they accepted the meeting with you beyond your intentions. This is a good way to check in before you start talking to ensure the meeting is as valuable as possible.
• What’s your sense of what needs to happen to improve that/make progress here/change that?
  Knowing your buyer’s perspective on the situation and how they think it can be addressed will give you an idea of things like company culture, how receptive they’ll be to your ideas, how to frame your solution/service/product, etc.
• What kind of opportunities do you see for improvement in this area?
  This is a great question to uncover both aspirations and afflictions. By getting the buyer to articulate the opportunities for improvement, they’re likely to talk about both the problems they have in this area (afflictions) and their vision for what it could be like (aspirations).
• What have you done in the past to address this issue/try to reach this goal?
  As you’re formulating your solution, you don’t want to suggest something the buyer has already tried and failed. You either want to build onto what they’re doing or change it altogether, neither of which you can do without this question.

The Best Sales Conversations Balance Advocacy & Inquiry

If you want to get more information from a buyer, sometimes all you need to do is ask a question. However, sometimes you may need to ask multiple questions. Be careful not to ask too many questions, as this may make the buyer feel like they are being interrogated.

Remember that the best sales conversations happen when you strike a balance between asking questions and giving advice.

The 50 sales questions in this article will help you connect with buyers, uncover needs and opportunities, communicate the impact, and demonstrate your value by pushing back and getting buyers to think in new ways.

These are all essential elements to winning sales consistently.