Stephan Schiffman - The 250 Sales Questions To Close The Deal

THE 250 SALES QUESTIONS TO

CLOSE THE DEAL

Stephan Schiffman

Contents

Questions That Initiate Contact
and Build Rapport with a Prospect

Opening Questions to Figure Out What
the Person and the Company Do

Follow-Through Questions to
Figure Out What the Person
and the Company Do

Questions to Figure Out What
Someone Who Contacts You Does

Questions That Move You
Toward a Next Step

Next Step Questions
for Managers Only

Questions That Help You Identify
and Deliver the Right Presentation

Questions That Deal with Setbacks
or Obstacles in the Sales Process

Questions That Will Help You Formalize
the Sales Decision and Negotiate
the Best Deal

Acknowledgments

My thanks go out to all the people whose help made this book possible: Brandon Toropov, Steve Bookbinder, Lynne Einleger, Amy Stagg, Scott Forman, Tina Bradshaw, Alan Koval, Surendra Sewsankar, George Richardson, Stacia Skinner, Art Jackson, David Rivera, and everyone else at D.E.I. Management Group. As always, thank you Daniele, Jennifer, and Anne.

Introduction

S uperior questioning skills are a prerequisite of any successful selling career. In this book, I've tried to share what I've learned about questioning in the sales interview over the past quarter of a century. I've focused in on 250 essential sales questions questions that, when asked intelligently and in the right setting, will help you build rapport, streamline your sales process, and, yes, close more deals.

As always, I'm interested in your comments on what follows. I hope you'll write to me with your insights and experiences.

Make it a productive day!

Stephan Schiffman

President

D.E.I. Management Group

888 7th Avenue, 9th Floor

New York, NY 10106

contactus@dei-sales.com

Chapter One

Six Kinds of Questions

T his book is designed to help you ask questions that move you closer to closing the deal. It offers 250 questions designed to help you travel relentlessly toward that goal. The questions are arranged into six distinct categories.

1 Questions that help you initiate contact and build a rapport with the prospectChapter Two.

2. Questions that help you figure out what the other person does (you can't sell effectively if you don't know this)Chapters Three, Four, and Five.

3. Questions that help you secure a Next Step with the prospectChapters Six and Seven.

4. Questions that help you identify the right presentationChapter Eight.

5. Questions that help you deal with setbacks or obstacles in the saleChapter Nine.

6. Questions that will help you formalize the decision to use what your product or service offersand negotiate the best dealChapter Ten.

Going Beyond Magic Questions

When I train salespeople, I often ask what kinds of questions they think are the most important in the sales process. A good many of them tell me that they want to focus on killer questionsquestions that supposedly force the issue or close the sale. These sorts of questions typically sound like this:

What do I have to do to get you into a Dodge Viper?

When should we start?

Do you want it in blue, or in yellow?

Basically, these are questions that sound likeand have even been described asclosing questions. It's like people think there are magic words they can say that will turn a skeptical prospect into a customer.

The sad, and often overlooked, truth is that these questions alienate prospects. They will close only those sales where the person has already more or less decided to buy. These are not the kinds of questions you and I will be exploring in this book.

Selling is a process, and a fairly complex one. No one single question recited from memory during a few short seconds is likely to secure the deal for you. That's the bad news. Here's the good news: Intelligent questions posed as part of a larger process can and will win you the business. And that's what we'll be exploring together in this book.

Selling as a Process

Think of selling as a process, a relationship that emerges over time.

Like all useful processes, good selling has a goal. What is the final stage of the sale? Typically, the salespeople I talk to will tell me that the final stage is the close, and that is certainly accurate enough. But it is also true that it is only salespeople who are focused on closing a deal. From the buyer's perspective, the initial decision to agree to work with us is actually a decision to use what we have to offer.

So, instead of focusing obsessively on the word close, I prefer to think of the final stage of the sale as the prospect's decision to use what we have to offer. The prospect decides to use our product or servicethat's the direction where we want our questions to take us.

Let's start from that point and work backward. I want my new customer to use me as a resourcenot just today, but hopefully forever. That is the ideal result of the sales situation. Here's a brief description of what I call the Makes Sense Selling Model. It shows the sales process as it should work:

1. Open (takes little time)

2. Gather info (the most time!)

3. Plan (little time)

4. Close (hardly any time!): The point where we say, Makes sense to mewhat do you think? (That's the ultimate question to close the deal, by the way.)

And here are a few things to remember about this model:

People only buy what makes sense to them

Your plan must be based on what they do

75 percent of the work comes before your presentation

What Makes Sense

What questions can we ask to make the person decide to use us? There really are none. In fact, the only reason people ever buy anything is because it makes sense for them to do somakes sense from their point of view.

Stop for a moment and think about the last time you purchased anything from a high-pressure salesperson. Even if you happened to run into someone who used all kinds of fancy closing tricks in an attempt to get you to buy, and even if after hearing one of those closing tricks you did decide to buy from him or her, my guess is that the reason you did so is that it made sense for you to buy from that person.

Perhaps your whole business is built around documents and copyingand perhaps your copier had once died during a rush period. You then had a busy period coming up, and a copier salesman happened to call or walk in the door. You took a glance at your deadlines, you took another glance at the copier salesman, and you listened to what he had to say. Half an hour later, you agreed that it made sense to get a new copier. So you bought from him.

No matter what the salesman said, you bought because it made sense for you to do so. Whether it will make sense for you to buy from the same copier salesman