Asking questions of your customers can help you learn more about them, but there’s an art to phrasing your queries. Mark Roberge, a Harvard Business school lecturer and author of
The Sales Acceleration Formula, says salespeople too often use a “show up and throw up” strategy, rattling off a bunch of random questions to buyers. Instead, employing empathy is the key to asking the right questions. “Selling is about understanding the perspective of the buyer and then tailoring your sales process according to that,” Roberge says.
Roberge has a five-phase evolution to asking the right questions, including recognizing what doesn’t work, understanding the importance of asking questions, appreciating the power of open-ended questions, sequencing open-ended questions to gather more information, and reframing the buyer’s perspective through provocative questions.
Salespeople tend to rely on closed-ended questions that can be answered with a “yes” or “no.” Instead, a sequence of open-ended questions that invite buyers to elaborate on their responses can help develop that buyer perspective—their needs, their challenges, the timing around the deal, and their buying authority, Roberge told Forbes.com. (Roberge spent a decade at Hubspot as the senior vice president of worldwide sales and services and later served as the chief revenue officer.)
You could ask: Can you tell me more about your goals when buying a home? Based on the customer’s response, probe deeper to get a better sense of their priorities by asking additional questions, such as What do you need to do in order to make this home purchase successful? and How can I take some of the stress of this off of you?
A provocative question to reframe the buyer’s perspective might be: Why don’t you think this house is the right one for you? Before meeting with your clients, try to view the situation from their eyes. “Great salespeople can empathize and adjust in real time, as the meeting is taking place,” Roberge notes.
Get more tips on asking the right questions.
Source: “The Key to Asking Better Sales Questions Is Empathy, According to Harvard’s Mark Roberge,” Forbes.com (Feb. 26, 2018)
