In this video, we discuss how to ask good questions on a cold call. This is a very helpful area to spend time on because one of the best ways to close the prospect at the end of the cold call is to find a reason to keep talking. And one of the best ways to keep talking is to ask good questions.
Types of Questions to Ask When Selling
In order to figure out how to ask good questions on a cold call, it can help to first look at some of the different types of questions that you can ask when talking with prospects.
- Pain
- Current state
- Desired state
- Organization
- Need to purchase
- Ability to purchase
- Authority to purchase
Types of Questions to Ask When Cold Calling
In each of those categories are a number of questions to ask, and you by no means should ask all of those on a cold call. The key to how to ask good questions on a cold call is knowing that you don’t need to ask all of those, but that it also does not make sense to ask many of those when cold calling.
The way to make it clear which questions to ask and which ones to skip is to look at three goals for the questions that we ask when cold calling:
- Get the prospect talking
- Find a reason to talk more
- Identify if it makes sense to keep talking
With those three goals in mind, it is clear that the only questions we need to ask during cold calls are pain and current-state questions.
Creating Your Questions
Unfortunately, we cannot tell you which pain and current state questions to ask, as they will vary by product and service. But I can provide you with a process for creating your own questions when figuring out how to ask good questions on a cold call.
Creating Pain Questions
Pain questions are questions that probe for the pain points your product or service helps your customers to resolve, minimize, or avoid. And to show you an example of what these look like, we can go back to the recording of a salesperson cold calling and trying to sell recruiting services.
To create pain questions, we can identify the pain points the product or service helps with and create a question for each point that probes whether that is a concern for the prospect. Here is a list of pain points created for this salesperson:
- Takes a long time to fill open positions
- Hiring the wrong people is extremely costly
- Time-consuming to properly find, screen, and interview applicants
- Difficult to determine which applicant to hire and make the right decisions
Once we have those pain points, creating questions for cold calling is very easy, and here is a question for each point:
- How do you feel about the amount of time it takes to fill open positions?
- How important is it to decrease the time to fill open positions?
- How important is it to improve the quality of applicants you are hiring?
- How important is it to decrease the amount of time you spend interviewing?
Creating Current State Questions
A second type of question to create is a current state question, which helps you learn more about what the prospect is doing in the area where your product fits. These questions will be different for every product or service, and here are some questions for this salesperson:
- What is your process for filling open positions?
- How often do you need to fill open positions?
- Do you currently have open positions that you need to fill?
- How many positions are you needing to fill?
- Do you use internal staff for recruiting?
- Are you working with a recruiter or staffing agency?
- How happy are you with the quality of candidates you are interviewing? Top-caliber talent?
- How long does it usually take to fill open positions?
- When was the last time you considered making changes or improving your recruiting process?
- Do you feel like you have the internal resources and processes that are needed to get positions filled quickly and with the right caliber talent?
For your pain questions, first create a list of pain points your product can help your prospects make go away. For each pain point, create a question or two that can be asked to see how concerned the prospect is about that particular area.
How to Respond to Answers to the Questions
How to ask good questions on a cold call is only half of what we need to figure out. The other half is how to respond to the answers that the prospects give to the questions that you ask.
This can be a little more complex because while you might have a short list of questions to ask, there are many different responses that you can get back from prospects. But we help to simplify that by categorizing prospects’ answers into three categories:
- Hot – the prospect has pain or challenges in the area where your product fits
- Neutral – the prospect is doing OK or does not know how things are going
- Cold – the prospect is doing well or great
When you can categorize the response into one of those three categories, it is easy to know which direction to take the cold call.
We hope this video helps you to know how to ask good questions on a cold call.
