One of the best ways to try to create the perfect sales pitch is to build your pitch around good probing sales questions. This aligns with a key belief that we hold that the best salesperson is the one who asks the best questions.

 

Bad Sales Pitches Don’t Have Good Questions

Before we look at building the perfect sales pitch, let’s look at one of the easiest ways to identify a not-so-great pitch. The next time someone tries to sell to you, stop to watch if they ask you any questions.

If you do this, you will be extremely surprised at how often the salesperson totally skips the step of asking questions to learn more about you and to truly understand what is going on with you and why you might need what they are selling.

This misstep takes away an opportunity for a perfect sales pitch for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that at all the moments where the salesperson could have asked questions about you, they likely filled that space with time talking about their products and company. This creates an “all about me” type of conversation and this is less engaging for the prospect.

Another reason why this approach is not a great type of pitch is that if the salesperson does not ask any probing sales questions, they will not extract as much information, and this can greatly decrease their ability to qualify, build interest, and close the prospect.

 

How to Build Your Probing Sales Questions

If you agree with all of that, you may reach a point where you can say, “OK, I want to have a perfect sales pitch with good probing sales questions, but I do not know what to ask.”

This is an understandable place to be and being aware that you need to ask good probing sales questions is only half of the process. Figuring out what questions to ask is the other key piece to developing the perfect pitch.

The good news is that we have a process that you can go through that will help you develop a very good list of probing sales questions.

  • Step 1: Identify the benefits or improvements that your product helps your buyer to realize
  • Step 2: Look at each benefit and think about what problem that helps the buyer to resolve or avoid
  • Step 3: For each problem, compose one or two probing questions that you can ask to see if the problem exists or is a concern

When you complete step 3, you should have a good list of probing sales questions that you can use in your pitch. One thing to keep in mind if you really want to have the perfect sales pitch is that this list of questions can actually be slightly different for the different buyer personas that you can sell to because the problems and benefits might be slightly different from one category of buyers to the next.