We held a webinar on “10 Sales Tips for When You Feel Like You Suck at Sales,” and sales tip 5 is to ask good questions.
But tip 6 is to ask good questions. This is a key tip for a few different reasons and those are listed below.
Questions help you when you don’t know what to say.
If you are not good at sales, one of the biggest problems and possible intimidations is that you might not know what to say when talking with prospects. That is understood and can be an issue regardless of your level of sales skills.
But some of these sales tips can help you “hack” the system, and this is one of those: If you always have a few questions to ask your prospect, you can worry less about not knowing what to say because whenever you get stuck, just ask some of your questions.
This not only gives you something to say, but if your questions are designed right, they can get the prospect talking, and then you have to worry more about listening than talking.
Questions make you seem like you are smart.
If you feel like you are not good at sales or just starting, you might worry that you will give off an impression where the prospect figures that out.
These sales tips and asking good questions help to trick the prospect a little bit because you might not have a deep level of knowledge (be very smart), but if you ask good questions, you will give off the impression that you are a very sharp and professional salesperson.
Questions will give you valuable information.
If you feel like you are not a good salesperson, you may feel that way because you are not making good decisions. If that is the case, it is very understandable because selling and dealing with prospects is very complex, and it can be challenging to know what to do in all of the different situations.
Unfortunately, there will always be times when it is unclear what the best decision to make is. But one thing that can help decrease the number of situations where it is unclear what to do is to increase the amount of information that you have.
Let me give you an example. A prospect may ask you to put together a proposal or presentation, and you may spend days of preparation putting that together. You may lose the deal, and all of that time is wasted.
In this example, you don’t know why you lost, but if you had more information about the prospect, you could have possibly done things differently. You might have known that the prospect was not qualified, and you might have spent a few hours on preparation instead of a few days. Or you might have structured your response with a better message that communicated your offering better.
Asking good questions and using these sales tips can help you to have more information in situations like this and that can help you to make better decisions and be a better salesperson.