It can sometimes seem daunting to train salespeople to ask the right sales prospecting questions. This is understandable because a conversation can go so many different directions. But it does not need to be so difficult, and we will provide some structure here that you can apply to your sales training processes.
Question Branches
One thing that makes training salespeople to ask the right questions difficult is that asking questions is like a frog jumping on a series of lily pads. When one question is asked, that leads to a prospect response, and from that response, there is a whole new set of follow-up questions or actions.
To truly teach the right questions, you must prepare for all of the different branches and lines of questioning. Mapping this out can be a bit difficult from a sales training perspective.
Learning Through Trial-and-Error
The unfortunate thing in most sales organizations is that if you don’t know all the different questions to ask, they will learn primarily through trial and error. This will involve the salesperson going through the same situations again and again, and after a while, they will start to figure out what to ask, usually after not asking the right questions a couple of times.
The challenge with this sales training process is that it is the most costly way to train salespeople. This process usually involves many mistakes, and there is usually a very long ramp-up time. When you add up all the deals and customers lost during this period of learning through trial and error, it is extremely costly in terms of lost revenue.
4 Steps to Teach Salespeople to Ask the Right Questions
Here is a straightforward 4-step process that you can use to train salespeople to ask the right questions.
1. Pre-Qualifying Questions
The first step to making a giant stride forward is to outline the pre-qualifying questions for the products that they sell. These questions determine whether there is enough of a fit for both parties to meet or keep talking.
Here are some examples:
How concerned are you about the amount of time it takes to train and ramp up new salespeople?
How important is it for you to decrease your sales staff turnover?
What kind of sales training methodologies have you used in the past?
2. Hard Qualifying Questions
Next, you want to train salespeople to ask hard qualifying questions. These are questions that determine how real the deal is. Here are some examples.
What is the budget range that the project needs to fit in?
What is the decision making process?
What other options are you considering?
3. Closing Questions
For step 3, you will want to train salespeople to ask the right closing questions. These are questions to ask to close the prospect, and here are some examples:
What do you think of what we have discussed so far?
What would you like to do next?
What would you need to be able to make a commitment to move forward?
4. Build Question Trees
Step 4 is where you really take your team to the next level, and this is where you build out question trees. These are a breakdown of questions with all of the branches of follow-up questions. For example, if you ask a question, the prospect will have some sort of response. For each prospect response, there is a follow-up question or action, which will make up the branches of the question tree.
Building that out might sound a bit difficult or tedious, but it is not that bad. You can think about the anticipated prospect responses for the first line of questions. Then, for each response, develop the follow-up question or action. You can then repeat this process for as deep as you want, but two or three levels should be sufficient to help train salespeople.
