Sales and Selling
This post is an excerpt from Entrepreneur You using the final letter of the acronym M.A.P. for an explanation of a critical aspect of sales and selling.
Probe
To keep the sales call moving forward, you’ll need to develop a line of questioning. But this isn’t just any type of questioning. This is asking questions that you could not find the answers to on a piece of paper — questions that will help build your relationship and your proposal.
At this point, you may feel like you’re ready to jump into closing the sale and to begin providing your services or product to your client but no matter how tempting this may be, you’re not really ready yet! Realize that you still know relatively little about the client, and you need to understand them fully before you can begin to help them. Remember that the point is not to sell to them. You’re there to help them.
There are different lines of probing questions you can ask. You might ask simple questions that need only a yes or no response. You might ask questions gleaned from information you found on the client’s website. Or you might choose to ask questions that elicit intelligent, thought provoking answers. We will concentrate on the last group. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not telling you to sit in this meeting and hound the poor client. There’s nothing I hate more than someone who interrogates me like a private investigator trying to get a murder confession out of me. This will put anyone on the defensive! Instead, I’m talking about developing questions that you can easily ask during the conversation and that allow you to understand the client more clearly.
I have developed over 100 questions for each of my product lines. Does that mean I use all of them during a call? What do you think? Of course not! But when you’re in front of someone and you get nervous, having these questions readily available is what will make the difference between you and the competition. The categories and the questions you’ll develop will follow the natural flow of a conversation. Read on to learn more.
For further information on the rest of M.A.P. go to Entrepreneur You.
This is an excerpt from Entrepreneur You.
JUN
