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Quiz: Can You Move the Sale Forward?

October 19th, 2009 @ 5:30 am

2 Comments

Categories: Cold Calls, General, Pitches, Sales Skills, Sales Tips

Tags: Question, Chances, Sales Tools, Benefits, Sales Strategy, Sales, Human Resources, Geoffrey James

Ineffective questions are a common sales mistake.  Such questions slow the sale down and can kill a deal entirely, if there are too many of them.  Here’s a quick quiz to see if you know what makes a question effective.

SCENARIO: You just made a cold call to a lead who seems interested in what you have to offer.  However, to move the sale forward, you need to gather more information.  Here are six questions that you might ask:

Which of these questions is LEAST effective?

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    1

    IanP2

    10/19/09 | Report as spam

    RE: Quiz: Can You Move the Sale Forward?

    Gosh, Where to start on this.

    When a buyer receives a cold call, he/she hopes for two things from the sales rep.
    1. That they understand the industry they are approaching.
    2. They understand what they are seling.

    From these basics we hope, but rarely expect that the callers will modify their approach to project their companies' values.

    Some companies sell ranges of widgets and compete on price, quality, delivery, reputation or whatever.
    A buyer wants the reps for these companies to 'lay out their wares' by pitching along the lines of "We are ABC inc. and we sell many kinds of widgets targetted precisely at your industry, can we come in and show you our range, you will be impressed with our prices, quality, delivery...blah blah".
    This is real old fashioned market trading.

    Other companies sell services, maybe fashion design, engineering consultancy, IT solutions' or whatever.
    The buyer wants the cold caller to shoehorn this kind of service into typical examples of what he can do for the buyer's company.
    Quite often this kind of selling is almost corporate resume / CV based. "We are DEF co. and we did this for X and increased productivity, that for Y and identified new markets, can we come in and discuss ways forward to help you."

    The cold caller, in both these examples, should by the end of the call have established a number of things in the buyers mind.
    1; Who the rep's company is and what they do.
    2: That the calling company is, or is not, on the right playing field for the buyer.
    3; That there is a level of mutual interest in going further.
    4; Most importantly that the seller want to progress to the next level by meeting and discussing a way forward.

    If you get these critical ideas into the buyers mind then the rest is easy.

    IanP

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    2

    patriciaweber

    10/20/09 | Report as spam

    RE: Quiz: Can You Move the Sale Forward?

    I guess I read too much into the questions.

    "Of what I said, what might be of interest to you? (37%)"

    This implied to me that the seller was focused on their spiel first; meaning they weren't asking questions to even begin with!

    The winning one was going to be my second choice. Even though it was closed ended, it implied to me, there was a conversation going on. In general a better thing than going down the spiel direction.

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