In the age of empowered buyers, business is often won by the sales person who asks the best questions. Deb Calvert, president and founder of People First Productivity Solutions, has written the essential field guide for sales professionals who want to learn how to ask those questions.
Today’s buyers have access to unprecedented levels of information: product specifications, pricing, customer reviews, competitive comparisons. It’s all a few clicks away. They don’t need sales professionals to tell them what they can easily learn elsewhere, and will resent (if it happens at the wrong point in their buying process) being “sold.”
What they do want is consultative guidance, especially when it involves co-creating unique value.
Of course, the notion that asking the right questions is key to sales success is nothing new. Mike Bosworth’s Solution Selling remains a classic guide to asking smart selling questions.
But sales pros who’ve read Bosworth’s book often have two reactions: 1) It’s an incredibly valuable guide, particularly when selling complex, high-value products, but 2) it’s incomplete, not delving deeply enough into question design, particularly for open queries.