While effective questioning can be called a basic sales skill, it is also one of the cornerstone sales skills. If you can’t effectively ask your customer the right questions, you’ll never even get to the point where you’ll want to ask the most important question of all, asking for the sale.
Unlike selling in the real world, there are a few things that have to be assumed in your questioning of your customer. You have to assume that you have permission to ask them questions. Unfortunately, you’ll never know if you don’t because they’ll just leave and go somewhere else. You also have to assume that you may not get an answer. Not all of your customers will reply to your questioning. You can’t read their body language so you have no way to see if they are responding in other ways. You’ve got to just continue on as if you got a neutral answer.
Effective questioning can take many forms in a digital world. Sometimes you have to make inferences from metrics to assume the answer to a question. Want to know if your new design is conducive to sales? Watch your stats when you make the change. Many effective questioners will use A/B testing to effectively listen to the answers they’re getting from their customers. Sometimes you do get a direct answer in the form of a comment or email. While you may be shooting for the masses, those that do comment or email are a very strong indicator of what the rest of the masses feel. You should take a comment or email as an excellent opportunity to listen to your customers and to directly ask them questions. Use it to learn more about your customers needs, wants, and objections. Then use those needs, wants, and objections to position yourself in a way to make the sale to that customer.
You can’t please them all all the time. But becoming an effective questioner will help you get close to pleasing most of them all the time.
About Shane Ede
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