By Mark Faust – Echelon Management

One challenge in today’s competitive landscape is how does one create an image of difference in the mind of the customer to compete and win? One angle is to sell profit, not simply product. One should sell to customer’s objectives and the value that the customers stand to gain with your solutions. But how do you help your team become better questioners and thus consultants? How do you help them find new profits for customers by using better questions?

Getting to the point of empowering a sales team to be true consultants, takes the effort of customizing a vocabulary of questions that is not just a list of relevant info you need to know in order to qualify a customer, but that is also a list of questions that clarify the profits being lost for inaction and profits to be gained with the implementation of your solution.

There are 5 types of questions that can be asked in the selling process. We call this the FOCUS Questioning Method™

1. Fact questions elicit data that is of a neutral importance to the customer. While certain fact questions may be critical to qualifying or appropriately presenting the right solutions to your customer, poor sales performers get caught up in asking too many fact questions many of which may be of little importance and/or could be found through basic preparation before or after the initial call. Examples: How many acres to you have? What have been your top hybrids?
2. Opportunity questions elicit the objectives, problems, pains, or direction toward which a customer needs to move. Most often the answers find a pain; it could be the pain of an unsolved problem and/or the pain of not moving as fast as possible toward a valid objective or result. Examples: What are your top problems? Which hybrids are performing poorly?
3. Consequence questions (can also be called Cost questions) elicit the cost of not solving that problem or reaching that objective faster. Cost questions can quantify the negative dollarization of the problem. Sometimes the Consequences are merely emotional, but in most business situations an excellent questioner/consultant/sales professional can help a customer discover the dollarized costs of the “Opportunities” discovered. Examples: What did that problem cost you? Is that really that important of a problem to solve?
4. Upside questions help to understand the value that stands to be gained if a change is made, the problem is solved or the objective is reached sooner with an intervention that has yet to be decided upon. Examples: If you can solve this, what would happen? What is the value of reaching that objective?
5. Solution Step questions clarify the next steps that help to advance the sale/relationship and often give the customer a choice of options rather than a yes/no “doyawanna…” forceful buying close. Most complex sales aren’t closed as much as they are advanced to the next step if all proper qualification has taken place at each step. Examples: What are the next steps we need to take to get a solution approved and implemented? We have the solutions to your problems, what do you need from us to make a decision?

Bottom line creating a list of these five types of questions listed above creates an empowering tool that is a key to more thorough preparation and selling effectiveness. Create a sheet of questions for you and your team and add to it the best questions as they come to mind. Review regularly; evaluate each others sales calls and questioning effectiveness and you will have created a process for creating consultants that sell profit vs. peddlers that just present product.