On the Road Sales Coach LABS

The Vision Council

On the Road Sales Coach LABS

Probing or the Art of Preparing and Asking Relevant Questions

March 20, 2013

Rene Shepherd:Good afternoon. On behalf of The Vision Council I’d like to welcome you back to the first session of the 2013 Series of On the Road Sales Coach Labs.

With me this morning is my co-coach, Mike Karlsrud who’s from Minneapolis. Many of you know him as an industry veteran and a consultant. He’s also the owner of 6Calls.

This is a free series provided by The Vision Council and it is a member benefit for members of The Vision Council,

A little housekeeping before we get started. Number one is your safety. So if you’re in your car, please use a hands-free device. We’ve also determined, through several years of doing this, that we get the best call quality when we mute all of the lines. So we currently have all of your lines muted. If you find that you need a clarification on something that’s said or you need to share a moment of brilliance, you can do so by pressing star 6 at any time to unmute your line. If not, we will open the lines at the end of the call for Q&A.

The program today is titled Probing or the Art of Preparing and Asking Relevant Questions.

Since last June when we started this program, we’ve covered several steps of the sales process. We pretty much started at the beginning with prospecting and qualifying. We went on to setting the agenda and gaining acceptance and today we’ll be taking the natural progression of the sales process and we’re dealing with the next phase of that, asking the right questions or relevant probing, as I like to call it.

If you’ve been on with us before you know that we break all of our calls into three specific areas so it’s a little bit easier to digest and we segue between those three.

So the three things that were going to cover today are questions and what is the goal of this whole questioning process? How do you uncover and get a clear and concise understanding of your customer’s wants or needs. Then we’re going to move on to some open and closed probes and definitions of that and how and when to use those, and some examples. Then Mike’s going to take us through a little bit of an exercise where he likens the questioning process to the piloting experience in an airplane. So I think that you’ll want to stay on to hear that.

I know a lot of this sounds really pretty easy and basic on paper but when it comes to the application of these concepts, day in and day out, we’re pretty much going to reinforce, again, that it’s part of a process. Mike, I think you would agree with that, so why don’t we kick off and you start with the next piece of this selling process and pick up where we left off last time.

Let’s talk about that whole art of conversation as it pertains to the questioning skills.

Mike Karlsrud:Thanks, Rene, and I appreciate everybody on the call and the opportunity to be able to discuss this with them.

I think that what’s kind of fascinating is if we go back to our personal experiences and basically think about the great conversations that we have had. We have had conversations with our best friends or family members or just even strangers that happen to click with us that reallythe component to all of those great conversations is the give and take that happens between great questions and thoughtful answers.

Probing is one of these skills where most people, most salespeople, have the hardest time mastering. It is, by far, and I’ve been teaching selling skills now for the better part of 20 or 25 years, this is the one skillset that makes or breaks salespeople. It’s true that a lot of people go,“No, I only pay you for closing a deal.” Well you can’t close the deal unless you know exactly what you’re trying to sell into, what products and services make the most sense?

Now, while that sounds pretty commonsensical the reality is that we very seldom spend as much time as we need to in probing.

Probing is really the skillset to the anti-salesperson’s, I think, what they believe that they should be doing. You were hired to tell the story. You were hired to tell the story of your company, the products that you have the services that you represent and then you’re also paid to tell the story about how you are the best choice for your customer. But no one ever said that when you were hitting the road that you had to ask a lot of questions and yet, interestingly, the questioning skillset is the skillset that actually makes or breaks the bulk of your sales.

It requires a tremendous amount of discipline. It requires a tremendous amount of practice and of soul searching to come up with these great questions but it is so worth it. It is so worth it. It may sound like it’s a waste of time because, after all, you’ve driven like 45 minutes to go call on somebody. You’re paid to get your story told and you might be thinking I don’t have enough time to ask all these questions. They’re not going to have enough time to dialog. I need to get there and I need to (throw up) and I need to show up.

But what I have found out, what many people have found out, is the fact that if you can keep people engaged in a conversation the more information that they share by answering your good questions, the more engaged they are and I think we’ve all got examples of this.

One example that I always go back to is the fact that I called on so many doctors throughout the years where the first thing out of their mouths was, “I got three minutes.” I go, “Cool. That’s all I need. Just need three minutes. Do you mind if I just ask you a few questions within the three minutes of time?” Before you know it, Rene, it’s a 20-minute conversation or it’s a
30-minute appointment all of a sudden. If he’s really interested he’s even going out of the room and telling his receptionist to push people back a little bit further so that they can continue the conversation with you.

I think that is what’s so cool about this. It is much different than if you would walk in and start talking and just unloading then all of sudden they’ll look around and go, “Geez,you’re just kind of shooting in the dark. You’re just unloading your truck and I’m really not getting anything out of this conversation.”

So the goal in probing is to build this clear and this complete and this mutual understanding of what your customer’s needs and wants are and this is really the skillset that either careers are built or destroyed by,by your ability to uncover what’s happening or try to peel back this onion of information.

So we may be asking how do we know that we’ve done this well. You’ve probed really well when you got three criteria met. The clear understanding of needs. All this means is that each of you really know, specifically, what the customer wants or needs. You, specifically, know what they want or need and then, second of all, why it is important to them. So not only do you know what it is but why it is so important.

The next criteria are you have a complete understanding of their needs. So clear is the first one, complete is the second meaning that for the particular buying decision or whatever you’re talking about, that you know all of the customer’s needs and then, second of all, the priory of those needs.

I look at it this way, for instance, if I’m having a conversation with a doctor or a client and I’ve asked them what are your concerns and what can I help you with and he lays out two or three or four different scenarios about things that he’s looking for and needs or wants or desires that they have in their business or practice, I will often then ask, “Of those three things, Doctor, that you have just laid out for me, which one would you say is themost important to you? What’s the highest priority foryou?” Then what’s the next priority and then, finally, what’s the last priority?

This one simple step of asking that question really is gold for you, as a sales rep. The reason why it’s gold is because they just told you how to support with your products and services and which one to start with. What’s amazing is when we talk about meeting the needs that are the most important and have the highest priority we’ve struck gold because that’s usually their biggest concern.

Reversely, if I started supporting with products and services on the last thing that they had as a priority they’re going to blow you off and the reason why they’ll blow you off is because they’re going to sit back and say, “Dude that’s important but it’s not really that important,” and we missed our opportunity to go get the hottest topic and the most nastiest thing that they’ve got going on. You get to solve that issue for them. So it’s important to ask what the priorities are.

Then, the final component which is each of you has a mutual understanding of what those needs are so you and the customer share the same understanding that it’s a clear and complete picture of what they want or need and that you both agree that this is exactly what you should be addressing.

We hit this word called assumptions that comes into play and everybody knows what assumption means and where we often fall as a sales consultant and as a sales rep in not taking time to build these three criteria, is that we will jump ahead of the process and make too many assumptions. When we make assumptions we’re going to miss the mark for the rest of the sales call.

So a clear, complete mutual understanding of the customer’s needs will ensure that the recommendations that you make will address the needs from the most important to the least and the chances are that if you solve their hottest issue the rest will be icing on the cake. In other words, it gives you context for which to place the solutions that you’re bringing to the table. If we don’t have context, they’re the ones that are going to provide it to us, if we don’t have that context there’s going to be some huge misunderstandings down the road and when you go to close you may miss the mark.

I think this is one of the most important things that we need to have in our repertoire and we often gloss over this question so quickly because we’re so excited about selling the story, Rene, that we forget that the most important part of this is making sure we tell the right story.

Rene Shepherd:The interesting perspective is that the most powerful skill that a salesperson has is the ability to ask great questions. I heard that loud and clear and I think people minimize that skillset sometimes. The second most powerful skill is the ability to stop talking and listen for clues.

Basically, what you said was that when you question appropriately and identify the what, the why and the sense of urgency, you actually identify the starting point for your conversation and that’s powerful. That is very important in any conversation, knowing where to start. The beginning always gets the most attention so invest in how you start. So if you don’t follow this tip to ask great questions, you’re bound to flounder and not maximize your time with the account.

The next piece of the puzzle is knowing which questions to use, and when to use them.

So speaking of that why don’t you give us some examples or let’s talk about those actual questions. What are some of the questions that you can ask?

Mike Karlsrud:The first thing that I do is give us some definitions. The first thing is, for those of you and those of us that have been in sales training in the past we’ve always heard about open probes and closed probes. An open probing question is very simply defined as a question that requires more than a yes or no answer and a closed probe question is a question that requires a very short, confirming answer for us, so a yes or a no.

It’s interesting, Rene, you and I talked about this in private conversation as well as on these calls. The skillsets in selling aren’t always just used and should never just be used, in my opinion, in the selling process. They’re great skillsets for everyday life.

I share this example of I’ve got two boys, they come home from school, we sit around the dining room table. As a good dad you want to ask how the day went, right? So everybody sits around. The food is there. You’re ready to roll and I asked this one simple question which was, “How was your day today at school?” All of us parents will get the exact same answer. It’s either, “Fine,” or it’s, “Good.” That’s it. It doesn’t tell you anything.

But it’s amazing when you think about the simple question of whether or not it’s an open ended question or a closed ended question, it changes the dynamic significantly. So I learned, and I recommend this to all of you, how to best ask great questions at my own dining room table because the worst critics are my own children. I think all of us can have that same experience where you sit back and go, “Geez,Louise, I really wish I could get more information from you about how your day was because I genuinely care.” Well, ask the right question and you’ll get the right answer.

We’ve changed it up a little bit and in our household now the question, which we kind of get chastised for as parents is,“Tell me the coolest thing that happened in your day today.” Just by using that word tell me more, tell me more about that or tell me what happened it does not logically give you a yes or no, typically, unless they’re really being a pain in the rearend. Oftentimes they do want to tell you the story.

So an open probe is a question that requires multiple and a closed requires just a yes or no. So you might have some examples like this of calls. One of them might be, “Tell me about your new marketing plans or your marketing plans for 2013.” “Tell me about your sales goals or the goals for your optician.” “Tell me about some new things that you want to bring into your office during this next year,” or, “Tell me about some changes that you might be planning ahead or planning for in 2013.”

So when you start asking these questions and have this really broad, open brush, what it allows you to do is really begin to search for opportunities. Searching for opportunities is exactly what we want to do. Those are three or four questions or examples of open ends that I really like.

Some closed ones might be where you’re just asking for a simple yes or no. For instance you might ask, “Have you thought about doing a sun promotion this year?” If the answer is no, “Okay. Do you mind if I ask you a couple of questions about that?” “Sure.” “Have you ever run a sun promotion in the past?” “Yes.” “Tell me about that.” “Oh, it was so good or not so good,” or, “It took a lot of time.” “Didn’t see incremental sales,” and so forth but it’s that whole play between open and closed probes that allows you to, again, think of it as an onion and you begin to unpeel the onion.

The first answer is always good but it’s never as good as the second answer to the question, the third answer to the question and the fourth answer to the question. That’s where the real meat lives, in the second layer, the third layer and the fourth layer and this is the skillset seriously where we, as salespeople, need to dig in our heels, feel comfortable hanging out there and having the conversation thatjust lets this onion do its stuff so that folks can begin to really get to the core issues that they’re looking for.

I think you said it best in our last conversation. They’re conversation starters. The conversation starter is so important so that you know where you can take the conversation later.

Rene Shepherd:My key take away from this segment is that we need conversation starters. We’re not looking to a checklist of yes and no. That doesn’t give us the real deep dive into the kind of information that can help us create the strategy for success. So we’re not looking to check off a yes or a no. We really want those conversations to get started and successful conversation has the person that you’re talking to talking more than you talk.

I think that Mike gave a perfect example of when you get caught in the trap, and we all will, we get caught in the trap of using those yes and no questions. Suppose you would ask an account, “It’s August. Were you planning any children’s promotion?” That’s obviously a closed question and it comes out of your mouth and you realize it’s a closed question and the account says, “No. We weren’t.” Well, where do you go from there?