The Two Most Powerful Questions to Ask When Selling

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Lenann McGookey Gardner

Sales Training Expert and Executive Coach

     

The two most powerful types of questions you can ask when selling focus on prospect’s problems and what it would mean to relieve that Pain, according to sales expert Lenann McGookey Gardner.

The two most powerful types of questions you can ask when you’re selling are:

1. Questions that ask, “What does that problem, or that Pain, mean to you?”

2. Questions that ask, “If you solved that problem, or eliminated that Pain, what would that mean to you?”

“In order to pose either of these powerful types of questions, you have to know something about the Pain your prospect is feeling,” explains Gardner. “Once you’ve identified some Pain first, then you ask her about that – using one of the two types of questions described above.”

The source authority of this approach is Neil Rackham, author of The S.P.I.N. Selling Fieldbook.

Rackham literally recorded 35,000 sales conversations, all of them business-to-business, high-dollar efforts. When the transcripts of those conversations were loaded into huge computer databases, Rackham saw that the types of questions the salespeople asked fell into four categories – and that only these two types of questions were strongly positively correlated with selling success.

In other words, people who asked those two specific types of questions sold much more than those who didn’t ask those powerful types of questions.

Said Gardner, “Questions are the most powerful form of verbal behavior you can engage in when selling, and the two types of questions identified above are the most powerful types of questions you can ask. So ask them!”

Lenann McGookey Gardner is a Harvard MBA, an American Marketing Association “Professional Services Marketer of the Year” award winner, and a 2010 winner of the “Top Performing CEO” award from her state’s Business Weekly. She has two decades of experience helping services providers to grow their revenues and is the author of Got Sales? The Complete Guide to Today’s Proven Methods for Selling Services. She is also an Executive Coach. Learn more at www.YouCanSell.com.

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