Sales Models, Metrics, and Motions Blog

Ask the Experts: Great Sales Questions

by Matt Bertuzzi on Fri, Aug 06, 2010

(This post is part or our ongoing series of Ask the Experts questions, please share your thoughts and experiences by posting comments!)
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Michael Pedone, President & CEO of SalesBuzz.com, started an interesting discussion on the Inside Sales Experts group on LinkedIn the other day. He asked:

What is Your Favorite Sales Question to Ask?
 

So far there are 18+ responses and I thought I might share some of the common threads.

First off, I ran a word cloud (thanks to wordle.net) on the group members' favorite sales questions. Here's what I found:

A few things jumped out at me:

  • The dominance of "You"
    More than "your company" or "your organization" - sales people are asking their prospects if/why/how things impact them directly.
     
  • "What" as king of the 5 Ws (+ 1 H)
    More than any other interrogative - sales people are relying on open ended "What" questions.
     
  • Crafting a vision for the future
    Sales people are using words like "hoping" "look" "now" "to" to convey a picture of before and (an improved) after - with their solutions as the catalyst for change.
     
Well enough from me. How about you? What are some of your favorite / go-to sales questions to move a prospect forward?

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