(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.