As a salesperson I am always looking for the next new opportunity and or prospect to tell my story to. Always sharpening my presentation and questioning. Always making sure all of my material is spot on and has no grammatical errors. Always making sure to be on time for appointments and to make sure my other attendees and colleagues are on time as well. But what about making sure the prospect can buy, has budget and or what is the formal process of purchasing. All prospects have different personalities and each company has different policies. Some are more strict than others and some prospects make decisions in different ways. You could have the best thing since sliced bread and it could literally "solve world hunger" but if you do not know anything about "how they buy" you could be wasting your time. And time is money!!! So in my opinion the best tough and makes the customer think questions for this are, How do you make decisions on investing in a solution? And or How do you make purchasing decisions? And or What is the budget process like at XYZ company? DO NOT say Do you purchase through a bidding process? Do you have money? Can you buy my stuff? Yes or no questions will not help. Our job as salespeople is to HELP our prospects in purchasing our stuff. We cannot help them without knowing all of the details of the purchasing process. Find out how your prospects / customers buy today.
Send me feedback on the results of using these questions.
Shawn
PS: My next blog post will be talking about why you need to keep in mind that we are always trying to HELP people. ;) Stay tuned!!
