Good morning, amazing salespeople and businesspeople! I hope that each and every one of you is excited to get in the game, run hard, make a difference, and move yourself one step closer to the goals that you have for yourself … but participation isn’t mandatory. As always, you get to choose the level of participation today—why not choose ‘full out’ mode?

One of the most fundamental sales skills is that of asking questions … approaching everything from the perspective of wanting to discover. ‘So, what is it that we need to be discovering, James?’, you might ask. Great question—see … you’re getting the hang of it already!

When we head out in to the world to look for opportunities to offer our services in return for pay, our first order of business is to figure out how to identify the people who actually want or need these services. Short of wearing a sandwich board that says, “Will list your home for food!” how else will we identify potential clients without asking a boat-load of questions?

  • Who do you know that is talking about, or planning to sell their home in the near future?
  • When do YOU plan on making your next move?
  • If you were to even consider selling your home, where would you go next?

These are very basic examples of ‘probing’ questions—questions that we’re using as bait just to see who might even respond in a positive way. Once we have someone who admits to having plans to move in the near future we shift to ‘qualifying’ questions.

  • In a perfect world … how soon would you like to be in your new home?
  • What else needs to happen before you would be ready to list your home for sale?
  • What is the most important thing for you and your family about making this move?
  • What is the primary reason that you’ve decided it’s time to make a move?
  • What is it about your home that is no longer working for you?

Again, just a basic sampling of questions that you can ask to begin finding out the particulars about what is motivating these people to need what you have to offer. In my next blog we’re going to need to move into the real meat of ‘question-based selling’ and look at how we use questions to get past resistance/objections and, most importantly, to close for the signature! The real issue is that ‘saying’ and ‘asking’ are two totally different things.

Giving a speech is a skill of its own, but it doesn’t really have a place when it comes to selling. Let’s commit to learning how to think and speak in the form of questions so that we can get more appointments set, contracts signed, and commissions earned!

Isn’t that a fantastic way to make today count?

(Photo courtesy of galleryhip.com)