Build Sales Relationships: Consultative Questioning
January 28, 2008
(A commentary)
By Jeff Schmitt

I got my first sales job out of college. Naturally, I picked up a book to prepare. At the time, I thought it was like a bible. It was clear and compelling, packed with ways to rack up sales through psychology and control.

I marched into orientation, ready to close like a champion. That's when my real learning began. My manager opened training with a startling insight:
"Want to be successful in sales? Keep your mouth shut and your ears open." His approach contradicted everything I read: He stressed dialogue instead of dominance and questioning in place of presenting. And he always customized his approach based on what the other party shared. In his world, sales was not a game of breaking down a prospect's barriers. It was a means to identify a solution and determine whether forging a partnership had value to either party.

Francis Bacon once wrote, "A prudent question is one half of wisdom." Bacon would've been a successful salesperson. Like an attorney, a salesperson must ask open-ended questions and gather knowledge before presenting a compelling case.

This consultative approach yields a variety of benefits:

• Business intelligence. By gathering the right information, you position your solution as a viable alternative to the status quo. Questions enable you to learn about your prospects' individual or corporate goals, personal feelings, day-to-day pains, past experiences, expectations, decision-making authority and openness to change. In turn, you can leverage your understanding of the prospect, industry and solution to craft the most appropriate and effective message.
• Individual discovery. Questions allow you to help prospects identify their own
  problems—and the extent to which these frustrations impact their daily work and the larger operation. Many times, prospects may not fully realize their dissatisfaction. They simply accept certain barriers as part of their daily routine. Questions can help them better envision the true costs of complacency, making them more open to your solution.
• Early warnings. Have you ever been blindsided by an unforeseen issue? Have you ever expected to close a sale, only to learn too late that key stakeholders didn't truly embrace your proposition? Consultative questioning helps you unearth and address potential objections early in the process.
• Engagement: By establishing a dialogue, you turn potential prospects into active participants. You engage them intellectually and emotionally, demonstrating a sincere interest in them.
• Commitment: Time is money. A consultative approach helps you answer the key questions: Does the prospect have a need and buy-in? Is the timing right? Does your contact have the authority to buy and the will to do so? What types of budgetary or political considerations are at play? The answers will dictate the time and energy you expend in wooing a particular account.

Click here for some examples of consultative questions and contexts where you can use them. You can even print and give out this handy PDF to your sales team.

Additionally, here are some more secrets for using consultative questioning to your advantage:

• Listen. Let your prospects open up. Identify what they value in a solution and a business relationship. Listen for what isn't being said and probe. Your prospects won't always share the most accurate or pertinent information. Their narrative will naturally be compromised by a lack of exposure to a problem, a discomfort with revealing specifics or even personal biases and agendas. That's why patience and guidance are so key: the more your prospects talk, the sharper the picture that emerges.
• Care. Personal values are the backbone of any successful sales career. Expect failure if you work against your prospects' best interests or harbor doubts about your solution. In sales, you want your customers to view you as a strategic partner, not just a supplier. To do so, you must be flexible, creative and empathetic. Just as important, you need to deliver! Sales is the equivalent to walking a proverbial tight rope, balancing your values with the burden of meeting quota.
• Plan. You'll rarely get enough time to thoroughly qualify a prospect in an initial call and subsequent follow-ups. Identify what information is important and what is a luxury. Be ready to ask other open-ended questions based off your prospects' response, to broaden the give-and-take in strategic areas. Similarly, summarize responses to get clarification and prompt additional insights.
• Be knowledgeable. You need to be an expert—just don't make a big show of it. You must also possess a strong grasp of organizational operations and politics, industry trends, competitive solutions and the unique challenges faced by targeted companies. Without this, you'll lack capacity to provide lon-term solutions that truly suit your prospects. Always put yourself in your prospects' shoes. What questions would you ask if your company called you? What images would grab your attention and elicit your emotions? What would be important for you to know?

According to Anthony Robbins, "Successful people ask better questions, and as a result, they get better answers." Consultative questioning gets these answers. They will not only tell you what a prospect needs, but how they need it. They are the tools to help you understand where a prospect is—and how to help them get where they need to go.