Asking great sales questions allows you to discover what is taking place in your buyer’s life. This understanding of their needs and wants allows you to create a meaningful connection, and ultimately help them improve their future.

Sales representatives play an important role in persuading potential customers to make a purchase. They do this by introducing new and innovative ideas that challenge the customer’s existing beliefs. This encourages the customer to re-evaluate their opinion and see the potential value in the product. Additionally, sales representatives are able to identify any issues that could prevent the customer from completing the purchase, and take steps to prevent them.

Great sales questions help you win sales.

In this article, we will share 12 powerful sales questions that will help you build rapport, navigate buyer wants, needs, and desires, and close the sale.

What Are Open-Ended Sales Questions?

Can you give me an example of an open-ended sales question?

Broad open-ended sales questions

Broad sales questions that are open-ended help customers to feel comfortable and start talking. They are great for determining what is happening in your buyer’s world and are necessary for sales success.

Specific open-ended sales questions

Asking specific open-ended questions is more likely to uncover information that the buyer might not be aware of.

Open-ended questions, i.e. those that can’t be answered with a simple “yes” or “no”, typically fall into one of three categories: an expression of need, no perception of need, or lack of knowledge.

What are some good open-ended sales questions? Why are they important?

The goal is to start with general questions and then move to more specific questions. This will help you understand the buyer’s perceptions of their needs and allow you to present solutions that will improve the situation and drive the buyer’s interest.

What Are Closed-Ended Sales Questions?

Sales questions that can be answered with a simple “yes” or “no” are useful for figuring out what a customer wants. It’s easy to get more information from the customer after getting a positive or negative response. Closed-ended questions can help you find customer needs that they might not think of as a problem. Asking specific questions sometimes causes customers to reevaluate their needs.

12 Questions That’ll Make Your Sales Process More Efficient

1) Have you defined your ideal buyer profile?

The most common killer of small business sales efficiency is when people try to appeal to everyone. This makes it difficult to build a sales process and marketing machine that can serve different types of buyers. The best thing to do is focus your proactive marketing and selling efforts on one thing at a time.

Consider these questions as you define your personas:

• Do you have a document that describes your ideal buyer?
• Do you define characteristics of your ideal buyer like company size and industry?
• Does it include other firmographic information that might be unique to your typical buyer?
• If you sell larger deals to B2B (Business to Business) companies and have multiple contacts you approach when selling your service, what are their typical titles and departments?
• What else is unique about them? Are they usually male or female, junior or senior, managers or individual contributors?

2) Do you have a sales process?

I’ve seen many companies not have a sales process, which is the second most common mistake. In every sales pursuit, similar things have to happen even though each one is different. You need to figure out what those similar steps are and build a process.

Here are some questions to consider when you are building your process:

• Have you defined the different types of sales calls you normally have at different stages of a prospect’s buying process?
• Do you have a prospecting process for getting prospects on the phone that involves researching them using email, voicemail, and social?
• Do you have a process for identifying their goals and priorities?
• Do you have a process for ensuring you can help them and get their buy-in to do so?
• Do you have a standard method (such as a presentation, demonstration, or contract) that lays out a typical agreement?
• Do you have a process for getting buy-in on contract details?
• Do you have a process for helping your new clients or customers take advantage of your services?
• Do you have a process for managing your existing accounts?
• The above steps are table stakes for most companies. But they might not be enough for your business. If you’re in a services business, you might need a step-by-step process for delivering your services, reporting and reviewing results with clients, as well as renewing and upselling clients. If you sell a physical product, you’ll need a process for delivery and installation.

3) Is your sales process documented?

Documentation is essential to any process. To ensure that your process can be scaled, you must create documents that outline how each step in the sales process is to be carried out, as well as what needs to happen before and after each step. For example, do you have a defined list of questions to ask, when to share certain stories, and what criteria must be met in order to move a deal from one stage to the next?

Using an internal wiki or Google Docs can help manage this process more effectively. Google Docs is advantageous because it allows others to login, leave comments, suggest edits and ask questions. By doing this, it allows for changes to be made to the sales process over time.

The reason for doing this is so that your team can continue to find ways to approach and acquire customers more effectively, and your process can be updated to reflect these improvements. In addition, it’s likely that your marketing campaigns, product and service offerings, and competitive landscape will also change over time. As such, it’s important to use collaborative documentation to keep improving your sales process in real time, without having to worry about losing track of the latest revision.

Sales processes that are most successful come from when front line reps, managers, and a sales consultant who has experience working with a sales methodology collaborate. It can be helpful to use a sales consultant because they can bring in experience from other companies as well as sales methodologies and frameworks that can be widely applied. It is important to involve front line sales reps so they can provide feedback and help to test the process. Having the reps involved also creates buy-in from them because they are more likely to follow a process that they helped to create. Make sure to also involve sales managers to help with the execution of the process.

4) Do you have an efficient way for identifying best-fit leads?

It is important to identify companies that match your buyer persona and attract the right contacts. Inbound marketing is the best way to do this. Small businesses should prioritize leads that match their ideal buyer profile. The best sources of qualified leads for small businesses are networking, referrals, and word-of-mouth. Data sources can be used to find companies that match your buyer profile.

Make sure your CRM includes views for your best leads to make it easier to find them when you’re prospecting.

5) Do you have an efficient system for researching your leads before you reach out?

Once you identify potential leads, begin researching the companies and individuals you plan to approach.

If someone has visited your website, take a look at what content they read to get an idea of their interests. This is a good starting point for your first outreach. If someone has not visited your website, look at their website and social media profiles to find conversation starters. Use these conversation starters in emails, voicemails, and conversations.

6) How so?

If you want to understand how a buyer perceives a situation, you should try to look at it from their perspective. This will give you a better idea of how to solve the problem, as well as an insight into the buyer’s thought process.

7) Can you tell me a little more about that?

If you want to gain a better understanding of something, or think there may be a good opportunity here, doing some additional research will help you see things more clearly.

8) Do you write emails from scratch every time you pursue a new prospect?

Since you’re unlikely to have success reaching out to potential customers by phone, you should have a few email templates on hand that you can quickly modify to fit the person you’re contacting. Be sure to tailor your email templates according to the information you’ve uncovered about them.

Here are five more questions to ask when creating email templates:

• Are you using standardized templates that are easily customized?
• Does your template management system automatically populate your messages with CRM data so you don’t have to type your prospect’s name and company name over and over again?
• Are your templates so focused on yourself (and not your prospects) that you’ll get ignored by most of the people you send it to — or do they reference what you’ve discovered about your prospect so they will be more likely to conclude that you’re interested in getting to know them?
• Do you personalize your email templates based on the research you’ve gathered?
• Do your templates include standard places to input your research?

Ensure that your template system includes a mechanism to keep track of which emails have the highest open and click rates. Identify which emails are effective in fostering connections, and take measures to duplicate the elements which make those emails successful.

9) How do you think the board of directors would evaluate the success of this initiative?

The first step to success is knowing the metrics your work will be judged on. By knowing these ahead of time, you can put systems in place to track them from the start.

10) Do you have a simple way of tracking which deals are in which stage of your sales process?

Now that you’re connecting with potential customers and giving them advice as they go through their purchase journey (also known as your sales process), it’s important to keep track of which deals are in what stage. You should estimate when the deal will close and how likely it is to close. A lot of salespeople still do this in a notebook or on a whiteboard because it’s too time-consuming to update in a CRM.

CRMs today make it easy to change deal stages with a drag and drop feature.

11) How? (How do you see this panning out? How do you think you need to proceed so this becomes a part of the culture? How might you avoid the common challenges like X, Y, and Z?)

“How” questions help the buyer start thinking about the new reality and avoid problems. Asking how questions can be very powerful for generating insight.

12) What does success look like for your business?

What is the buyer’s vision for the future? What are their goals for the business, themselves, the project, and the relationship? Do not make assumptions, get the buyer to explain their vision from both a rational and emotional standpoint.

One question is sometimes all you need to get a buyer to share all the information you need to help them. You usually need to make more than one inquiry though. Don’t ask too many questions though or the buyer will feel like they are being interrogated.

The best sales conversations balance inquiry with advocacy.

In addition to advocating strongly, using the sales questions above will help you connect with buyers, discover their needs and opportunities, communicate the impact of your products or services, and get them to see your value by getting them to think in new ways.

These are all essential elements to winning sales consistently.

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12 Most Common Sales Mistakes And How To Avoid Them 10 Ways to Improve Your Sales Email Conversion Rates 9 Sales Funnel Strategies to Increase Revenue and Conversions 10 Sales Tactics That Don’t Work Anymore