Questions Built For Curiosity

In a crowded and competitive marketplace, everyone is looking to differentiate and stand out from the
crowd. Your USP's and pitch are important, but all of this could be undone if your questioning is not up to
scratch.

So many people these days want to jump straight into pitching to a customer to show them their difference.
But, not enough people are investing the right amount of time upfront to truly understand their
customer's needs.

It's not just investing the time in questioning, it's ensuring the type of questions you ask build your
credibility, influence your customer and unearth the real needs that create a case for change.

So how do you create effective and game changing questions. Here’s a few different types for you to try!

Pain & Gain Q’s

We buy either to relieve pain or achieve gain. Quite often as humans we are more motivated by moving
away from pain than towards gain.

The why questions help you unearth pain/gain from the customer:
• Why does this need to change?
• Why are you looking to move away from?
• Why are you looking to achieve this?

The what/how questions are important to building and probing the pain/gain:
• How did that impact you?
• What were the repercussions of that on the business?
• How would that benefit the business?

Scale Q’s
Scale questions are an effective way to identify gaps where you may be able to fill with your service or to
understand how satisfied your customer currently is with what they have:
• On a scale of 1-10 how happy are you with your current provider
• On a scale of 1-10 how important is this current project

If it's a low score, identify the gaps which you can fill:
• What's missing that makes you say that?
• What would it need to look like to be a 8-9?

If it's a high score, understand why, see if you can match that and then add value on top:
• That's great, what is it you like about them? (they may list the things you can also provide, but if
you have even more to give, then you're in a good position)

Checkpoint Q’s
Checkpoint questions are important to ensure the customer is on the same page as you, unearths any
objections and gives you potential buying signals. Use these throughout your conversations.
• How does that sound so far?
• What are your thoughts on that?

Hypothetical Q’s
Hypothetical questions are a great way of testing the water and understanding whether the customer will
shortly be in a position to buy;
• If you speak to X and they're happy, are you good to move forwards with this?
• If we're able to come back and promise X, will you be happy to proceed with this?

Questions Built For Curiosity

Chris Hatfield aka Not Another Sales Guy
www.notanothersalesguy.com