Diagnosing Your Sales Prospects Needs

Diagnosing Your Sales Prospect's Needs Diagnosing Your Sales Prospect's Needs As a salesperson, your role is to help your prospects solve problems and create new opportunities. Your product or service will improve their situation in some way. But before you can show the prospect how that will happen, you must uncover their needs. Finding a prospects needs works a lot like a doctors appointment. The prospect is willing to talk with you because he sees that he has a problem, but he may not know or realize the specific nature of his problem. Like a doctor, your task is to ask detailed questions to identify the specific symptoms, and then use that information to diagnose a cure (hopefully, the product or service youre selling). Make Your Prospect Comfortable The first step in the diagnosis process is to give your prospect a level of comfort. Youll be asking some probing questions later on, and if the prospect isnt comfortable speaking with you, they might not be willing to answer those questions honestly. One way to make your prospect feel safer is to quickly demonstrate your understanding of their situation. If youve done your homework ahead of time by asking some qualifying questions and doing some research, you can give a quick summary of what you understand their situation to be and then ask them to confirm. Ask the Right Questions Once youve broken the ice, you need to get an idea of the prospects general state of mind. Start with some fairly wide questions, like “What is your biggest goal right now? What is stopping you from reaching that goal? What steps have you taken to overcome that obstacle?” These questions will determine your prospects biggest need as they understand it and give you a glimpse into how theyre thinking. Effective Sales Questions Asking the right sales questions will help you more closely understand any prospects needs:Powerful Sales Questions to Ask Your ProspectsSales Questions That Sell Now that youve determined the most significant issues as the prospect understands them, you can probe a bit deeper with some more specific questions. Youll start with some questions about the past, which can help you identify a baseline. For example, if youre selling productivity tools, you can start by asking about how well your prospects employees have performed in the past, how well theyre performing now, what their expectations are as to their performance, as well as how their customers have reacted to their performance level. This line of questioning will give you a solid grasp of how the prospects needs have changed recently (if at all) and where they stand in relation to the goal you uncovered. Determine the Level of Satisfaction If the prospect seems to be doing fairly well compared to their past situation, then your task is to probe for ways that they could be doing even better. Questions like, “Are you happy with your current level of performance? What areas would you like to see improved further?” and so on can help identify areas of opportunity where your product or service can help. On the other hand, if the prospect is clearly going downhill compared to their past performance, you can now drill down further to identify just how bad the problem is. Often the best way to uncover the real problem is to keep asking “Why?” For example, if your prospect says that theyre unhappy with the number of data entry errors they see, ask “Why are your employees making a higher percentage of errors?” They might say that theyre struggling with a new software program. You can then ask, “Why are they having a hard time with the program?” They might explain that it doesnt synchronize well with their existing system. Now you have a much better idea of the exact issues the prospect is facing. Asking diagnostic questions is a powerful tool in sales because not only does it enable you to uncover the prospects needs, it also helps him to understand what those needs truly are. Many prospects have never really analyzed their situation, and what they think of as a primary need may only be a symptom of a deeper need- which your questions can help to uncover.