Attention Sales: Here’s how to cleverly answer your prospect’s trick questions

56% of sales do not happen because of the inability of the sales agents to answer the prospects' queries. One of the most common questions that a prospect may ask you, to determine if you are worth that 30 minutes of their time you requested, is the ‘Sell me this pen’ question. We have all heard this line made famous by the ‘Wolf of Wall Street’. Today, prospects still use this technique but it will most likely come in the form of ‘why should I buy from you? or ‘what makes you different’. What they really want, is for you to sell them.

BUT BEWARE!

This is a trap question and you should avoid jumping straight into your value proposition. Paul Lanigan eloquently explains how to answer this. He suggests you say ‘to be honest, I don’t know why you should buy from me- we haven’t discussed your personal challenges yet’. However, typically companies similar to yours buy from us because we have helped them increase/decrease X, Y & Z. Tell me more about your specific problems and we can see if we would be a good fit’. Now you have their attention. You have told them what companies trust you, what results you have achieved for your customers and you have subtly asked them to open up about their problems without directly asking them ‘are you interested’.

OK so now you have managed to catch your prospect’s attention, but what happens when you present your pitch and the prospect asks that dreaded question ‘sounds good. Can you send me more information?’.

This is code for ‘I’m not interested’. We have all been there and 9 times out of 10 we know what will happen. You will send them information and you will never hear from them again. And anyway, you haven’t qualified them so you don’t know what material is relevant to send them. Your left thinking ‘what could I have done better?’. A good way you could answer this question is to say ‘of course – what is your email address? Then follow with ‘I want to make sure I send the most relevant content to you, can you tell me a bit more about ….. “. This way your prospect can open up on their problems and secure that next meeting. Another way of phrasing this question is to say ‘all of our marketing collateral is available on our website but, to be honest, it is very generic and it won’t tell you anything new that I haven’t already told you. Can you tell me a bit more about what company challenges you are facing so I can send you on content that is more specific to you? In both scenarios, you will have succeeded in getting some qualification questions and you are significantly increasing your chance of a follow up call.

Now that you have got your qualification information, the prospect could then go on to say ‘I am already working with Competitor X. I don’t need your solution’. How many times have you heard this? Rather than jumping into all the reasons why you are better than competitor X, perhaps you can ask a simple open-ended question ‘That’s interesting. How happy are you with their service?’. This is a great question to get your prospect to open up about the weaknesses of this competitor. Once you know their pain points, you can then proceed to tailor your value proposition to how your service can overcome these issues. Another way you can phrase this question is ‘on a scale from 1-10, how happy are you with their service? If they say anything less than a 10 you can ask why they chose that number and proceed to say ‘I’d love to share some ideas on how we could get you to a 10’.

If this has helped you in your prospecting efforts or if you have your own challenge, I’d love to hear more and share some ideas on how you may overcome this objection.