You want business growth quick – brush up on your Questions!
The questions you ask a prospective customer (and your regular customers) really is the key to knowing more about how you can serve them.
So, get a good array of questions … Why?  Well:-
a) you will come across as intelligent (seriously, ask intelligent questions and you give the impression you have intelligent answers) (insider tip)!
b) You are showing you care, you want to know how you can help them.
c) You will totally and utterly seperate yourself from the competitor. You want your prospective to see you as the trusted advisor, then start expanding your pool of questions. The more senior the person you are seeing the more ‘high end’ questions – (not asking straight up what you could ascertain from the internet or by asking a junior).
d) Â information you elicit is far greater- and what is information? –
Information is POWER!!!Â
What you could be doing…
✔  Share with your colleagues any questions you ask. Your colleague may have a cracking question that could get you an insight you hadn’t though of.Â
✔  Regular clients – its essential to keep asking questions about what their goal and vision is – as things will have changed from the last time you saw them (although for some reason we think it hasn’t so again, that stops many people from asking about something that may now be totally relevant).
✔  Think about your delivery. This is not a polite interview! Questions should be interesting, relevant and meaningful and show an obvious link to how your company can potential help them.
a) you will come across as intelligent (seriously, ask intelligent questions and you give the impression you have intelligent answers) (insider tip)!
b) You are showing you care, you want to know how you can help them.
c) You will totally and utterly seperate yourself from the competitor. You want your prospective to see you as the trusted advisor, then start expanding your pool of questions. The more senior the person you are seeing the more ‘high end’ questions – (not asking straight up what you could ascertain from the internet or by asking a junior).
d) Â information you elicit is far greater- and what is information? –
Information is POWER!!!Â
What you could be doing…
✔  Share with your colleagues any questions you ask. Your colleague may have a cracking question that could get you an insight you hadn’t though of.Â
✔  Regular clients – its essential to keep asking questions about what their goal and vision is – as things will have changed from the last time you saw them (although for some reason we think it hasn’t so again, that stops many people from asking about something that may now be totally relevant).
✔  Think about your delivery. This is not a polite interview! Questions should be interesting, relevant and meaningful and show an obvious link to how your company can potential help them.
✔  Ask more ‘WHY’ questions. Ok they say last time they bought from the competitor – the WHY will highlight exactly their thinking behind that decision. (again, watch your delivery of these questions. We are encouraging inquisitiveness here and therefore you need to adapt your tone, manner and body language).
Beware!Â
Recognise that we tend to default to the same few questions, and they might be ‘loaded’ as in we think we know the answer – thereby deleting anything that doesn’t add evidence to your already formed opinion.  I would guess that this, in itself, means we can miss around 80% of whats happening with our customer as we are only focusing on what we already think they will say.
Recognise that we tend to default to the same few questions, and they might be ‘loaded’ as in we think we know the answer – thereby deleting anything that doesn’t add evidence to your already formed opinion.  I would guess that this, in itself, means we can miss around 80% of whats happening with our customer as we are only focusing on what we already think they will say.
