5 Questions That Will Boost Your Sales Conversion Rate Quicker than Nitrous Oxide in a Nissan Skyline
Today I want to give you five questions I use regularly in my coaching business to drill down on problems or issues in a client’s business AND help them find a solution. Maybe you’ve heard of them? Maybe you haven’t? But either way I promise you these questions are a must have in any sales, leadership,consulting or coaching role – in fact, if you’re in any kind of relationship you need to know these questions back to front.
How can five questions be so important?
Asking the right questions will help you understand the needs of your client or prospect and deliver rock star solutions. It ensures you know what they want – and they get what they want. It also helps you drag in new business because the net you cast catches every detail of their problem and positions you as the all knowing ‘hero.’ And finally it turns cold prospects into ‘yes’ decision makers because you helped them identify the current situation as a problem that needs fixing, now.
Let me give you an example.
Until recently, my wife and I had investments in a gym only five minutes down the road from our home. The gym catered for women who on the face of things had a generic problem: they wanted to ‘get fit.’ If you were new to the sales game, you might feel you understand their need because ‘getting fit’ sounds so, well… nice. But here’s the bad news: Getting fit is something most of human society aspires to.
…Every New Years day we promise never to eat so much again, to quit smoking, to wake up at 5AM to make that gym session etc. All of these statements sound good, but none of them will motivate us to start or stick at achieving our goal. And in the gym we knew it better than most as we watched rate of unused year-long gym memberships increase and retention rates spiral down. So here’s what we did.
My wife trained our gym instructors and personal trainers on the five questions and discover what really motivated our female clientele. Within one week of implementing the questions we had some pretty astounding results. Women would cry and tell us how they need to lose weight so they could see their kids and grandkids grow up; others would say how they’d been bullied all their life because of their weight and now “enough’s, enough!” Now I ask you… do you think it had an effect on retention rates? You bet. It also lifted team morale as more clients began to achieve their goals.
So growth leader… will you test the 5 questions in your business? Action step: Print them out, memorise them and measure the results you get.
5 Questions
You’ll need these questions if you’re in a sales or leadership role.
- What is your number one priority?
- Why did you pick that one?
- Is that important to you? Why?
- What are the consequences of not having that opportunity?
- Does that worry you? Why?
- (taken from Allan Pease)
