Improving Sales and Service by Asking Good Questions

Tuesday, 01. 12. 2010  –  Category: Ranger Wireless Solutions

Imagine you are at a networking event and someone asks you what your company does.  If you work in sales or customer service, you likely have a good elevator speech that you can recite.  Inevitably, if the present company is willing, we go beyond the minute pitch and delve into certain nuances of our industry, the company’s history and product set we offer.

Before you know it, you have been talking for ten minutes about your company.  While you have educated those around you, the likelihood that your new contacts are any closer to purchasing your product than they were before you spoke is low.  In fact, they may have internally taken themselves out of consideration for your services based upon their perceptions of your business parameters.

In customer service, we are asked dozens of time a day to tell our story.  Left to our own devices, however, we often trump our best intentions.  Our excitement for the product, desire to solve a problem, or eagerness to make a sale often compels us to jump in and begin telling our story.  Like our example shows, we step into an open-ended opportunity to tell any and all information we feel might interest our listener.

This tactic, however, doesn’t often to get us our intended outcome.  We often overwhelm the listener with information while missing the answer they desire.  To overcome this tendency to bombard our listeners with information, Customer Service and Sales Managers often create rules and scripts for our reps to help guide their conversations.  However, each company message has its own unique dimensions and therefore our communication rarely fits neatly into a pattern.

To have a successful outcome with each request, more and more managers are learning that a system needs to be implemented where we ask good, probing questions that allow us to narrow down our options (rather than open up new possibilities).  This also ensures that the customer’s needs—which are, by the way, the reason they are speaking with you—are met above all else.

If you are looking to implement a question-based sales and service system in your organization, use these four guidelines to help build the mindset in your team.

There Is No Perfect Question: It is sometimes easy to think that one question will get to the heart of your customer’s needs.  However, this is just not the case.  Much like the game “21 Questions,” getting there may require asking several questions that help to hone our focus down to a few specific details.

Focus on the Real Problem: All too often, a customer will call in with a question or concern, you will spend twenty minutes solving it for them only to learn that their real issue was something completely different.  This is a terrible waste of time and energy for both of you and gets you no closer to a resolution.  Therefore, it is important that your attention is initially focused on determining the real reason for their call.

Avoid Yes and No Answers: While it seems logical that these would be the types of questions you would want to ask (see my earlier reference to 21 Questions), the opposite is true.  Often, customers who only answer yes and no leave out vital information.  Open-ended questions, on the other hand, give customers the freedom to communicate details that otherwise might never be given.

Go Somewhere With Your Questions: You can ask all the questions you want, but if they do not lead to a solution you are in trouble.  Customers don’t typically like to answer a lot of questions, which means you need to move quickly to show them that you are going somewhere with your communication.

David Fleming is Director of Corporate Communications for RANGER Wireless Solutions, a CornerWorld company.

Tags: customer service, David Fleming, questions, sales