Sales Blog for Sales and Sales Management

I am on LinkedIn.  If you are in sales, you should be too.  It is a great resource for information and a great way to link in with friends, clients and prospects.  In the "sales playbook" group I am in, someone posted the question,  "What is your best question on a sales call?" In other words, "What is your money question?"  This was my answer:  In the comment box, I told them, "I teach people to identify the single most common objection they get from a prospect when it is time for the prospect to make a decision.  Once they identify the most common objection, they must make sure that, during the qualifying step in the sales process, they ask a question about that objection. For most, if not all of our clients, they really aren't buying something that they already don't have or use.  As sales people, we are fact stealing / attempting to take the business from someone else."

Usually the reason for not getting a new piece of business is because the prospect chose to stay with the current relationship - there wasn't a compelling reason to make a change to work with someone new.  And so, to answer the question that was posted, the best question to ask in selling has to be one that deals with competition, especially the incumbent.  The question might sound something like, "How will you go about telling your current relationship that you are going to make a change and you will no longer be doing business with them?"

I promise you this is where the rubber meets the road.

If you think about a sales process being like a baseball diamond, you would ask this question somewhere between 2nd and 3rd instead of finding out when you are sliding headfirst into home hoping to score another run.