The Four Stages Of A Sales Call
The Four Stages of the Sales Call
1. Preliminaries: warming up events that occur before serious selling begins (in larger sales Preliminaries have less influence on success)
2. Investigating: most important of all selling skills and it is more crucial in larger sells (The average person in major-account selling can increase overall sales volume by more than 20% by developing improved Investigating skills).
3. Demonstrating Capability: showing the customer you have something worthwhile to offer. Do you have a solution for their problem?
4. Obtaining Commitment: a successful sales call ends with some kind of commitment from the customer. (In larger sales there may be a whole range of other commitments you have to obtain before you reach order stage)
Which stage is most important? Success in the larger sales depends, more than anything else, on how the Investigating stage of the call is handled.
Questions and Success: Questions persuade more powerfully than any other form verbal behavior.
- There is a clear statistical association between the use of questions and the success of the interaction.
- The more you ask questions, the more successful the interaction is likely to be.
- Some types of questions are more powerful than others.
Are “open” and “closed” questions important?
Closed questions: can be answered with single word, often “yes” or “no”
Open questions: these require a longer answer, often called nondirective questions.
There is no measurable relationship between use of open questions and success. None of the studies showed that the classic distinction between open and closed questions has any many in high value sales calls.
What are the right questions?
- Successful people didn’t just ask random questions.
- There is a distinct pattern to a successful call.
SPIN Sequence of questions
1. Situation Questions: data gathering questions about facts and background (successful people don’t overuse these set of questions)
2. Problem Questions: explore problems, difficulties and dissatisfactions in areas where the sellers product can help (Inexperience people normally don’t ask enough of these type questions)
3. Implication Questions: these questions take a customer problem and explore its effects or consequences. (successful people help the customer understand a problem’s seriousness or urgency) These questions are very important in larger sales and many don’t ask these enough.
4. Need-Payoff Question: these questions get the customer to tell you the benefits that your solution could offer. (very strong correlation to sales success in larger sales, top performers ask more than 10 times as many Need-payoff Questions as do average performers.
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