Whether they are prerequisites or
Chapter 5 explains how active listening and questioning motivate customers to supply the details. It will become apparent to customers how these details serve their self-interests.
You want customers to qualify
You qualify your own products on their ability to achieve customers' goals before you mention any specific ones to customers.
If you find yourself disqualifying customers more than qualifying them, you should review how you defined market segments.
Starting sales calls with a focus on making customers' goals measurable puts them in control and motivates them to share information with you.
Filters allow both customers and you to perform a test of reasonableness on whether you both achieve their goals.
Filters fall into two categories:
prerequisites
and
The filters are as
Goal motivation (I)
Current situation (I)
Plans (I)
Alternatives (I)
Decision
Complete, start, budget, and decision dates (P)
Funding (P)
Past keys (I)
Attainment measurement (P)
A customer's positive, neutral, or negative status determines its
Use the create-and-wait strategy to win over satisfied negative customers.
Locate the FDM by looking at the contact
Moving funding from a capital investment to an operating budget expense lowers the decision-making level and shortens the sales cycle.
Attainment measurement is the most-important filter for both customers and you because it determines whether they can achieve goals via your products.
A person qualifies as the FDM if he or she determines the specifics of the four prerequisites and releases or
Make sure you focus on the goals customers want to achieve, not on how they are using features of
1. Martin G. Groder, Business Games: How to Recognize the Players and Deal with Them (New York: Boardroom Classics, 1980).
The
You use your listening and questioning skills to accomplish this task. Your mastery of these skills is
Yet, questions are like limited natural resources. You can only ask so many questions before you exceed a customer's grilling threshold. Grilled customers fight back with curt answers such as "Yeah," "Nope," and "Okay." Therefore, make every question count. This chapter shows how to make every one count by explaining:
How to get customers to consider you an expert because of the questions you ask
How your active listening and active questioning skills motivate customers to provide measurable answers
How your customers use three types of answers to share information—and how only one of them counts
How the four key questioning techniques work to transform vague responses into crystal-clear statements