GREAT sales professionals know questions can be used in increase the value of their solution, eliminate the competition, and increase the prospect’s urgency to move quickly. This article presents a model for asking effective sales questions.
In today’s competitive sales environment, customers buy solutions that help them capitalize on opportunities or reduce problems. Successful sales professionals use questions to:

· Uncover facts

· Identify issues (opportunities or problems) that the customer faces

· Determine the resulting impact of not addressing the issue

· Help the customer identify the criteria for solutions

Entelechy uses the FIRST model to describe the process that successful sales representatives follow.

Fact Questions

Fact questions answer who, what, when, and where. They are fairly easy to ask and to answer. Fact questions can yield critical information including technical requirements and the customer’s buying criteria. Fact questions include:

· What is your role?

· How many people are involved?

· When would you like to begin implementing a solution?

· Who will be making the decision?

· Where are various systems located?

While fact questions give us important information, they usually do not help us identify problems. In fact, for large sales, a large number of fact questions – especially around publicly available information -- are associated with UNSUCCESSFUL sales calls. Customers don’t want to train us on their business; they become annoyed. Many facts can – and should – be determined before the call.

Issue Questions

Issue questions help us – and the customer – clarify the problem they are trying to address or the opportunity they wish to seize. Like fact questions, issue questions are also relatively easy to ask and answer. Unlike fact questions, these questions target the issue (problem or opportunity) the customer is facing. Issue questions include:

· What problem are you facing?

· Can you describe the situation as it is now?

· What would you like it to be?

· What’s preventing you from achieving your goals?

· What might be causing the problem?

· Are you happy with...?

· If you could change something...?

For large sales, identifying issues (or low value needs) is a plus but is not by itself associated with successful sales calls. Why is this? Identifying an issue (a problem OR an opportunity) is often not enough impetus to act. The status quo is good enough in the mind of the customer.

We need to help the customer identify the implications of taking action -- or not taking action.

Resulting Impact/Value Questions

Resulting Impact/Value Questions help determine the resulting impact of the issue. While the temptation is great to present once the customer indicates that they have a problem that you might be able to solve, we suggest that you will be more successful if you ask Resulting Impact Questions to determine how significant the issue really is.

Resulting Impact Questions help determine the full impact — ideally in monetary terms — on customers, employees, business, and the buyer if the problem goes unaddressed or the opportunity goes unrealized. Examples of the beginning portion of Resulting Impact Questions include:

· How might this affect your...

· Does this impact your...

· How much do you think this is costing you…

· What might happen if you addressed this…

· What’s the impact …

· What is the effect on…

Resulting Impact Questions cause three very important things to happen; they:

1. Increase the need to do something 2. Attach value to the need 3. Differentiate your solution Especially for large sales or where budgets are extremely tight, Resulting Impact Questions are associated with SUCCESSFUL calls. This is because the full impact of the issue may not have been explored; few people look at ALL of the ramifications on customers, employees, business, suppliers, etc. Resulting Impact Questions will separate you from your compe