Author: Ricard Vidal Batiste

How to ask questions to sell? It may seem like a quite simple process, but far from it, the art of asking questions to sell is complex and requires a series of skills and techniques.

“If I had one hour to solve a problem, and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the appropriate question, because once I knew the right question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes” – Albert Einstein.

Some time ago we talked in our blog about the BANT method, whose objective is to qualify leads based on the following criteria:

• Budget.
• Authority.
• Need.
• Time.

 

To find out if a potential customer is really interested in the opportunity that is being presented, we must ask a series of questions that can either be binary, that is, those whose only answer options are Yes or No, or they can be adaptive, those that do not limit the person to whom the question is asked.

In this context, we must ask ourselves whether the way a question is asked determines the type of answer that is given.

What questions should I ask?

Or in other words, what makes a good question? According to the authors of The art of powerful questions, a powerful question:

• Generates curiosity in the listener.
• Stimulates thoughtful conversation.
• Brings underlying assumptions to the surface.
• Invites creativity and new possibilities.
• Generates energy and forward movement.
• Touches deep meaning.
• Evokes further questions.
• This list would not include binary questions, as they limit us to choosing one position or the other, black or white, without taking into account that there is a whole scale of greys or even a colour wheel.

 

Binary questions vs. adaptive questions

As famed CEO coach Dave Bailey explains, adaptive questions encourage a growth mindset. Rather than focusing on Yes or No, they allow us to focus the question on where we want to get to and reflect on the effort it will take to get there. The idea is to propose a more creative search for answers and solutions, rather than relying so much on guided responses with limited options.

For the BANT method to be effective, we must ask the right questions at the right time. Even if a prospect does not score high on the scale, the business process can still lead to a purchase if the right questions are asked.

For this purpose, we propose the following examples for internal reflection, transforming binary questions into adaptive ones:

• Binary: Does this person have sufficient budget?
• Adaptive: What is the prospect’s budget and what can this person do to achieve it in order to reach his or her goal?
• Binary: Does this person have the authority to make decisions?
• Adaptive: What can this person do to be influential in terms of this project?
• Binary: Does the prospect need the product?
• Adaptive: What is the prospect’s business need?
• Binary: Can he/she buy it now or does he/she want to buy it now?
• Adaptive: In what time frame will this person implement the solution to their business need?

Once we have internalised the correct way to formulate our questions, it is time to think about the actual questions we will ask our prospects:

1. Budget

Instead of directly asking “What is your budget?”, some alternatives:

• What is the budget you would allocate to this solution?
• How much would you be willing to spend on similar products/services?
• How much are you currently spending on other solutions?

If you were a car salesman, the first thing you would do when someone walked into your dealership would be to ask about their budget, right? Because you wouldn’t try to sell a Jaguar to someone who has the budget to buy a Honda.

2. Authority

Instead of asking “Who makes the decisions in your company?”, some alternatives:

• What is your contribution to the decision process?
• Which people in your team will use our product/service/solution?
• What are the top priorities when evaluating solutions?
• Do you think we should invite someone else to the meeting/convention?

Instead of focusing only on the decision-maker, it will also be useful to ask about the end-users, as they might influence the process.

3. Need

Instead of asking “Do you need the product/service”, some alternatives:

• What are the main challenges, pain points and problems you are currently facing that you are anxious to solve?
• How much does this problem bother you on a scale of 1 to 10?
• What kind of solutions are you currently evaluating and how do you think it will benefit your organisation?

You are not selling, you are solving problems. But if you are wasting time explaining your service or product to a customer who doesn’t really need it, this will not be positive for either party.

4. Time

Instead of asking “When do you want to purchase the product/service?”, some alternatives:

• Do you have a time frame to start the project?
• What kind of time limitations are you working under?
• How long have you been looking for a solution?

These questions will only be effective and positive if we do not forget one of the basic principles, listening. It is essential to avoid our potential client feeling questioned, as well as to create a real atmosphere of trust. By listening and observing your clients reactions you will see if they are receptive and willing to communicate or if, on the other hand, you start to annoy them and go too far. At HelloMrLead we have an article on our blog where we talk about it and give you 9 tips to get it right.

 

Choosing the CTA

What if you don’t get the chance to talk in person? These days a lot of communication is carried out online, either by email or via LinkedIn. Which is why we move on to talk about the Call To Action (CTA). This is to request the immediate action of the interlocutors or visitors of a particular website through text, button or link, using words that create a sense of urgency. In this way, our CTA will be effective and we will turn potential customers into final customers. At this point, we must also be careful when choosing the words or phrases we are going to use.

The brevity and frankness of a well-written call to action will put the focus on what is important and eliminate any distractions. And, while we must ensure that our CTA is concise, we can use either two simple words or several sentences.

Depending on the platform we use, the call to action can vary a lot. However, the best way to become good at something is to learn from others, so we leave you with the following examples of CTAs for email and LinkedIn:

• Would you like to know more?
• If you give me your email address I can send you a presentation, is that OK?
• How about scheduling a 10-minute call so I can tell you more?
• If you’re interested I could explain more in a short call, is next Tuesday OK for you?
• We have a lot more to tell you, are you interested in our service?

 

And speak of the devil, now let’s go to our CTA: Did you find this post useful? If you want to continue learning different techniques or you want more information, do not hesitate to continue browsing our blog or even, if you prefer, get in touch with us through the web so you can get the attention of your customers and potential customers and you can transmit them all your potential.

We leave here other sources used (in addition to those already mentioned) for the writing of this article:

https://medium.com/@clodura19/bant-sales-the-top-questions-you-need-to-ask-to-qualify-prospects-in-2020-2a7c8ac986cb

https://www.yesware.com/blog/bant/

https://jessica-richard.com/preguntas-para-vender/

https://adespresso.com/blog/call-to-action-examples/

Index:

1. Who is HelloMrLead?
2. What does the HelloMrLead method consist of?
3. How do we qualify the lead?
4. What is the purpose of the HelloMrLead method?
5. What other services do we offer to our clients?
6. Tools we use.
7. Dashboarding.
8. Our USP and UVP.

Who are we?

HelloMrLead is a company dedicated to B2B marketing, mainly outbound, whose innovative techniques help achieve the maximum number of opportunities for our clients. .

But what does this mean exactly?

We help companies use their strengths to foster sales and relationships. In this way they manage to grow their business. It should be noted that most of the companies we work with are part of the technology sector, whether they are startups or companies with a long professional career, being this the specialty of HelloMrLead.

With B2B (Business to Business) we mean that our client, our final interlocutor. This client is always an employee of a company, with business responsibilities and concerned about the interests and needs of the company itself. We are the ones who arrange the meeting or contact with this person and not the other way around, that is, we carry out an outbound strategy.

We prospect, qualify and generate leads and nurture them through the buying process. With this we manage to close business meetings and provide them with a personalized experience with our clients’ companies, and turn them into loyal customers for life.

What does the method HelloMrLead consist of?

Through 3 possible ways:

• E-mail. We address the contacts that appear in the company’s database, presenting our client’s product or service.
• LinkedIn. It is also a very effective way to close business opportunities and we cannot ignore it.
• Calls. But they are not cold calls like those made in a call center. We always make the calls after having established a previous contact, so the person is already willing to talk to us and knows that we are going to contact them. The call is always the final point of our lead generation strategy.

By lead we mean a person from the company we contact who:

• Is interested.
• Have a budget.
• Has time.
• Is interested in buying or contracting the product or service.
• Is ready to start negotiating.

In this context, it should be noted that we always define the positions of the person who is part of that company, since it is not the same to talk to an intern as to the CEO of an organization, since the power in decision making is very different.

How do we qualify the lead?

How we find out if the person has the right interest, need and time. Using the HelloMrLead method. To do this, during the lead qualification call, we use the 4 criteria of the BANT method:

• Budget: verifying that your potential client’s budget is adequate.
• Authority: making sure that the person we contact has the authority to make purchasing decisions.
• Need: we find out what the client’s real need is in order to successfully address it.
• Time: how much time we dedicate to the decision process and closing the sale of the product or service.

Through a series of questions, which we previously discussed with our client and which depend on the strategy he wants to carry out, we qualify this lead with a traffic light score that we then deliver to our client.

What is the purpose of the HelloMrLead method?

The objective is to schedule a commercial meeting between our client and the company that would be interested in the product or service offered.

HelloMrLead does not participate in these meetings, but looks for the possible lead or interlocutor, contacts him, provokes his interest in the customer’s product or service and calls him to arrange the meeting with our customer, finally disappearing from the chain.

An important issue is that HelloMrLead is invisible during the process, it does not exist in the eyes of the lead. We say that we “put on a hat” for the client during the lead generation time, being assistants to. We use the client’s email and LinkedIn accounts and when we call we address the potential lead by saying that we are part of the client’s own company.

What other services do we offer our customers?

Sometimes we are hired, not to carry out this whole chain of lead generation, but simply because we have years of experience in marketing and database generation.

With our ValiData service we generate databases of interesting prospects for a company, and we carry out this service because we have the experience, the tools and the necessary equipment to do so. The databases are created based on well-defined criteria and targets. These criteria can be geographic, number of employees, sector of the company, level of turnover, software used, etc.

What if the customer doesn’t know exactly what their target is?

We also help our clients calculate or estimate their market capacity through a TAM, SAM, SOM estimate. These acronyms refer to the total market (TAM), the market we can serve (SAM) and the market we can reach (SOM). In short, we help you to know what percentage of the market you can really work with, since there will be companies in the same sector that already have a large reach and with which you will not be able to compete at the same level.

Another of our products are B2B business presentations. In this way, we adapt the message to each buyer persona, identifying the reader’s pain points. With this, we will increase the ability to capture the attention of the lead, we will be able to propose solutions with a greater orientation towards him/her and with a greater coherence with your corporate image.

What if the customer wants to be trained?

One of our most ambitious projects that we have been developing for some time is the creation of the B2B sales training course. Having been in the market for so long, we have done consulting for many companies, which has given us the experience and knowledge necessary to launch this project.

Some companies do not want to hire our services on a long term basis and depend on us, but prefer to learn from the team of HelloMrLead, learn from our methodology and incorporate it into their own organization. In this case we do the consulting, we analyze the company itself, its structure, departments, and how they can in a way restructure those departments to hire or train the people who are dedicated to lead generation and commercial opportunities. Therefore, we help them to create the necessary tools to carry out this process, the methodologies, the reporting processes and everything related to data and metrics. This is very important because it helps them to know if it is profitable or not.

It is a massive in-house training process. This means that we do the consulting to internalize the prospecting chain. Once we have completed this step, we go to the company and, almost full time, we help them to design and create from 0 the departments that will work like HelloMrLead. In addition, it is done on a long-term basis, helping to get everything up and running, launch and, finally, retire.

Tools used in the HelloMrLead method

We use a series of tools to carry out our activities:

• Pipedrive.
• Toggl.
• Asana.
• Slack.
• Drive.
• Team Pass.
• Google Calendar.
• Calendly.
• Vozelia, Zoiper, Fonia.
• Woodpecker.
• Zopto.

Dashboarding

In HelloMrLead we monitor campaigns, review the different metrics and apply data-driven sales. This means that decision making is based on data analysis and interpretation, in order to better serve customers or consumers.

We work using different metrics, KPIs and objectives.

• Metrics:
  • Number of calls made.
  • Hours spent per team.
  • Quantitative metrics of email marketing campaigns: open rate, response rate, invalid/bounce rate.
  • Social selling: LinkedIn acceptance rate, conversion rate.
  • Inside sales.
  • Qualitative metrics: average BANT percentage, reasons for lost opportunities, conversion and sales closure.
• KPIs:
  • Bounce rate no higher than 15%.
  • OR (Odds Ratio) greater than 40%.
  • RR (Relative Risk) must exceed 15%.
  • Hot leads must be equal to the target number of leads to be delivered multiplied by 4.
  • At least 2 hours of effective calls per day made by one of our SDRs.
  • Minimum of 40% of leads coming from LinkedIn.
• Objective: number of visits arranged from the calls made. It will always depend on what has been agreed with the client.

Our USP (Unique Selling Proposition) and UVP (Unique Value Proposition):

There are several reasons why you should bet for HelloMrLead:

• We have years of experience in the sector.
• We have dealt with more than 80 clients throughout our existence as a company.
• We have developed our own methodologies with the qualification of leads.
• We try to incorporate Big Data as much as possible, so that decisions are data driven, i.e. based on data.
• We use business intelligence, KPIs, metrics?
• We are transparent at every step and inform you about insights, strategies, changes and decisions.
• We constantly improve our processes through A/B testing and analysis of results.

Moreover, we are so confident that you will be happy with the results of our work that we will only charge you for the leads once they are validated by you. Your success is our success.

Would you like to increase your sales? In HelloMrLead we take care of making your product known by meeting with your company’s target audience.

Do you still have doubts? Are you interested in the HelloMrLead method and want to know how much it would cost to hire our services? Don’t hesitate to contact us at our web or send us a message directly to our profile on Facebook or LinkedIn.