Quit Asking “Feature” Based Questions and You’ll Boost Your Sales

That’s right! Quit asking “feature” based questions and start asking “outcome” based questions.

This is the easiest way for you to increase your sales!

If you want to significantly alter your sales results, here is one of the most powerful things you can do. I’ve talked for years about the need to be focused on customer outcomes, rather than ones that get the customer thinking about features.

Check out this article out regarding what salespeople at The Container Store ask customers.

Don’t go saying this doesn’t apply to you because you sell in B2B. It applies to B2B just as much as it does B2C.

Retail salespeople typically ask customers feature-based questions, such as, “What can I help you find today?” At The Container Store, employees are taught to ask the customer, “What space are you trying to organize?”

I love the question, because it engages the customer and gets them focused on the outcome they’re looking for rather than a feature or particular item they want to buy.

Think about the questions you ask customers.  I bet they’re more feature based than they are outcome based. Now let’s take what The Container Store is doing and go one step further.

The huge impact of the question they ask is when they ask the question. They ask it first! They don’t wait until they’ve been helping the customer for several minutes. It’s their lead question.

Now think about that idea with regard to how you sell. Again, it doesn’t matter if you’re B2B or B2C. Are you waiting too long to ask outcome-based questions?

This is one of the biggest things any salesperson can do to dramatically increase their sales results. What makes this even better with regard to increasing sales is it doesn’t require more leads.

This is something you can do with every prospect and customer.

Moving from feature-based questions to outcome-based questions and doing it EARLY in the sales process works! Try it for a few weeks and I’m sure you’ll find it works, and the more you try it, the better you’ll become in being able to ask outcome-based questions.

Copyright 2015, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of High-Profit Selling: Win the Sale Without Compromising on Price.

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