One Single Wish

So, you’re past the first hurdle. You’ve nurtured and generated that selling opportunity for your sales team….

Traditionally at this point, the ball is in the sales court. But there are ways of using quality questioning from your front-line sales team that can provide a twin-benefit to your business. Firstly, the answers can provide your sales team with more ammunition to tailor the sales approach and close more business and secondly, provide you with additional insight to tailor your future B2B marketing approach.

We all know the importance of market research – but often market research can become out of date very quickly. So encourage your front-line sales team to help. Just as you would with your B2B marketing efforts, so too should your sales team capture as much useful and relevant insight as they can and feed back to the entire business.

The information a sales contact can obtain during a sales call (be it face to face or on the phone) is invaluable – and key to gaining quality information is the ability to ask quality questions.

I’m not here to bang on about open and probing questions (we can leave this to the experts) but I think I might have found one of the single most important questions that you should encourage be asked during every sales call…

 “If I granted you one single wish, what would it be?”

Aside from the typical responses which include a nice house, holiday home in Monte Carlo, health and happiness etc, when you pinpoint the question to a business wish the response will tell you the ultimate desire your prospect has, which in turn is often related to a major pain-point. Your sales person can uncover that ‘sweet spot’ to help close the deal quicker and you can be provided with invaluable information to help build an up to the minute picture of exactly what your prospects are looking for.

By understanding and leveraging those major pain-points you can begin to create key messages to use in your lead generation activity.

If your CRM system allows, encourage your sales team to capture even more quality information during their prospect interactions – it will help them sell more in the longer term and help you generate more quality opportunities for them to sell by leveraging the pains.

Get your entire organisation bought into identifying those prospect pains, leaving you to prescribe others the wonder cure that is your product/service.

Related content

Access full article

Propolis logo white

B2B strategies. B2B skills.
B2B growth.

Propolis helps B2B marketers confidently build the right strategies and skills to drive growth and prove their impact.