At the end of the day, it’s about actually closing sales. You can do everything else, right. But if you’re not actually closing deals, you’re going broke fast. Over the past 10 years of working with thousands of salespeople, I’ve discovered that the best closers use the same types of questions over and over and over in order to close sales. And you’ll notice that they don’t all come right before the close, but rather throughout that discovery process to see a close and seeing that higher value sale. In this chapter, I’m going to show you three closing questions that every salesperson must ask, check it out.
Question number one, what does this challenge cost you? Now without understanding the cost of a prospect’s problem, you’re never going to get them to actually articulate the value of actually solving that problem. So let me give you an example. If a challenge costs a prospect, a million dollars, then the solution to solve that problem is worth a million dollars. This is key, getting your prospects to articulate what that challenge is costing them is creating massive value. And is this seating them to start thinking about how important that solution is?
Question number two, is solving this challenge a priority to you right now? Now, this is a question that’s really a challenge to the prospect. But you’re going to ask in a way that’s not aggressive, but is genuine. Because you want to know if right now is the priority time? Have you ever gone through the entire sales process, only to hear from the prospect that you know what we’re going to put this off till next year? That was your fault if that happened. And by the way, it’s happened to all of us, so don’t feel bad. So we need to discover if right now, the challenge is a key priority. And if it is, then you can get full buy-in for your solution. You do not present until you know if the challenge is a priority right now. Question number three, what would you like to do next? Now, this is really towards the close of the sale, once you’ve gone through the full discovery process, and you want to test them to see whether they’re even really thinking about moving forward with your solution. That’s where you asked this question. It lets them feel like they’re actually driving the boat, but it also gives you really important feedback into their actual desire to work with you.