The Most Powerful Question in Sales
Although there is no silver bullet in sales, no quick trick or tactic that will immediately earn you a closed deal. I have learned one question is liquid gold in speeding up your sales cycle and leaving fewer “maybes” on the table?
Selling takes time, and depending on what you sell a full sales cycle could be a week or it could look like a year.
All we can do as founders, partners, and sales reps is ask the right questions and tailor our solution’s value to that specific client.
Suppose you are in a growth position at your company. In that case, you probably talk with hundreds of prospects per quarter providing technical presentations and guiding prospects through a sales cycle to ultimately close them as clients.
You can provide all of the technical jargon you want, and share all the features and functions of your solution. But there is one stigma that remains true.
Prospects struggle with execution
They may understand your product, but what they lack are the execution skills to implement your solution into their current tech stack.
That is where you are the expert
You have to relay the timeline and milestones that need to be met to execute a successful implementation when they join on as a client.
People buy when they understand how to execute (get from A to B), not just because they understand your product.
So what is the question that will unlock this more productive conversation?
Ideally, when do you want to roll this solution out by?
When you get the prospect to put a date on rolling out your solution that does two things:
- It allows you to reverse-engineer all of the milestones you need to hit to make sure you can execute implementation for them within their timeline
- It is an assumptive sale strategy once you have built plenty of value through other conversations
The reality is sometimes prospects don’t know when they want to have something in place, but forcing them to think about it will get them to prioritize it more.
If there is no date, there is no deal
Try it out on your next sales call and let me know how it works out for you.
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Thank you for reading!
BR
