What questions help me position my product or service better than the competition?
What is the best question to ask my customers to help them?
Above are a couple questions I have been asked in the past about asking the right questions. The truth is that the is no one or two questions that will be able to be used in every industry. The questions will change a bit for each industry and situation. It is up to you to figure out which ones will work for you best. So let’s get to work on helping you!
Last week we talked about S.I.R. types of questions and what each one of these were. I reviewed what each of the these types of questions addresses. Today we focus on helping you derive your own questions to ask.
You are very familiar with your product or service and most likely know where they shine and where they do not. You want the customer to be focused on the why they need your product. Today we derive those questions with the simple road map. This process involves tying back benefits to form questions. The stronger the question, the better the benefit is highlighted when it is uncovered with the customer later in the sales process.
I’ll use a graphic to illustrate this process of creating questions to pull out benefits from your product or service’s features:
Take out a sheet of paper and a pen and start listing features of your product. List the features across the top of the sheet of paper from left to right, making each feature into a column. Below each feature, list a benefit that each feature creates. For example, when doing trainings with slides, I use my clicker that has a little button that makes the slide I am on turn completely blank. The feature is the button that I can push to make the slide go blank. The benefit is that I can then draw attention back to me and keep people from trying to read ahead on the slide. Feature = button, benefit = gaining attention.
Below the benefit, write down the needs that the benefit answers. The graphic is extended into the next step of the question creating process.
Using the same example, the magical button that makes the screen go blank and offers me the benefit of gaining attention, ask: what need is answered by the benefit? For me, I use the fact that I need to draw back the attention of the audience to expand on a point I am trying to make. I may also want to share a personal story of how I screwed up something in the past, so they don’t do the same thing in the future. The need that is being answered is how do I refocus the attendees’ attention back to me.
Now we have to figure out the question that we can ask that both answers the need and highlights the benefit that the feature addresses. List below the needs answered, in the same column, a few questions that you could ask. Here are a couple I would use: Would it be beneficial if you had a way during your presentation to refocus the group back to you so that you could enhance the point you want to get across? How much greater influence do you think you would have when training people if you could pause the presentation to highlight a point that needs to be addressed in more detail?
Below is the complete process of creating the questions that tie back your features and benefits:
When I used to sell stand-on riding lawnmowers that held inclines and fit in tighter areas than traditional lawnmowers, I would ask questions about whether the customer had ever had any employees trapped upside down when a mower flipped over, had read about some of these incidents in Florida around retention ponds (most resulting in death), or about the areas they had to maneuver around. I would follow up with questions about how they currently handle those areas, and so on and so forth. I was aligning them with the fact that my product could move around, and if the operator got into a bad spot, they could simply step off the back and be safe.
When asking the questions that tie back to your features and benefits you are able to ask questions and find out if your product is truly going to help the customer. If they are saying yes to what you are asking you know you are on the right track to finding points to make when you present your solution to the customer later in the sales process. Asking the right questions that pull out huge needs for the customers is the way to start getting them to draw in to you and confide in you more as well. They will start sharing more and more to help you hopefully answer the question they started asking when you first approached. How can this person help me?
It’s that easy to derive questions to ask that pull out the needs the customer would have that your product or service can answer. Remember to create your S.I.R. questions using this process so that you are pulling together all the different types of questions to ask your customers. Practice this week and then next week, I will show you why needs are so important to answer. This will help you increase your influence with customers. Start working on your questions and I’ll see you next week!
Sincerely,
Kevin Sidebottom