Asking Questions and Learning

I feel like I learned a lot this week in class. One of the biggest takeaways I had from this week of class was the component of asking questions and learning about the person you are trying to sell to in a funnel-like way. What I mean by this is that you start your questions in a broad sense, and then the more you learn about the client and the more they open up to you, you are able to narrow your questions down to exactly what they might need from you. This ties in directly to identifying the pain within your client and knowing exactly what they are really in need of. Identifying the pain was interesting to me because I never thought about it, but it just makes so much sense. It should be obvious that you need to find out what will make the buyer emotionally justify giving you money for whatever product or service that you are selling. The tricky part is finding out what exactly their pain is. This is tricky because sometimes they will not be as open with you about certain things. The best way to combat that is to be friendly, and honest. If you think your product is not the best match for them, tell them this and it might end up making them want your service anyway because of how transparent you were. Between being honest and friendly, and putting that together with identifying the pain and asking broad questions down the funnel to the more narrow questions, I feel like my outlook and approach on sales is different now than it was before the semester started. One important thing to note is that when you are asking questions, you need to let the other person really talk. Sometimes we have ideas and thoughts in our heads that we want to share before the other person even had the chance to truly convey how they were feeling about the original question you asked.