When we first covered Sandler Rule #17, “The Professional Does What He Did as a Dummy, On Purpose,” I was initially confused. Why would I want to ask dumb questions? Why would I want to expose myself as a novice? Doesn’t this just give power to the prospect? However, as we continued our discussion, I began to understand how this rule is critical to the process.<\/p>\n
In the past, we repeatedly discussed the fact that the biggest temptation, and one of the biggest dangers, in the sales process is talking and saying too much. The prospect doesn’t just want a spiel about every product feature and every little benefit you can possibly bring to him, the prospect has specific needs and wants and you need to know exactly what they are. One of the most useful tools to dig for more information is Dummy Questions, questions that on their face appear simple (maybe even obvious!) but incentivize the prospect to give you more information and details about how they see the situation. Effective sales is effective information gathering, these dummy questions allow you to open up further conversation. You are able to use dummy question at every stage of the sale, bonding to post-sale! Always remember to never assume too much, ask more questions, dig deeper into the problem.<\/p>\n
One good example of the use of a Dummy Question is the following scenario:<\/p>\n
Prospect: \u201cI have looked at a few of your competitors, and their prices are much better.\u201d<\/p>\n You: Do you think there is a reason for that?<\/p>\n The question sounds dumb and simple, but it enables to conversation to continue. Possible results in this scenario could include learning what exactly the prospect values most, is it price? Quality? Communication? Another alternative response could be: “Is there any reason to continue the conversation?” Again, simple and dumb; however, it allows you to continue the conversation and find out if the prospect is still interested while also implementing the technique of pushing for no. Dummy Questions are essential for drawing out information, and are interwoven into many different parts of the sales process, along with being closely tied to many of the other rules and concepts we’ve discussed.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When we first covered Sandler Rule #17, “The Professional Does What He Did as a Dummy, On Purpose,” I was initially confused. Why would I want to ask dumb questions? Why would I want to expose myself as a novice? Doesn’t this just give power to the prospect? However, as we continued our discussion, I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3241,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3241"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14132"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14132\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14135,"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14132\/revisions\/14135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}