If questions are a tool for creating quality conversations and making your buyer think, then one of the most useful questions is:
"What matters most, right now?"
Because when you ask a question that triggers focus, and you have your buyer highlight the subject that’s most pressing and relevant to them, it’s pretty much guaranteed that the conversation will be useful to them.
Whereas questions like "Who’s the decision-maker?" or "What’s your budget?" frame your conversation around the technical aspects of a sale, and while they matter, they’re not the things that your buyer cares about.
Your buyer doesn’t lay awake at night thinking about how big the budget is for the new website they need – but they sure dofret and worry about hitting revenue goals for this year.
Besides, a question about budget or decision-making is a ‘you-question’: it’s there to serve your mission – move the deal forward and get the sale – and you’ll find it much easier to actually get that sale, when your conversation centers around ‘them-questions’, and what’s required for your buyer to move their own mission forward.
Because hey, now that you’ve identified what’s important, and what’s missing or broken, and what’s most important to your buyer, wouldn’t you know: You just happen to be the guy or gal whose team can build that website that helps them get their mission accomplished.
This is why questions are so important, and this is why it’s vital that you ask calibrated questions:
The kind of question that focusses a conversation on what’s important and relevant to your buyer.
And for nice people, this is great news. Because the more you listen, the easier it becomes to ask the right questions, which means you get to listen even more, and that means you’ll never have to struggle, trying to figure out how to pitch or make a compelling argument.
Just ask your buyer questions about their problems, until eventually they ask you about your solution.
And if you follow that process, diving deeper and gaining more and more insight, then by the time you’re asked about your solution, that solution will appear to them as the most natural, logical, good idea there is, and it’s not at all uncommon for your buyer to then volunteer the sale, saying "How does it work?" or "When can we get started?"
And the only way to get a buyer to volunteer a sale, is to talk about their mission and goals and challenges, and what matters to them.