“Close-ended questions can be good, but especially when it comes to discovering, uncovering pain points, finding out about a prospect or client’s experiences, open-ended questions are gold. ” – Ion Farmakides in today’s Tip 722
Do you incorporate as many open-ended questions as to get to know your prospect?
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Ion Farmakides, Ion is the head of business development at Pearl Lemon. He brings 15 years of business development experience from startup to enterprise levels. He’s closed over 10 million Euros over the phone, and he also shared with me that he’s a horrible musician. Here he is:
Ion Farmakides: Hello. Hello. Hello. Ion Farmakides here. Head of Business Development for Pearl Lemon. Quick tip, which is more of a reminder, I suppose, because it’s something that I’m sure all of us know, at least I do. And yet I still forget about it from time to time. And that is to incorporate as many open-ended questions as possible, especially as part of say the discovery portion of a call or a sales conversation. And favor them over the closed-ended ones.
We all know the difference, you know, “Do you like pizza?” “Yes.” “What kind of pizza do you like?” “Well, let me tell you.” And I think it’s very easy to kind of have those situations where you ask a question you get a no, or you get a yes, and then you’re like, “Ooh, okay. I guess I have to ask another question now.” Whereas open-ended questions, the whats, the how’s, the where’s, the when’s. I think very powerful tools in any conversation really, but they really help you uncover either pain, any type of information that’s going to help you, not just close the deal, but also build a rapport. Get to know your prospect a little bit better. It also works obviously with existing clients. It’s not just a sales tool, but to me, this is the tip of the day or the week over the month of the year even sometimes.
Open-ended questions, they’re super, super important. And I will say there’s some times if I get stuck and this is something that maybe not everybody’s super comfortable with, but if I don’t know what to ask, but I definitely know I’ve either been speaking too much, much like I’m doing right now, or it’s been too long between questions. I’m not sure as to where I need to go though, which I’m sure it happens to a lot of people. I’ll just ask out of curiosity, and then I’ll just force myself to come up, with a good enough question, which helps with the flow of the conversation.
It’s also great exercise. It helps you be quick on your feet, but I suppose those are two tips kind of linked to each other. But yeah, close-ended questions can be good, but especially when it comes to discovering, uncovering pain points, finding out about a prospect or client’s experiences, open-ended questions are gold. And yeah, I’d say we all try to use them a little bit more. They also make the conversation with much healthier for both parties. So that’s it for me today. I hope everybody’s having a great day and catch you soon. Bye-bye.
Scott Ingram: For a link to connect with Ion on LinkedIn, which he’d love for you to do, just click over to DailySales.Tips/722 and we’ll have that link for you there as well as the video version of this tip, a transcript as always and that’s also where you can join our listener list. DailySales.Tips/722
Once you’ve message Ion. Be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!