Step One ~ Question

Question yourself next time a customer contacts you for your products or services. Do you care about the customer's problem? Do you feel that your company has the right solution? Do you feel comfortable with the customer's symptoms before you consider offering your solution? Is this potential customer allowing you the time to ask all of your questions?

If you did not answer yes to these questions, you might want to consider alternative products, services, providers, or careers. Sometimes it is okay to tell a customer you do not have the answer. Before you go down that road, make absolutely sure you understand the problems of the customer. How?

Step Two ~ Questioning

Did you take the time, and I don’t mean five minutes, to ask the 60,000-foot questions—broad-based in scope, long-range in nature? Do you understand the history of the customer’s current problem? Why not? What did you do before these problems arose? Do you know the players involved and how the decision is to be reached? Do you know who is the final decision-maker on the project and what the time frame is to close?

Step Three ~ Question the Questions

Finally, have you dug down deep enough to the root of the problem? It is at this point that you need to get down to the 100-foot view. How? Ask hard-hitting questions. Get down deep and probe. Serious customers expect you to do your job by questioning their questions, their intent, their motives, and their problems.

If you have no intentions of asking the deep-rooted questions, do yourself and your customers a favor. Don’t waste their time. Customers expect and want you to question their concerns. You might dig up a problem or a solution that they had not thought of. It is at this point that solutions get clarified.

Offering a solution after five minutes of discussion is as absurd as a doctor recommending brain surgery for a headache. You expect your doctor to run tests. Test your customers, their problems, and their questions. Then, you might find a basis for your solutions.

Solution-based selling is a nice catch phrase, but don’t let your customers catch you using it unless you truly mean it.