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Designing Core “Disqualifying” Questions to Save Presentation Time and Increase Your Closing Ratios!

The sales professional’s ability to conversationally ask the hard questions is critical to sustaining sales success. To accelerate your ability to serve others, is to learn how to politely and conversationally ask ‘dis-qualifying’ questions to vet a prospect’s ability, desire and commitment to entertain your offer on a serious level.

Three of the hard questions for most sales professionals to feel comfortable discussing are and these tend to drive most buyer’s initial decision process:

  • Financial
  • User
  • Time Line constraints

Be careful, if your entire sales presentation is dependent upon this single sub-decision maker making the deal go through, you may be in trouble. The other three sub-decisions and internal voices may serve to veto your offer when you are not there to defend it!

Sales professionals must recognize that every successful PRESENTATION must address all four respectfully. If any are not addressed professionally and the sales transaction takes place anyway, this will only spell future disasters!

Sales professionals must recognize when one of the four core mental decisions’ is not effectively addressed, a sale occurred anyway – they unsold the presentation!

  • Buyers remorse occurs when someone buys something (or in a recruitment perspective joins an organization based solely one only one sub-decision point), gets home and then realizes that it has caused a financial problem or burden to them. They realize that they are not really using it as intended and they got caught up in the emotion of the sales transaction and did something that now logically doesn’t make sense to them. They may return the item or if they keep it, they may never return for future business opportunities.
  • Intimidation occurs when they reflect back on what they purchased and realize it has too many gadgets, too much power for them in respect to what they actually needed – over technical for them. What seemed easy during the PRESENTATION is now intimidating.
  • Frustration occurs when they reflect back upon what they bought, realizing that they did not really need nor will they really use it and then recognize that the Coach got the best of them. Now they become mad at themselves and resentful towards the sales professional and organization they represent.

Sales professionals must realize that they are doing the prospect/customer a disservice by avoiding these issues and questions. Ask simple questions like:

  • “Does this proposal/offer fall within the financial perimeters you were expecting?” Or, “Is there a budget range we need to be sensitive to?” Or, “Will this address the financial situation you are in?” Or, ...
  • “Does this look like something that can be easily used to address your needs?” Or, “What do you like most about what we are talking about and looking at here in respect to __(insert the product/service being discussed)__?” Or, “Can you see yourself doing this and benefiting from this?” Or, …
  • “Is there a specific time window that you were looking to have this by?” Or, “Is there an urgency to getting this ______ and having it in use?” Or, “Are you ready to start now?” Or, …

Among the many questions that a sales professional may want to ask a prospect/customer for your products/services, there are always universal question targets that must be addressed. The earlier you ask these questions, the better you will be able to determine how best to meet the prospects/customers needs. This impacts your progress towards a close more efficiently or assists in determining if you can’t meet the needs of the prospect and therefore terminate the dialogue may be the best course of action for both parties.

The point of “Disqualifying Questions” is to assume that every prospect wants your offer, and you start qualifying them by eliminating the objections or derailments to a close as fast as you can.




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