Editor’s note: Paul Kirch is CEO of Actus Sales Intelligence, a Fort Worth, Texas, business and sales consulting agency, and Actus-360, a technology services providor. He can be reached at 214-295-6111 or at pkirch@actussales.com.

The questions you ask are critical in driving a consultative dialogue with your clients. Asking thought-provoking and intelligent questions can help uncover hidden information and make better decisions on how you manage the relationship.

There are many questions you can ask to engage your buyers and potential customers and the questions are unique to each client and their needs. This means you need to do your homework and pre-plan calls and meetings. When you have a call scheduled, think about the outcome you want and the direction you want the call to go. Then tailor a set of questions to help you accomplish your goal. If you feel they aren’t engaged, the right question can help bring them back in. Getting them talking is the key to engagement and consultation. After all, you can’t provide solutions if you don’t know their challenges.

When it comes to creating such questions, I use four core question types. If you create a list of these in advance, you will get better at leveraging them and easily tailor questions to drive the conversation toward your end objective.

Leading questions

Using leading questions requires you know about the market or the client’s business and if you can master this question type, it can be very impactful. With these questions, you already know the answer but you are using them to get your customer thinking.

“How are your slow-paying clients impacting the way you run your business?”

Investigative questions

The more you know about potential buyers, the better you can prepare to uncover their pain points. Uncover those points and you’re no longer selling, you're solving problems. That’s where investigative questions can make a huge difference. Think in terms of vendors, budget, hurdles, needs, pain points, etc.

“What’s your current research budget?”

Empathetic questions

Empathetic questions drive real issues to the surface. These questions allow us to relate and spark real, emotion-driven responses. It’s not manipulation, rather it’s connecting on a personal level. We’re talking about business issues but that doesn’t make it any less personal. Relate and win.

“How are the recent layoffs I heard about on the news impacting your workload?”

Instigating questions

This is an area where you must exercise caution but where you can make the biggest impact. If you can find a hot button or uncover a recent issue the client had with one of your competitors, you can ask questions to bring the issue to the forefront and make a huge connection. However, this is successful only if you’re prepared to address the issue from your company’s perspective. What would you have done differently? How would you be a resource for them? There’s nothing worse than going down the path of asking instigating questions and not being prepared to respond.

“Shouldn’t your vendor have caught that mistake? How are they handling it?”

Note: Remember to proceed with caution. Instigating questions should only be used when you have the rapport to support a bold move like this. Be prepared to defend your reason for asking.

What not to ask

I’m often asked what questions to ask but sometimes it’s more about what not to ask.

Trap questions

A question type to avoid is what I call “trap” questions. To put it simply, trap questions are ones that yield a yes/no response without any opportunity for a well-positioned follow-up question. For example, if you ask “Are you happy with your current supplier?” and their response is “Yes,” where do you go from there? “OK, thanks. I hope you have a nice day.” Perhaps it won’t be that abrupt but if you trap yourself, you really are losing any leverage you might have created. After all, when they respond in the affirmative to such a question, it creates a physiological state that is essentially a closed door, as they feel like shutting you off. You can recover from it but it requires that you reengage them into active dialogue again – it should happen in that conversation, if possible.

Lazy questions

Other questions that do more harm than good are those that appear lazy. In other words, if you could have easily found an answer with five minutes of research, then you might have lost all credibility before even starting. For example, if you ask a health care research firm if it does any health care surveys, wouldn’t you find it hard to be taken seriously? If you had done your homework, there’s a chance you would have never asked that question.

There is a way you can ask almost any question without appearing lazy. If you prove you’ve done your research, then you can ask similar questions to the ones in the paragraph above. “I see on your site that you have a wide variety of health care data and reports. Do you actually conduct health care research? Or is that data compiled through some other means?”

Note: These may be yes/no responses but it should not present a trap. Also, because you’ve shared your reasons for asking, it’s a safe question.

Learning to stop talking

In the end, consultative selling is not possible without good questioning and listening. Asking thought-provoking and engaging questions and then learning to stop talking to get their answer is one of the most important skills that effective salespeople must possess. As simple as it sounds, it’s shocking how often consultative questioning falls apart at the listening stage, where one might be so fixated on the next thing they want to say that they forget to listen.

What happens when you ask a question and there is a second or two of silence? That uncomfortable silence is often where the magic happens. Take a non-responsive prospect, as an example. You ask a question and get a short and very uninterested answer. Most sales professionals are very hypersensitive to this and start to feel panicked or anxious. If they ask another question and don’t get an immediate response, they often will chime in with some statement about their product or services because those topics are in their comfort zone.

Instead, if you can learn to shut up and enjoy the silence, you just might see a shift in the call and the dialogue. An unexpected question can stop the client in their tracks and make them think. Give the client time to consider their response – and then answer. The waiting game is often the key to victory. Try not to fear the uncomfortable silence.

If you’d like to learn more and receive a copy of our Askology PDF, please e-mail me at pkirch@actussales.com.