Buying and selling are processes! The selling process has 5 main phases:
- Phase 1: Generating attention and interest (marketing)
- Phase 2: Identifying requirements
- Phase 3: Gaining conditional commitment
- Phase 4: Developing the sale
- Phase 5: Closing
About asking questions effectively:
- Open-ended questions are most suitable in phase 1 and 2 to establish rapport, understand the customer pain-points, his requirements, his sources of value (e.g. “tell me about your company”, “what” type of question)
- Closed-ended question (“Yes” / “No”) are most useful to get clear signal / commitment and move to the next phase