So many questions to ask, yet prospects give us so little time.

While sellers are eager to ask a litany of sales questions, customers are often just as eager to get off the phone. In fact, shrinking time windows to engage prospective customers in a productive conversation about how your solutions can address the customer’s needs has made it more difficult to sell than ever before.

As salespeople, of course we want to ask questions to gain a better handle on the customer’s needs. Sellers also want to qualify the opportunity, understanding who else needs to be involved in the decision, the customer’s timeframe for moving forward, in addition to other qualifiers like funding, logistics, and the approval process.

While it’s more than fair for sellers to want to know where an opportunity stands, salespeople must begin to realize that while most of the qualifying questions they want to ask benefit the salesperson, but don’t do much to benefit the customer.

And, with some many salespeople knocking on the door trying to either get a foot in the door within a particular account, or expand their opportunity, the customer’s tolerance for spending time answering a barrage of sales questions has decreased significantly.

Thus, if you want to be successful moving forward, it’s incumbent on sellers to do something that causes customers to “want to” share more information, rather than hope than rely on the hope that potential buyers will feel obligated to respond to every query that a salesperson happens to throw their way.

How can sellers expand the window for discovery and qualification when dealing with today’s increasingly standoffish customers? That’s where the strategies and techniques outline in Question Based Selling can make or break your opportunity to sell.