Questions That Sell: The Powerful Process for Discovering What Your Customer Really Wants
Paul Cherry
AMACOM (2017)

“People don’t buy an 8th-of-an-inch drill bit. They buy an 8th-of-an-inch hole.” Theodore Levitt

This the second edition of a book first published in 2006. In the Preface to this new edition, Paul Cherry asserts that, although throughout the ages salespeople have always faced new challenges, “the fundamentals of sales are timeless.” Indeed, I think the business world today is more volatile, more uncertain, more complex, and more ambiguous than at any prior time that I can recall. However, there are some questions that are also timeless: Who is my customer? Which objectives are of greatest importance to my customer? How can I help my customer to achieve those goals?

By now we also know what buyers want: A seller who is easy to do business with, a product or service that outperforms comparable alternatives, superior customer service, and especially, no hassles. Most buyers resent being “sold” and prefer to be “convinced.” For Cherry, the most important change in the sales environment in recent years, one that defines selling in the twenty-first century is that, for better or worse,  “everybody knows everything about everybody.” I agree.

Invoking direct address, Cherry then suggests: “Your true competitive advantage is to be a collector of information. The only way to succeed is to know your buyer better — not just what’s posted on their company website or their LinkedIn page, but their hopes, their vision, their fears — the things they reveal only to those they trust. And the only way to get that deep knowledge is by asking the right questions in the right way.”

Buyers have their objectives. So must sellers and, as Cherry thoroughly explains, different types of questions have different objectives. For example, the purpose of an educational question (See Chapter 3) isn’t to gather information but to provide information.

There really is an art and a science to asking questions but mastering both is only one part of the equation. It is also imperative to master the art and science of listening. That is, “you need to cultivate real, strong relationships with your customers to make certain that their needs are met. This can happen only when you listen to your customers and really hear what they have to say.”

Cherry goes on to make other key points. “There’s something deeply embedded in the human mind that creates a powerful compulsion to answer questions. If someone asks a reasonable question in a reasonable way, and for reasonable reasons, it’s almost unthinkable to refuse to answer. It would be seen as a rude, almost antisocial act.”

Paul Cherry would be the first to point out that his modification of the Socratic method of inquiry must be mastered with meticulous care. Otherwise, it can result in irreparable damage to a relationship with a prospective buyer. With all due respect to the questions themselves, it is also imperative to be aware of the power of non-verbal communication. More often than not, what you say is less important than how you say it with your tone of voice and body language.  Master the skills examined in this book and you can sell a product or service, of course, but also an Idea.

In fact, I want to re-word that last sentence: Master the skills in this book and you can persuade...you get the idea. Read the book and then apply what you learn from it.