Sales & Marketing Series: "What are the best sales questions?"

Article by Andrew Rudin, MS

What happens when we make assumptions? The movie Return of the Pink Panther provides a great lesson. Peter Sellers, playing the immortal character of Inspector Clouseau, sees a hotel clerk holding a dog on a leash and asks “Does your dog bite?” The clerk responds “no,” and Clouseau reaches to pet the dog, which immediately bites his hand. “I thought you said your dog did not bite!” he exclaims. To which the clerk replies “That is not my dog.”

In sales, how do we know if our prospective customers are answering the questions we think we’re asking? How do we know if we’re asking the best questions, or even the right questions? The Pink Panther vignette illustrates both humorously and poignantly what can happen if we take actions when there are incongruities between questions and perceived answers. I can relate to Clouseau’s not-entirely-self-induced folly, and I wondered whether sales questions I’ve used could be similarly entertaining fodder—or, at the very least, instructive. So, I reflected on my inventory of sales calls over twenty years and came up with two examples—one showing failure, the other success—that illustrate what can happen when asking questions in selling. My conclusion: getting to the right answers requires careful thought and constant practice. There aren’t any shortcuts, but there are some best practices.

A Failure:  Stuff for a Buck Chain Stores

I worked for several weeks to secure an appointment with the VP of Operations for a large national chain of dollar retail stores, which I’ll call Stuff for a Buck.  My company’s product was a suite of bar code scanning hardware, software, label printers, and services.  To prepare, I studied the dollar chain’s distribution, logistics, and competitive challenges.  I was ready for The Meeting at Stuff for a Buck.  

After asking mostly ordinary empirical questions such as:  “How many trucks?  How many warehouses?  How many shipments per day?  and How many stores by region?”, I moved to the pain part (I was told early in my career that a big part of selling is to “find out what keeps the customer up at night.”).   “What goes wrong in your daily operations?” I asked.   The VP responded, “It’s quite common to put the wrong load on the trailer.  For example, the truck going to Charlotte might actually be carrying the inventory that’s supposed to go to Wilmington.  It happens quite often throughout our distribution network.  We haven’t found a way to prevent it.” 

Ka-ching! I hit what-keeps-me-up-at-night pay dirt! My supposedly keen industry insight caused me to extend his answer into the downstream logistics migraines that Stuff for a Buck must experience: heavy trailer loads of goods shipped in error all over the country. Goods in transit out of control and arriving in unintended locations. Stock outages. Customer service issues. After collecting some more data from the VP and offering him the hope that my proposal would eliminate his problems, we exchanged pleasantries about kids and golf, and I departed his office.

Using what he’d told me, I developed a proposal for a real-time, multi-warehouse inventory control system, including 200 handheld and mobile terminals, and dozens of radio frequency access points. Inventory movement would be efficiently and accurately recorded with the simple pull of a scanner trigger. No more manual data entry, no more paper, no more mistakes. All this for $300,000—an excellent value considering the multi million-dollar scale of the company’s inventory and transportation costs. Of course, I forecast my sales opportunity to close in the current fiscal year, and received kudos from my district and region managers for having uncovered such a valuable lead. High fives were given all around, and we believed we couldn’t lose. I sent the sales proposal to my prospect and awaited the affirmative response, which never arrived.

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Andrew Rudin is the Managing Principal of Outside Technologies, Inc. and specializes in sales strategy for technology companies.  He holds a BS in Commerce (Marketing) and a MS in Management Information Technology (MS/MIT) both from the McIntire School of Commerce, University of Virginia, where he serves on the Advisory Board for the MS/MIT program.  He is Certified in Production and Inventory Management (CPIM) through APICS.  As a Faculty Adjunct at National Louis University, he teaches Strategic Uses of Information Technology.  He can be reached at 703.255.3732, or arudin@outsidetechnologies.com

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