15 Best Sales Questions to Ask Prospects

Asking sales questions is crucial to understand your prospects better and increasing the chance of closing a sales deal. No wonder it is an effective sales prospecting strategy for any business. Various business prospects may have differential needs and goals.

However, they may hesitate to give out much information unless you ask the right questions. Asking the right sales questions allows you to connect with the customers by understanding their needs and requirements.

To have the right set of sales questions to ask, you must know the types of sales questions that are mainly used. Well, there are two types of sales questions:

Open-Ended Sales Questions

Open-ended sales questions are unstructured and allow the consumer to give more detailed answers. It can further be divided into two parts:

• Long Open Ended Sales Questions
• Short Open Ended Sales Questions
  

Closed-Ended Sales Questions

Closed-ended sales questions are basically answerable with a ‘YES’ or a ‘NO’. You can even ask your prospect to explain the answer. If you ask them if they would like something, and they reply yes, you can ask them why they would like it or need it.

If you are still wondering what you should ask your prospects, read on to have curated a list of 15 best sales questions to ask prospects.

A Guide to the 15 Best Sales Questions to Ask Prospects

It is important to ask questions to prospects in the B2B field to know what product/solution would suit their needs. Below are a few B2B sales questions that you must ask prospects:

01. What are your key short-term & long-term goals?

This open-ended question will allow the prospect to tell you in detail what they need. Some of the short and long-term goals can be as follows:

Short-Term Goals

• Growing page traffic by 20%
• Implementing a loyalty program for customers
• Posting on social media business pages at least three days a week
• Partnering with foundations and charities to support a common cause
  

Long-Term Goals

• Boost web presence
• Achieve 99% customer satisfaction record
• Employ 100 talented heads within the next year
• Improve sales by 30% in a year

02. What are your most crucial pain points?

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You must learn your prospect's pain points to ensure you offer them the best possible solution that solves those. For instance, if your customer is struggling to identify leads, you need to focus on that before all and offer the most suitable solution which has the highest chance to be sold.

03. What are your expected outcomes?

This question will help your prospect to think about the outcomes rather than the goals. You can explain how your product/solution can help them achieve those. Remember, you need to sell the result your solution offers and so it's crucial for that.

04. What are your time, budget, and productivity goals?

This question can help you know the constraints of your prospect and offer the best solution that fits all of their goals in terms of productivity within their stipulated time and budget.

05. What is your target deadline?

This is an excellent sales question; if you know that they have a set deadline, this will be the perfect time for you to pitch your solution. This question will also give you the scope to portray how efficiently you can deliver the result within their deadline which in turn will convey better clarity to your prospect and help close the deal.

06. Are your team's key objectives and the present strategies completely aligned?

This B2B sales question can gain you an upper hand while pitching the product. After you know the goals, outcomes, and objectives, knowing the team's role in the department can benefit you to plan and suggest how your solution can bridge any possible gap and help offer what exactly they are striving for.

07. What are your team's greatest strengths and weaknesses?

Always start asking them about their strength. Slowly and naturally, take the conversation to their weakness and then tell them how your solution can help them achieve their goals. The focus will be to convey that your solution can address the weak points, and strengthen the strong ones further to give them the best of competitive advantages.

08. Which thing about your organization do you need to change the most?

The required changes might be relevant to your product/solution or sometimes not. Still, this can give you a clear idea of what your prospect is looking for to assure that your solution can deliver it. Remember, no information from the prospect can be worthless to a true marketer.

09. Which past strategies do you want to improve further?

It is definitely one of the top sales questions, especially B2B sales questions. There can be many strategies that your prospect might be using. Out of which, they might plan to improve one of them. Knowing this might help you address their problem and can suggest some solution from your end to take a better market-driven and result-oriented approach.

10. Which KPIs are you struggling to improve?

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This is often one of the best B2B sales questions to ask your prospect. This helps you get a comprehensive idea of what business KPIs your solution needs to optimize. You need to convey to them with your past work, approach, case studies, etc. how drastically these KPIs can be improved.

11. Which resources can you utilize better?

There are multiple resources that a business can use to boost its productivity. Understanding the type of resource your prospect is using can be beneficial for you to close the deal by offering them a complete plan to utilize them more through a tailored solution.

12. How is your audience's response so far?

This is one of the best sales questions to ask prospects. Every business strives for a positive response from its audience. Tell them how your product will help them carry out their business smoothly, improve customer experience further and boost the KPIs like retention rate, and recurring revenue while driving promotion.

13. What are your criteria for choosing a company to work with?

This B2B sales question can help you understand the preference of your prospect to ensure they are your potential customer and you are not wasting your time.

14. What are your revenue and ROI expectations?

This is one of the best B2B sales questions to ask to know your prospect's ROI expectations. They help you sell your product in relevance to your prospect's need by assuring them ROI growth to align with their targets.

15. What affects your purchasing decision the most?

This is one of the best sales questions to ask prospects. The criteria and factors that affect a person's buying decision might differ. But this can give you better insight into their thoughts and convince them that your solution has everything to offer that they are looking for.

Wrapping Up

Wrap your calls with closing questions to ensure you have enough information about your prospects. Below are some of the best closing questions:

1. How much will rate our product/solution on a scale of 0-10?

2. What is the best thing that you love about our product/solution?

3. Let’s say we are developing an X feature in our existing product/solution. Would you be interested in upgrading from the basic plan?

4. That’s all from my end. Is there anything you want to ask?

These best closing questions will help gain strong trust from your prospect and build a good work relationship.

FAQs

Q1. Why do you ask sales questions to our prospects?

Ans. You must ask sales questions to understand them better, gain and maintain trust in addition to knowing what your customer needs.

Q2. What are some other top sales questions to ask?

Ans. Some best sales questions to ask prospects are -

• What do you think is the problem with your strategy?
• What is the most annoying part of scheduling a task?
• Do you face issues while boosting your community engagement?
  

Q3. What is the importance of a good sales pitch?

Ans. A sales pitch helps convert a prospect and improve the overall sales funnel.