Sales questions : Attacking current vendor
Here are a few direct and indirect questions to be used as a starting point for attacking an incumbent vendor / current solution.
• How do you feel about (incumbent vendor)?
• What do you like/dislike about company / product?
• What would you like to improve upon?
• How could it be better?
• When you were talking to (incumbent vendor) initially, what did you decide they had to achieve? Did you/they achieve that?
• If you think back to when you started this, what were your success criteria? What was it you were hoping to achieve? How does that compare with what you got? Why do you think that is? What improvements/changes could be made?
• How have your needs / the market changed since you got your solution from (incumbent vendor)?
• What would your perfect product/vendor relationship look like?
• What are your criteria for selecting suppliers?
• What would really put one supplier ahead of another?
• What alternatives are you/ will you be looking at for this?
• What are you looking for in suppliers?
• What are your three most important criteria for selecting suppliers?
• How do you go about selecting suppliers?
• When you look at (incumbent vendor), how do you know whether they are doing a good job for you – how do you measure their performance?
• Thinking ahead a few years from now, what do you think you will need from your vendor?
• What was behind your decision to go with (incumbent vendor)? Does (incumbent vendor) still do that for you?
More questions for you to use in your selling coming soon. Bookmark/RSS SalesItch now…. And don’t forget to add a comment to share your favourite questions with the community!
2 comments:
Great set of questions. The best situation is when you are selling to a new decision maker and not the one that decided to go with the current vendor.
Nick
Meeting to Win is doing a meeting series on Competition right now. I like the questions. It's tough to address competition. In the past few weeks, we've seen different approaches by political candidates - some talk about themselves and how they will help and others spend all their time talking about the "competition". If you are already leaning away from the "competitor", then it may help, but if you like the one being attacked, it will give you the resolve to get out and vote for the attacked. In selling its the same way. I like the questions and try to balance how much time I spend talking about my competitors. I try to ask these questions in the spirit of any vendor to see if we even would be a good match based on what they need/expect from any vendor. Our current series in on "Competitors" so I was very intrigued by this post. Thanks for great questions!
(www.meetingtowin.com)
Post a Comment