The common approach to selling marketing services is, “Find their pain, and then show how you can solve it.” But, if you only focus on your prospect’s pain, you’re leaving half the potential new business on the table.
A client who hires an ad agency or other marketing services provider is looking to either:
- Solve a problem or pain.
- Grow, improve, innovate, etc.
After you build rapport, if your questions only focus on identifying and solving their problem(s), you may miss all the fun – helping them grow, innovate, or create other opportunities in the future. Who knows what they may be, but you’ll definitely want to be part of it.
Here are a few questions that will get your prospects or clients talking about what they want, hope for, or aspire to:
- So, what’s going on at your company lately?
- What do you want to get done in the next year or so?
- What parts of the business hold the most promise for the next couple of years?
- What are a few things that your competitors are doing that you’re watching?
- How might you improve on what they’re doing?
- What do you need to get these things done?
- What do you need to know that you don’t know yet?
The great thing about these questions is that they’re not too-personal – they’re not threatening. They’re also open-ended, and future-oriented. You can just as easily ask them to a prospect or a client.
Since most, if not all, of your prospects and clients think a lot about how they’d like to change and improve, these questions may be just what they need to start talking.
And, once you get them talking, you’re likely to hear things you’ve never heard before, which will probably open up a whole new world of potential new business opportunities.
