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Asking the right questions to your prospects during a digital marketing sale can make a major difference.
The important thing to remember about these questions is that they are your tool for not only understanding the needs of the person, but also to work out if a business can truly benefit from the kinds of services you have on offer.
Despite what a lot of people might believe, turning down a considerable chunk of the businesses that come your way is necessary when selling your service.
The challenges and issues that come from starting business with a company that isn’t going to be the right fit for the services you provide is going to be much, much worse than the money you make from it. If you’re going to sell digital marketing services, pick the right businesses for the job.
It really isn’t worth it to waste your time with businesses who aren’t going to be helpful to you. They’ve either got unrealistic expectations of what you can provide, aren’t ever going to be satisfied by you, or they don’t have the tools and systems in place to capitalise on your services properly. In either case, not at all what you want to have to work with.
In this fashion, it’s wholly normal to walk into every single sales conversation with a digital marketing question set. These questions will help you to sort between the clientele that are worth your time, and the ones who aren’t going to be any use to you.
So, to try and help you figure it all out, we’ve put together 14 questions that can be used on a sales call to try and gauge how well you’re likely to connect with a prospect.
The list is built in such a way that you proceed through it chronologically, so start at the beginning. Each question is also designed to build on what came before it.
Before we do get started, it is important to note that when it comes to questions like these, the way that you say things and the type of industry your prospects exist in will make a difference. Your tone of voice can mean the difference between sounding professional or rude, so just bear that in mind.
14 Questions For A Digital Marketing Pitch.
“What made you want to take this call today?”
A question like this can be useful for anyone who wants to have an open-ended answer in their discovery call. In all likelihood, you probably pushed for the call to take place, but this question helps to make you a buyer in the relationship and changes the narrative slightly.
A question like this also has the benefit of being pretty open in terms of how it gets answered. If your client is nervous, which most will be at the start, they tend to babble a little, and this can lead to giving away a lot of key info about their goals and areas of weakness. This provides you with some critical information about their situation which you can use to shape the rest of your sale.
“How long have you been doing this job for?”
If there is one thing that people like to do, it’s talk about their business. People love talking about their company and themselves, and you can glean a lot of information.
The company that your prospect owns is an extension of them as a person, especially when you’re dealing with small business owners.
The question will give you a good idea of how successful the business is whilst still keeping the conversation light enough to carry on.
The best thing you can do in these situations is ask the necessary questions from a sales perspective, starting with broad inquiries and getting more precise as time goes on. Questions like these will help you to get some high-level information, and at the same time, not set off any resistance in the person.
“Why did you get into this business?”
The purpose of this question is to try and tease out some of the values that the business owner has. Ideally, you want said owner to tell you about some of the deep and emotional reasons why they choose to run their business.
With a question like this, you can appeal to their values during the presentation. Remember, all the information that you gather will help to make your case.
“Where is your business at this moment, and where do you want it to be in a couple of years?”
The thing to remember about a question like this is that it is meant to gauge the ambition of the client. If your client has a lot of goals but hasn’t made much progress, that tells you something about them.
“How many customers do you bring in every month on average?”
A good question to ask on a lot of occasions is how many customers the team has per month. Now that you understand what the future goals of the company are, it is time to find out specific information as to where the company is and what it plans to do publicly now.
As a question, this is good for making sure that the gap between the goals of the prospect and their current state is highlighted. Your goal in this will be to make sure that the company understands they need action to reach their goals.
“How many new customers do you want to gain each month?”
Building on the last question, this one aims to highlight ambition and expectations.
This question will tell you what kind of numbers you need to use in your pitch. You need to make sure that you base your estimations and promises around what the client wants to achieve. If you don’t, you may seem unrealistic or unnecessary to the client.
“If you reach capacity, will you start hiring new staff?”
Naturally, the more clients a company is able to accrue, the more staff they need. You want to try and work with clients who can grow their business, because this increases how much you get paid for your services.
Beyond that surface information, however, is something even more important. You’ll want to convince your client that the services you provide will help them to grow, inherently. If you can do this, you’ll set yourself up for success.
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“Who is your ideal customer?”
It isn’t a secret that people love to get a personalised offer. If you ask your client what their ideal customer is, you help to make them believe you have their best interests at heart.
You want to make sure that your client believes you have their best interests at heart. That’s why at Internet Marketing Team, you’re always at the heart of what we do. It’s good customer service to honour the needs of your client, and to make their vision a reality.
“What is the estimated lifetime value for a customer who uses your business?”
When we ask a question like this, we are looking for two pieces of key information. These are as follows:
- What is the current value of a customer that uses the business?
- How advanced are the sales processes that the company uses?
The first piece of information that you get is vital for presenting your price. If the client makes a protest regarding the cost of the service, you can use this customer value.
The second piece of information you obtain is used to gain knowledge of how the company uses their sales process. You don’t want to work with a company that has a poor sales process, because this means that they are less likely to handle any business that you generate for them. You will get the blame for the problems, regardless of whether it was your fault.
Broadly speaking, if your prospective company has a good understanding of the typical lifetime value of the customers, this is a good indicator that the sales process they have in place is robust.
“What is your ideal budget for a digital marketing package?”
This question will tell you a couple of things. First, you will learn about the price sensitivity of the client. Second, you will gain information about their expectations.
Any client who answers lower than the typical industry price is either uninformed about the complexities of digital marketing, or they are looking for cheap services. In either case, you will need to be careful.
“Have you experimented with digital marketing in the past, and if you have, what results did you get?”
Ideally, you want to hear the word yes in this one, because it means that you can probably sell the service again. If companies have done it once, then they’ll probably try again if the argument is compelling enough.
The only thing that you want to do is look out for any statements that sound bothered. Some companies have had bad experiences in the past, and it will colour their opinions now.
If your prospective client has had a bad experience, then ask them what went wrong. This will give you a better understanding of why they object to the idea of digital marketing, and you can then work around that by suggesting solutions that you would offer.
“Can you describe your sales process for me, from the initial point of contact to closing a sale?”
This is a great question to ask, because you will walk away with a pretty solid understanding of how your respective client handles sales. If they don’t give you a very good response, or they simply dodge the question, then their sales process is probably weak.
Ultimately, you will need to know how the sales process works if you’re going to effectively create a digital marketing campaign. The more that you know, the more likely you can successfully generate business for them.
“What makes you different from the competition?”
This is a question that will give you a lot of information about different things. First, you can begin to gauge how difficult the project will be based on what the unique selling point of your client is. Second, you can use this information to create a unique offer that will appeal to their brand.
Ultimately, prospective clients love it when a sales representative takes a direct interest in the unique message of their company, because it means that they are more likely to feel represented.
“Do you offer anything special to new or prospective customers?”
Special offers are the bread and butter for a business because it allows them to entice new customers whilst offering something tangible.
At the end of the day, you might be responsible for creating a special offer to advertise to the audience of the company, so it’s well worth getting to know what they have.
Final thoughts.
One of the most important things to consider when we look at these questions is that they have a deeper meaning than what we initially think. Obviously, questions like these are designed to help you gain key information about your prospective client, but we also use them to identify potential obstacles, the specific needs of the client, and how to frame the services we provide in a constructive way.
Here at IMT, these are just some of the questions we tell our White Label Digital Marketing Services clients to ask their prospective clients, or we do the pitching for them. The important thing to remember about asking questions is that they provide you with information you need to successfully make your pitch. If you want to be able to successfully connect with prospective clients, you have to establish a relationship with them, which you do by asking targeted questions.
It’s important to remember that your goal as a sales representative is to sell the product. So, everything that you do has to be focused on that objective, and asking questions allows you to collect the information you need to create a customised pitch.
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