How To Get The Customer Talking When Selling To Them

What can I say to get the customer talking?

To get the customer talking ask open questions. Now those are questions which begin with how, what, when, where, why, who, and tell me. Those are questions that you can't answer yes or no. And they give you a lot of information. You can start with a question such as 'what did you have in mind?'. And then later on you can probe a little further by saying, 'what sort of size were you thinking of?' Or 'where were you going to install it?' Or 'who else is going to be involved in this particular project?' Just keep asking those open questions until you can establish fairly firmly what you think they want. Now, you can ask closed questions to establish facts. For example, 'is there a power point handy?' Now, if you are a hair dresser going into someone's house, you will need a power point for your hair dryer. If you want to do a demonstration on your laptop, you may need a power point for that. It is that sort of question to establish facts but keep on asking questions until you are pretty well sure in your own mind that you can match your service or product to their particular needs. And then you can describe the features and settle the benefits.