With the right questioning technique, even if you do not make the sale, you can uncover hidden problems, even find new products and services. Creative questioning makes your customer part of your sales team. Every sales process, no matter how small, begins with an Investigative stage. Investigation is a listening activity where you determine customer needs. These are useful for qualifying and clarifying, but they yield almost no information.
Open questions expose customer needs.
These questions elicit information, and they help build relationships. The flaw in open questions is that they limit the customer to their experience. Open questions, by and large, document only the customer's past. It is designed so you can learn customer needs, plus their wishes and desires. Creative questions tap the customer's imagination, and short-circuit the internal editor that we all carry with us.