The Power of Open-Ended Questions in Sales Conversations

What if there was a way to get inside the heads of your prospects and customers? It would make work a whole lot easier for your sales reps, thatâs for sure.

While itâs impossible to read the minds of your leads and accounts, there is a way to pull valuable information from them during your talks. Itâs a skill your salespeople can develop and use to better serve your client base.

With open-ended questions, you can gather insights from the horseâs mouth and use them to enhance the buyerâs journey and improve customer retention.

So letâs dive into what this is all about and how you can use open-ended sales questions to improve your customer insights.

Asking the right questions is a crucial skill for salespeople. Questions help you uncover customer needs identify potential objections and guide the conversation. While closed-ended questions can be useful for gathering specific facts, open-ended questions encourage more detailed and thoughtful responses from prospects. Mastering open-ended questions can elevate your sales conversations.

What Are Open-Ended Sales Questions?

Open-ended sales questions are questions that invite the prospect to provide an expansive, descriptive response. They typically start with words like “what”, “why”, “how”, or “describe”. For example:

What challenges is your team facing with your current solution?
Why are you looking to make a change now?
How could a new solution impact your business?
Describe your ideal workflow.

These types of questions allow prospects to fully explain their situations. The responses you get will be longer and more detailed compared to closed-ended questions that can be answered with just a few words.

Benefits of Open-Ended Sales Questions

Using open-ended questions in sales conversations provides many advantages:

Builds Rapport and Trust

When you ask open-ended questions, you give the prospect the floor to speak freely. This makes them feel heard and develops rapport. It shows the prospect that you’re interested in understanding their unique situation, not just pushing a product. Establishing trust is essential for sales success.

Uncovers More Information

Closed-ended questions only reveal surface-level information. For example, asking “Are you currently using a CRM system?” will give you a simple yes or no answer. Asking “What do you like and dislike about your current CRM system?” encourages a detailed response about their experiences, needs and pain points. Open-ended questions allow you to dig deeper.

Guides the Conversation

Thoughtful open-ended questions allow you to direct the flow of the conversation naturally. You can steer the discussion toward topics that will reveal whether your solution is a fit. If you pepper the prospect with closed-ended questions, it feels more like an interrogation. Open-ended questions keep the tone conversational.

Prevents Assumptions

It’s easy to make incorrect assumptions about prospects’ situations. For example, you might assume a prospect wants to replace their current solution due to lacking features. But through open-ended questioning, you may learn they actually have a smooth renewal coming up and are just exploring options. Avoid assumptions by letting prospects explain.

10 Open-Ended Questions for Sales Conversations

Here are some examples of powerful open-ended questions to ask prospects:

1. What are your main challenges with your current [solution]?

This question allows prospects to explain their pain points so you can determine if your solution would address them. Listen for hints about lacking features, budget constraints, poor integration, or other issues.

2. How is your current [solution] limiting your team’s productivity?

With this question, you’ll gain insight into productivity bottlenecks prospects are facing that your solution may help overcome. Listen for tasks taking too long, missing functionality, lack of user adoption, etc.

3. What improvements would you like to see that could enhance your workflows?

This encourages prospects to share workflow inefficiencies you can highlight your solution’s strengths around. Listen for manual processes, miscommunication issues, data discrepancies, and desired automation capabilities.

4. Why are you exploring new [solutions] at this stage?

Asking prospects why they’re exploring solutions now invites them to share their reasons and timeline. You can gauge where they are in the buyer’s journey and tailor your sales approach accordingly.

5. How could improving [X process] impact your business?

This demonstrates your industry knowledge by naming a specific process. The prospect’s answer helps you quantify potential ROI and business objectives you can connect to your solution.

6. What factors are most important to you in selecting a new [solution]?

It’s critical to understand a prospect’s top purchasing criteria so you can emphasize your solution’s alignment during your presentation. Listen for must-have features, implementation needs, level of support, ease of use, etc.

7. Could you describe your ideal workflow with a new [solution]?

Letting prospects paint a picture of their desired future state provides insights into functionality they need. Take notes on key elements you can showcase your solution delivering.

8. What hesitations do you have about moving forward with a new [solution]?

Uncovering any concerns upfront allows you to proactively address objections and risks. You may hear budget restrictions, change management challenges, or specific features they’re unsure about.

9. Who would be the key decision makers involved in selecting a new [solution]?

Knowing all the players involved ensures no key perspectives are left out of the buying process. Ask follow-up questions to understand each person’s role and influence.

10. Is there anything else that’s important for me to understand about your situation?

This open-ended wrap-up question gives prospects a chance to share additional context you may have missed earlier in the conversation. You might uncover hidden needs or challenges.

Best Practices for Open-Ended Sales Questions

Follow these guidelines to get the most out of open-ended sales questions:

Prepare questions in advance – Have a list of open-ended questions ready to guide key conversations. Improvise additional questions based on the prospect’s responses.
Ask one question at a time – Avoid overwhelming prospects with multiple questions at once. Give them time to think and respond.
Use follow-up questions – Ask “can you tell me more?” or “can you expand on that?” to draw out more details after initial responses.
Listen intently – Give your full attention so you capture all the insights from prospects’ responses. Don’t just wait for your turn to talk.
Take notes – Jot down key information revealed to reference later and personalize your sales presentation.
Watch body language – Note voice tone and non-verbal cues that convey how the prospect truly feels.
Clarify as needed – If a response seems vague, politely ask the prospect to provide more specifics and examples.

Improve Your Questioning Skills

Asking thoughtful open-ended questions during sales calls takes practice. Hone this skill over time by preparing strategic questions for each prospect conversation. Reflect after each call on what questions worked well or where you could have dug deeper. Crafting and delivering great open-ended questions will boost the quality of your conversations and help you close more deals.

open ended questions for sales

When to Ask Open-Ended Sales Questions

Open-ended questions can help in a variety of sales scenarios. It can assist with sales prospecting, as well as grow relationships with current accounts. When you ask the right questions, it can even create opportunities to identify new ways to target and help your customers.

Remember, the goal is to make learning about your leads and accounts painless. So the idea is to make it feel natural vs. like pulling teeth.

The best time to use open-ended sales questions is when you need to:

Qualify a lead youâre pursuing
Learn pain points and needs of a prospect or customer
Understand the benefit your product/service will have for them
Find out objections and hurdles
Discover how their process works
Gather feedback about an accountâs experience with your product (for upselling/cross-selling)
Build rapport by asking questions about the accountâs issues and priorities

This isnât an all-inclusive list of ways to use open-ended questions for sales. But it should give you an idea of how you can use them to benefit you and your customers.

When coming up with questions, just keep the following in mind:

Start with broad questions and then ask more detailed questions as you get answers (think of an inverted pyramid).
Be a good listener and show curiosity.
Keep it personalized â avoid generalized questions that sound prepared vs. natural and genuine.

What Are Some Good Open-Ended Questions for Sales?

What are good open-ended questions to ask leads and accounts? Well, it depends on the scenario. So we put together a list of 47 open-ended questions based on your goals.

Sale qualifying open-ended questions are perfect for prospecting. Hereâs what you can ask to learn more about a lead.

Whatâs your budget like for this project?
Whatâs your timeline for purchasing a solution?
What are your concerns right now?
Can you explain your decision-making process?
Whatâs changed since the last time we spoke?
How soon are you looking to get started?
What are your thoughts?

Understanding your customersâ issues helps to position your product or service as the best solution. Here are seven open-ended questions you can ask.

Whatâs wrong with the current technology/service/product youâre using?
What are some of the hurdles holding your teams back from reaching goals?
What are the objectives and goals your business is trying to reach?
What made you decide to book a call with me?
What improvements are you looking to make within your department?
What have you tried to resolve the issues youâre having? What happened?
If you had complete authority over your current system, how would you change it? Why?

Being prepared for potential objections is critical to closing deals. So here are some questions to ask to reveal them in advance.

What are your thoughts so far?
What other areas of concern do you have?
How would you evaluate your current service/product?
What would stop you from making a change today?

You donât want to cut communications with customers right after closing a deal. So consider asking open-ended questions to show youâre still interested in their success. You can also use this time to learn how they found you, so you can focus your attention on the right channels.

What service or support would help you become successful?
What caused you to reach out to us?
What made you decide to use our product or service?

Your credibility and reputation are everything to leads and customers. So itâs ideal for salespeople to extend their questions beyond business to build rapport. Here are nine questions you can ask to get friendly conversations going.

What did you do last weekend?
Whatâs happening in your company these days?
How has your business changed after X event?
I know your basic background, but I would love to learn more about you. Whatâs your story?
I really admire the values your company has. How did you come up with them?
You said youâre hoping to retire soon â what are you planning to do then?
What were you doing before you were at this company?
What made you join this project?
I saw you downloaded our guide â what reason made you download it?

Understanding what motivates your customers helps with creating collateral and conversations that resonate with them. Here are some questions you can ask.

What are some of the goals you have for your division?
Whatâs your top priority today? And why?
Where do you see yourself in five to ten years?
If you could turn back the hands in time, what would you change in your organization?

You can never have too much information about your customers. But itâs not always easy gathering the right intel. So try using these open-ended sales questions to learn more about your audience.

Why is this your strategy today?
Why do X over Y?
How do you think you should move forward to improve productivity?
How do you think you can avoid common issues like A, B, and C?
What have you tried so far? Why didnât it pan out?
Have you considered X, Y, or Z? Why or why not?
What would you say if I said I think you may have under-invested in finding a solution?

Open-ended questions are designed to spark conversations. So itâs good to prepare follow-up questions to keep discussions moving along in the right direction. Here are some follow-up questions you can try.

How so?
Why is that?
Can you tell me more about that?
What caused that to happen?
Howâd that make you feel?
Did it improve or get worse?

Open Ended Questions For Sales That Get You Outstanding Results

How do you ask open-ended sales questions?

The best way to ask open-ended sales questions is to use the inverted pyramid method. Ask broad questions first, and then use open-ended questions that are more specific to the responses you receive. When done correctly, this will help you build a more natural conversation with prospects.

What are open-ended sales questions?

An open-ended sales question is a probing query that helps sales reps better understand their prospects. They can be used at any time during the consultative sales process, from initial conversations with a potential customer up until the close of a deal. A few characteristics of open-ended sales questions include: They are conversational.

Do open-ended questions matter for sales professionals?

While it can be complicated to ask relevant open-ended questions, many sales professionals believe that this skill becomes easier and more natural with time and practice. In this article, we discuss why open-ended questions for sales professionals matter and provide a list of 45 open-ended questions you can ask during your next sales meeting.

How many open-ended questions are there for sales professionals?

Here are 45 open-ended questions for sales professionals divided into five categories: 1. Qualifying Qualifying questions can help you determine the probability of turning your sales pitch into an actual sale.