If someone came up to you on the street and tried to sell you a miracle pill that was 100 percent guaranteed to eliminate migraines, would you buy it? Probably not. You’d probably be busy doing something else and uninterested in something for which you had no need. But what if you were shut up in a dark room at home wracked with headache pain and the knock at your door was the same salesperson? Would you buy the pill then? Chances are you would. When pain is immediate and acute, people want a solution and they want it now. The best salespeople are masters at capitalizing on this human tendency, says Joachim de Posada, an international speaker and best-selling author who specializes in sales issues (www.askjoachim.com). They know how to use questions to create migraines in their prospects. And when the pain is most severe they know to offer their “pill” – the solution that will take away that pain.

“Knowing how to ask the right question is a very powerful skill,” says De Posada, who once worked at Xerox Learning Systems and helped create that company’s selling process, which places heavy emphasis on effective questioning. Here, he says, is the best three-step questioning technique for creating headaches in prospects:

1. Orientation questions. These are the questions that help you become familiar with the basic information about a company: the number of employees, number of divisions, geographical areas, and so on. With the glut of information available on the Internet, prospects expect a salesperson to have done their research and know the answers to most, if not all, their orientation questions.

2. Analyzing questions. These questions develop the headache, says De Posada. Here’s an example of how analyzing questions bring a problem to light:

Sales rep: “You said you serve 10 countries. When you change a price on a product, how long does it take that change to filter out to all 10 countries?”

Prospect: “Oh, about 10 days.”

Sales rep: “So let me understand this. When you raise the price of a $100 item to $110, or a 10 percent increase, you’ve got 10 days where you’re losing $10 per sale?

Prospect: “I guess that’s right.”

Sales rep: “And you said you sell about 1,000 of these items a day. So that means you’re losing $10,000 per day, or $100,000, on that one price change.”

Now the prospect has a headache and you’ve set yourself up to sell the aspirin, says De Posada.

3. Developing questions. Here’s where you turn the headache into a full-blown migraine by extending the problem out into other areas of the prospect’s business. You do that by asking questions such as, “How does losing $100,000 with every price change affect your research and development budget and capabilities?” and “How are the cutbacks in R&D affecting your competitive position?” After these kinds of developing questions, you’re ready to say: “If I could show you a way to communicate price changes to every country instantaneously, would that be something of interest to you?” If you’ve done a good job creating the headache to this point, you’ll get a “Yes!” here every time.

“Companies want the silver bullet, the quick pill to make sales people effective and there isn’t one,” De Posada concludes. Instead, the key to becoming more effective is to learn to ask better questions. It takes a lot of work and a lot of practice and De Posada estimates only about 5 percent of salespeople do it well. Instead, most reps rely on the “spray and pray” method – spraying as much information as possible on prospects and praying that something sticks. The “spray and pray” sales method creates headaches for prospects, all right, but not the kind that will get you the deal!