Accelerate Sales Velocity, Ask Your Prospects These Questions
Gary Zurnamer
March 29, 2023
The more you know about your potential buyer, the more you can tailor your offering to suit their needs. With an understanding of a prospect's priorities and pain points, you can have more relevant conversations and move them through the sales process faster.
Clear communication within your team is also key in accelerating sales velocity. Having context on how a deal is progressing, and how the sales team can come together to tackle blockers, is incredibly powerful.
All of this starts with asking the right questions.
Vouch has helped thousands of sales teams get their questions answered with short, authentic videos. The following sets of questions have been tried and tested in our platform. Not only do they deliver context to accelerate sales velocity, they’re easy for your prospects and team to answer, maximizing your responses.
The best sales discovery questions
Context on a prospect’s needs will help you have more productive conversations in the early stages of the sales cycle. Jump straight into the features they’ll care about, allay initial concerns, and build connections faster.
These questions are simple, broad and incredibly effective in uncovering a prospect’s priorities and pain points:
- Could you tell me about your business?
- What's your top priority right now?
- What's holding your team back from reaching your goals?
If you want to go deeper, check out the ten ‘uncommon’ questions leading Content Marketer Devin Reed swears by to get under his customer’s skin.
When should you ask sales discovery questions?
Before your first meeting. With Vouch you can create a campaign in seconds and share the recorder link along with your meeting invite. Your prospect can quickly record their answers and you can get up to speed before you speak, maximizing the impact of your meeting.
Find these questions as a pre-filled question template in Vouch.
The best lead qualification questions
When evaluating if your product or service is a good fit for a customer, these questions are great conversation starters.
They’ll add context around the size and urgency of your prospect’s problem, help you determine how they compare to your ICP, and decide on the best course of action going forward.
- What is the business problem you're trying to solve?
- What are the priorities for your business/team this quarter?
- What are your biggest pain points?
When should you ask lead qualification questions?
Early in the sales cycle. Clarifying these points early will stop you investing too much time in a prospect that doesn't have the right problem or budget for your solution.
Use these questions as a pre-filled question template in Vouch. Check out our question template library.
The best deal review questions
Sharing deal reviews within your sales team is the fastest way to unlock group learnings and create an efficient sales enablement process. Particularly powerful for remote or hybrid teams that miss out on that water cooler conversation.
Capture all of the insights your reps are gaining out in the field with these questions. Adjust depending on whether the deal is ongoing or closed.
- Tell us about the opportunity.
- How did they find us?
- What is the problem they are looking to solve?
- What is the business impact of them doing nothing?
- What is making you confident this is a deal we can win?
When should you ask deal review questions?
Get your team across a potential deal as soon as it enters your pipeline. With Vouch’s integrations, you can automate the review request or create your own prompt to record. Vouch integrates with the tools you use every day from Salesforce to Hubspot and Slack, helping you streamline your workflow and share your update while it’s fresh in your mind.
The best customer testimonial questions
Once you’ve turned your prospect into a happy customer, don’t stop asking questions. These testimonial questions can create convincing customer stories that might just help you close the next deal in your pipeline.
- Please introduce yourself and your role at [company name]
- Would you recommend our product/service and if so, who to?
- What problem were you facing that made you seek out [company name] and how did [company name] help you overcome those problems?
- What is the best thing about [company name]?
- Is there anything else you would like to tell us?
When should you ask your customer for a testimonial?
Milestones will vary from business to business, but generally you’ll want to give your customer enough time to fully experience your product or service, but not so long that they lose that initial excitement. Once again, integrations can help automate the process, so a templated customer testimonial request is triggered when:
- A customer leaves a five star review
- Their campaign or project comes to an end
- They hit a milestone, such as one month using your service
We’ve unpacked each of these testimonial questions and why they’re so effective in this blog. And you can find them in Vouch's question template library.
How to get your prospects and team to answer questions
Now you’ve got the questions that’ll accelerate sales velocity, you just need your prospects and team to answer them. Start by providing context and making it easy.
- Explain why
Everyone’s short on time. Explaining that you want to make your meetings more productive and a better use of their time should incentivize them to share their answers ahead of time. Share the questions somewhere obvious (within the meeting invite for example), and explain why you’re asking them.
- Make it an easy ask
The easier it is to respond, the more likely they will. That’s why we’ve provided questions that are easy to answer, and an entire recording experience that is friction-free. There’s no downloading, calendar syncing or lengthy email writing required. Your contacts and teammates simply click the link, view the questions and hit record. And they can make notes and record as many times as they need to. Check out the recording experience from their perspective here.
- Integrate it into your workflow
If it becomes a seamless part of your process, not something you have to navigate away to complete, the more likely it’ll become embedded in your workflow. Don’t rely on good habits or memory, integrate Vouch Q&A campaigns with the tools you use every day, like Salesforce, Hubspot and Slack, and they’ll be automatically triggered at exactly the right time, throughout the sales cycle.
Steal these questions for yourself with Vouch’s pre-filled question templates
Question templates are the ultimate campaign shortcut. Check out this webinar clip from Vouch's Enterprise Sales Lead, Ben Sher, who'll show you how to get them set up.
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Be sure to book a Vouch demo today and chat with a video content expert.