Craig Klein left a comment on my blog this morning. I checked out his blog and saw a great post that I had to point people to. Here's an excerpt from the full article:
Bottom line: Recent experiences like this one show me that too many sales people still haven't gotten the message - sales is not about talking, telling or teaching. Its about listening.
Your goal is to continue to ask the prospect questions about their world. Understand what's working for them, what challenges they face, where they think they're heading and most importantly, what are the greatest risks they see in the current world or in the future. What are they afraid of.
Why? Because people buy for emotional reasons. Especially in business, people buy things because its a piece of a vision in their head or they buy because they're afraid of something. Either way, if you know what that is, then its easy to show them how your product or service can be a crucial part of the vision or protect them from failure, cost overruns, etc.