The three fundamental questions in sales

I am not directly selling but I do a lot of assists in the sales process and I am around a lot of sales people. A lot of the stereo types about sales people is probably true. When I worked at Oracle from 1995-2004, we had our ups and down in sales. What we learnt over the years was that the biggest competition was not the competition but a lack of immediate imperative from the customer, and a tendency to procrastinate. The salesman is thinking at any given time as follows. "The customer needs to buy from us now".

Let us analyze this statement. "Needs to buy" is the verb or the action that the customer needs to perform. It begs the question as to why the customer needs to buy at all or do anything for that matter?

The next thing is the word "now". It begs the question why now. In other words, why should the customer act now if at all they have to act?

Assuming the customer actually needs to buy now, then the words "from us" becomes relevant. A lot of time you will find sales people answering the question "why buy from us" without even bothering to answer why buy and why now?

A good sales manager is somebody who recognizes this and ask the three fundamental question all the time to his sales people in that order.

"Why do anything at all?"
"Why now?"
"Why us?"


Happy Selling. These are tough times. Tough times do not last, Tough People do..

Mahesh