On a recent #livesaleslab, we talked about two questions. First, why should people buy from you, and second, why should they buy from you now?

These seem like relatively simple questions to answer.

However, most of the time when I'm asking these questions of salespeople, the answers I get are usually somewhere along the lines of, "Well, they should buy from us because we have the best quality product." Or "They should buy from us because we have the number one in customer service." Then of course, there's those that say, "Well, we're the only ones that do this in this particular way." And then of course, there may be those few that still say, "Well, we do have the lowest price."

Problem #1- Everyone Is Saying The Same Thing

Now I would challenge you to say none of those are things that differentiate you as to why they should buy from you because everybody's saying that. You can go to any website and throw a stone and you'll find that they say they have best in class customer service or the best quality or even the best price, or that we have these features and benefits. And the problem is is that everybody's saying that.

Problem #2- These Differentiators Are Discovered After They Buy

The other problem is that all of those things that differentiate you as to why they should buy from you, are things that they experience after they've made the decision to buy.

So how do you differentiate before they make the decision to buy, and ultimately maybe the reason why they buy?

It's all in the questions that you ask. And I know that you've heard me say this before, but it is truly the way that you're going to differentiate from all of the other salespeople that ask questions that are all about their products and their services, or don't even ask questions. They just tell them.

What You Can Do To Differentiate Yourself

So what are some of the ways that you can differentiate yourself from the others? I highly recommend a book that you can read. Lee Salz' book, Sales Differentiation, talks about this. And in it he talks about that it's not enough just to listen to your prospects and your buyers, but asking these kinds of questions are going to be critical for that.

And I actually have a worksheet that I share with all of my clients, and I'm going to share with all of you. It's called the Layered Questions Framework. And with it, we use that framework to make sure that we are asking those questions in our pre-call planning. What questions do we need to ask of the buyer to understand if they have a problem we can solve, if it's a problem worth solving, and why it's a problem worth solving.

Just going into those three layers will help you to differentiate yourself from everyone else. That's why they should buy, but it's in that third layer of what's the cost of not fixing it, that's when you get to the why they should buy now. And if you don't have those things, then you don't actually have an opportunity.