Alright. Now that you’ve asked the series of questions which help your prospects understand and feel what their future will be like once their problems are finally solved, your next task is to get your potential customers to think about the consequences of not doing anything to change their current situation.
In other words, once they see and feel what their future will look like, in a way, you want to take all of that away from them for a brief moment by asking Consequence Questions. And the reason for this is because these questions create urgency and get your prospects to defend themselves on why it’s so important to change now, rather than later.
But you’ll want to keep in mind, though, that you’re not trying to trick your prospects into buying something that they don’t want or need. Instead, you want to help your potential customers realize that they can improve their current situation by purchasing your solution in order to solve their problems effectively.
So, how this works is that you take a problem that they’ve already told you they have and want to solve, and you ask them a series of Consequence Questions around that problem. And with that said, here’s an example of what that would look like:
To begin, you’d ask, “Okay. But on the flip side, what happens if you don’t do anything about this, and you keep experiencing these [insert what their actual problem is] for another [three, six, or 12 months, or 5, 10, or 15 years, depending on what you sell]? What are the consequences for you . . . at that point?”
Now, suppose the prospect gives an indecisive, wishy-washy answer and says something like, “Well, I don’t know. I hope that doesn’t happen. But if it does, I guess I’ll just have to figure it out.”
From there, you’d ask, “Do you want to keep putting yourself in that situation and continue going through all of that pain . . . if you didn’t have to?”
And since most prospects will say, “No,” you can respond by asking, “Okay, so it’s important to do something then?”
Now, if the prospect gives you another negative answer, you would ask, “Are you willing to settle for that, though?”
And again, most prospects will say, “No.” Then, at this point, you’d need to be a bit tougher on the prospect. So, in order to do this, you’d ask, “Well, who makes the decision whether you settle or not?”
Now, at this point, if your prospects still seem hesitant, you can get them to defend themselves. And to do that, you’d ask, “Okay. But for you, why look at doing this now, though? Why not push it down the road and keep being forced to deal with [insert what their actual problem is] like a lot of other people do who don’t know anything about [insert your type of product or service]?”
And by this time, they should respond in a way that shows they’re ready for you to begin presenting your solution. But, before you start doing that, though, you’ll want to ease into the next step by asking a few Transition Questions.
Luckily, this transition stage is fairly quick and simple if you’ve done the groundwork up to this point by asking the previous set of questions effectively. So, here’s an example of what this would look like:
First, you’d say, “Okay. Then based on what you’ve told me, what we are doing could actually work for you.”
Then, you’d continue by asking, “Because you know how you said you’re looking for [repeat back what they said they wanted]? And because you don’t have that yet, it’s making you feel [frustrated, stressed, worried, annoyed, concerned, or whatever negative emotion they told you they’re feeling]?”