6 Intelligent Questions to Ask Your Sales Reps After Each Sales Call

One of the most crucial keys to your sales reps’ success lies in analysis and review, which is an important part of managing sales teams.

By analyzing details from each call, you equip salespeople with actionable insights to refine their approach, boost skills, and ultimately close more deals.

The key is asking thoughtful questions to ask your sales team, to uncover what’s working well, areas for growth, and how you can better support them.

This level of personalized feedback and coaching is proven to keep reps engaged while advancing their selling abilities. That’s why leading post-call debrief questions to ask in a sales meeting are important.

Yet with packed schedules, it’s easy for managers to neglect these value-rich sales review questions.

Or worse yet, rush through generic queries that reveal little and advance development minimally. For your team’s success, you need consistent, tactical reviews focused on what matters most.

The right questions prompt deep reflection from reps on their actual process. This leads to meaningful dialogue where you collectively pinpoint strengths to leverage further alongside specific gaps to address.

The insights uncovered form the foundation for tailored coaching and training plans.

In this article, we share six intelligent questions to ask sales reps after every call. This comprehensive framework steers constructive analysis while keeping meetings focused.

You will discover the tactical open-ended questions that spur big-picture thinking plus self-evaluation. Use these to run reviews that motivate and elevate performance.

Key Takeaways

1. Conducting regular sales call reviews with thoughtful questions is crucial for improving team performance. It provides insights to refine approaches.
2. Ask open-ended questions that get sales reps to reflect critically on their process to reveal strengths and areas for improvement.
3. Understand what captivated the prospect’s attention and curiosity to determine what messaging resonates most. Replicate this.
4. Evaluate how well reps balanced talking vs. listening to the prospect. Fostering two-way dialogue is key for relationship building.
5. Discuss which sales skills reps wish came more naturally to identify gaps and personal development opportunities.
6. Have reps quantify their progress on both revenue and activity goals to maintain focus on leading indicators of success.
7. Uncover what parts of the sales workflow or tools are cumbersome so you can evaluate where to increase efficiency.
8. Brainstorm how to overcome common objections heard to improve rebuttals with better relevance and resonance.
9. Capture best practices that secured advances to expand what works rather than overly scrutinizing the negative.
10. Conclude reviews collaboratively setting expectations and next steps for capitalizing on insights uncovered.

What to Ask Your Sales Team

Make it a point to schedule a short one-on-one with every one of your salespeople following a sales call. These questions will give them what they need to make their next sales call a successful one.

1. What questions did you ask the customer?

It is crucial that your sales reps know that the customer should not be the only one asking the questions. Your salespeople reps should be focusing a great deal of attention on asking the customer questions, ones that they have prepared ahead of time.

These questions should be catered to each customer, so that they do not feel they are getting a general sales call.

Are the questions that your sales rep is asking focused on the business? Do the questions help your sales rep determine whether there is a sales opportunity or not?

The questions your sales reps ask their customers should set up an opportunity for the customer to discuss a current problem they are having, and for the salesperson to provide a solution, in the form of the company’s products or services.

2. What are the things your customer wants?

In other words, what are the customer’s motivations for buying?

Though your sales rep may be tempted to ask instead what the customer needs, that is not what they should be after.

Your sales rep should be digging into the customer’s pain points to learn how they can sell to the customer’s wants.

In order to successfully sell, you sales team needs to understand what the customer is looking for in a product or service, and then provide reasons why the particular product or service they are selling will help them get what they want.

3. How did you establish yourself as a trusted source?

In order for a customer to buy from a sales rep, they have to feel they can trust him or her. Thus, you will want to ask your sales reps how they set themselves up as someone the customer can trust as a business advisor.

During the call, it is ideal for your salesperson to provide the customer with case studies or other evidence of the value of the product or service.

This will require your sales reps to do some research, which will help them get to know the product or service better − this is always crucial to successfully closing a deal.

4. How did you set us apart from competitors?

Your sales reps have to first recognize that your company is not the only one in existence selling this product or service.

Once your salespeople have accepted that, then they can move on to discovering how your company’s product or service is better than the others, and possibly even more importantly, how the sales reps themselves are different from other competing companies’ sales reps.

Your salesperson’s response to this question should dig deeper than the specifics of how the product or service is different − it should go into how your sales rep established that they have value for the customer that they will not find elsewhere.

5. Who else plays a role in the customer’s purchase?

Many times, your customers are influenced by someone else in their life when it comes to purchasing products or services.

Whether it be a supervisor, a friend or someone else, it is likely that another person is in your customer’s mind when he makes a decision as to whether he will make the purchase.

It is your sales rep’s job to determine who those other influential people are, and how they can convince those people to jump on board with the purchase as well.

6. What does the buyer stand to gain from this purchase?

Your salesperson needs to be ready to give some financial information on what the customer will gain if they decide to purchase the product or service.

Whether it be improving productivity, increasing sales, reducing turnover or something else, the customer is more likely to purchase the product or service if they have some numbers or statistics on how the product or service will benefit them.

It is key that your sales reps always focus on satisfying the buyer’s wants.

Specific Questions

If your sales reps are looking for some specific questions to guide them and get them started on diving into the minds of their customers, here are some great sales questions:

1. What do you dislike about your current vendor?
2. What do you dislike about the product you are currently using?
3. What concern(s) is stopping you from making this purchase?
4. What are you most excited about for your company in the coming year?
5. Who will make the final decision about this purchase?
6. What are the top 3 challenges you face at work right now?
7. What are your top 3 business priorities for the coming year?
8. What is holding you back from reaching your profit goals?

In Closing

By asking your sales team the above six questions after each sales call, you are setting both you and your sales reps up for higher chances of success.

Your goal is to get to a point where you do not need to ask these questions after each sales call because you know your sales rep has all of these areas covered.

By putting in a bit of extra time and effort, you will be thrilled when you get to that point, and see the increase in sales as an added bonus.