Book Summary Preview : Secrets of Question Based Selling How the Most Powerful Tool in Business Can Double Your Sales Results By Thomas A. Freese Sourcebooks Inc., 2000 ISBN 1570715882 270 pages

Question Based Selling offers a unique approach by providing you a step-by-step, easy-to-follow program that will enable you to ask the right questions at the right time. Author Tom Freese takes you through the QBS methodology, showing how you can penetrate more accounts, establish greater credibility, generate more return calls, and close sales faster.

Chapter 1: Increasing Your Probability of Success
In sales, the average success rate for engaging new prospects is between two to five percent. This means that for every one hundred sales calls, the average salesperson will uncover only a handful of qualified opportunities. This low success rate translates to a difficulty in filling the pipeline with revenue opportunities.

The challenge if for salespeople to keep themselves motivated, even if the vast majority of sales calls end in rejection. QBS teaches you how to be different in order to achieve above-average sales results.

Selling Isn’t about “Right” and “Wrong”
Every salesperson knows that each sales transaction is unique because clients will have different needs, biases, and experiences. The concepts behind “right” and “wrong” are much too absolute to have any constructive value in sales. The author does not suggest that QBS is the right way to close a sales transaction. Nor does he imply that your current approach to selling is wrong. Instead, he expects you to make changes in your sales strategy. After reading this book, you will discover new and more productive ways to approach the sales process by using techniques that will increase your probability of success and decrease your risk of failure.

A Methodology Based on Cause and Effect
One of the goals of QBS is to simplify the sale. This is accomplished by identifying the events, activities, and strategies that will increase your probability of closing a sales transaction. It makes sense to incorporate those techniques and strategies that will move you closer to the desired goal, while disregarding other actions that produce undesirable results.

The single most effective way to increase your probability of success in a sale is to decrease your risk of failure. Probability and risk share an inverse relationship in sales: when one goes up, the other goes down. You need to minimize the risks involved in a sales transaction in order to increase your probability of success.