Video Mystery Shopping Tip: The ‘key’ to digging deeper with discovery questions

One of the most important things ALL new home sales associates are trained to do is to ASK discovery questions. This means asking your prospects open-ended questions that will allow you to learn more about them. You want you want to discover their buying motivators as well as their personal likes, dislikes, interests and other key information that will make selling them a new home more likely.

When you are qualifying your prospect, some of the typical discovery questions sound like this:

What price range are you looking to stay within?
Have you talked to a lender?
When were you planning on making your move?
How much money do you plan to put down on the home?

While these are all GOOD questions to use during the discovery process, they are not GREAT questions. No matter how your prospect answers the question, you are not really getting enough information to create your close.

I always encourage new home sales associate to find out what their prospects do for a living. This is a great non-threatening way for you to get an indication of how much money the prospect makes per year, but more importantly it is an excellent opportunity for you to dig deeper, develop rapport, and gather excellent information without feeling too ‘sales-y’.

Let me give you an example, last week I had a meeting with a financial planner. I was ‘interviewing’ him to see if he and I would be a good business fit. One of the first things he asked me was what I did for a living. I told him that I owned my own mystery shopping company and that I was also a speaker. Thinking his next question was going to be ‘how much money do you make per year?’, I was pleasantly surprised when he said ‘tell me how you got started in that business.’’ For the next 20 minutes or so I have him a brief account of how and why I started Melinda Brody and Company and before you know it, he and I were talking like we were old friends! You see, when he turned the question around and started to show genuine interest in me and what I did for a living, I naturally relaxed.

When you ask your discovery questions, make sure that they are indeed questions…not interrogations! People are usually very protective about sharing financial information with someone they have just met, so this area needs to be handled more creatively. Discovering more about WHO your client is way more important in making the sale than just asking them what they want their monthly payments to be. Take the time to dig a little deeper with each question that you ask. You will be surprised how easily people will open up to you when they feel that you are genuinely interested in them.