This article is part of the Sales Secrets Uncovered series where we share key learnings from our analysis of 211k+ sales calls spread over 3.8 million minutes and 12 months. Why? To uncover the stats that will help you sell better in 2022 and beyond!

Look, we’ll get to today’s newsletter, but first I have to share this shocked koala.

I mean, just look at how adorable it is! Just look at it!

Also, as you can see, this is not completely irrelevant to the topic at hand.

But before we can really get into the weeds, we need to, uh, qualify what we mean by sales qualification questions.

So questions like “When do you plan to go live?” or “Who will be involved in the sales process?” have been considered.

So first, let’s talk about how often sales folks are asking such questions.

Honestly, we were surprised. We really thought it would be higher!

Especially because qualification questions have such a positive impact. Our research says that they correspond to an increase of 25% in win rate. That’s significant!

Looking to dig a little deeper, we then looked at what exactly sales folks were asking.

Turns out, some of the most common questions involved -

1. Timeline (How long the project might take, when the prospect wants to begin etc.)
2. Authority (Who has the final say in the deal, what the evaluation process is like etc.)

Timeline-related questions cropped up most frequently

And yes, such questions did have a significant impact, corresponding to a 26% increase in win rate and an 18% decrease in loss rate.

Questions about authority were far less common though, appearing in just over 7% of all deals we looked into.

However, these probably had an even bigger impact on deals, correlating to a 29% increase in deals won and a 20% decrease in losses.

Spending time and energy on deals only to lose them after weeks or months of follow up is one of the biggest causes of revenue leak. They help you figure out which deals are worth following up on, and weed out the ones that are unlikely to pan out.

So asking the right koalafication questions is a bear-y, bear-y good idea!

And with that, I’ll see you next week, with more insights and definitely more animal puns.

Trust me, I’m not lion.