Sales and marketing is really about understanding what motivates people to buy. The questions you ask a prospective client will provide you with the information you require to understand the motivation this person feels to either buy from you or to wait and buy from someone else. They will provide you with the specific or necessary information you require to persuade or motivate someone to create a meaningful change in their life. Questions will allow you to command the attention of another person long enough to determine if there is a match between your product, service, or opportunity and what that person seeks. Questions are the key to communication; they open the door to communicating clearly, concisely, and comprehensively.

As the pace of our society continues to increase, the attention span of the average individual continues to shrink. Consider that we have more methods of communication now than ever before, but we seem to lack the time required to actually talk to each other. We have cell phones, cordless phones, email, instant messaging, fax machines, Blackberrys, pagers, voicemail, VoIP, and who-knows-what invention coming next. These innovations are designed to provide us with a greater opportunity to communicate interpersonally, but they also create more opportunities for misunderstanding and miscommunication.

In sales, people crave the human touch. No matter the vehicle people communicate through, the reason for communicating remains the same. In this journey of human experience, we require information. In order to gain this information, we must know what questions to ask and how to ask them. Acquiring information at the right time is as crucial in achieving sales objectives as building relationships with other individuals. Building better relationships begins with establishing rapport, which really means asking questions to receive better information to see where a connection can be created. This connection creates a bridge between you and another person, linking your commonalities and neutralizing the perception of distance between you. The faster you learn to create this connection, the easier interpersonal communication becomes.