Broad, open ended-sales questions are great for helping us to find out what’s going on in our prospects’ and clients’ worlds. They help us connect with buyers personally, understand their needs, understand what’s important to them, and help them create better futures for themselves.

Following are 21 open-ended sales questions you can ask that will help you round out the picture of your clients' needs. These questions are broken down into four groupings within the RAIN Selling^SM Framework:

• Rapport
• Aspirations and Afflictions
• Impact
• New Reality

One thing to note about open-ended sales questions: they don’t need to be complex. Often the basics are all you need.

Imagine for a minute you sold everything you should be selling across all of your firm’s capabilities to your existing clients. If all the buying centers bought all of the capabilities they should be buying, how much would your key account sales increase?

When people spend time analyzing this carefully, they find the potential to expand sales to existing clients is huge.

Given the great potential for growth, many companies give proactive key account sales quite the effort, but few achieve the results they should. The problem is they can’t, or for some reason simply don’t, create their own opportunities.

One of the greatest difficulties in professional services sales is helping potential clients understand what outcomes they will achieve when they work with you. Creating a picture of what outcomes are possible with the solution you present is imperative for two reasons. First, prospects need to be convinced of the outcome and that you can achieve it or they likely will not purchase. Second, if they do not fully understand what you are able to do for them, they cannot communicate it to the rest of the influencers in their organization and your sale may get stuck in endless internal discussions.

Helping prospects to understand the value of the services you provide is an exercise in teaching and learning. Prospects need to understand what will be different for them and their company if they purchase your services versus if they don’t, or if they purchase services from a competitor. In the end, prospects are not interested in buying your services; they are interested in what your services will get them.