Ask Them to Tell You a Story

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

In the last two podcasts, we’ve seen how questions are one of the power tools of persuasive communication. There’s probably only one other tool that has the power to do so much to persuade, and that is a good story.

A good story grabs and keeps attention; a good story makes you credible; a good story packs a lot of meaning into a simple package; a good story engages the heart as well as the head; and a good story sticks in the memory. That’s why it’s always great to have a story or two to reinforce your message.

So, what if you could marry the two, kind of like combining chocolate and peanut butter? That’s what I talk about in today’s podcast, how to use questions to get them to tell you the story you want them to hear.

You do that by asking questions that get them to articulate a story for why they should change. When you think about it, every decision to change has a story behind it. People don’t change for the sake of change; they change because they’ve told themselves a story. They’ve seen a conflict in their current situation that requires resolution. They envision the plot in their minds: if I do this, that will happen, and hopefully it will be a happy ending. No story, no change.

So, where do questions come in? You can use questions to draw out the story of change, and you can use questions to shape the story they do tell. It has to be their story, but you may be able to nudge it along in the direction of the ending you would like to see.

There are various forms of this approach. Teachers use the Socratic method in, clinical psychologists use Motivational Interviewing , salespeople use SPIN, are all designed to get listeners to reach their own conclusion that they must follow the course of action you’re selling. The general principle they all have in common is that rather than trying to motivate people to act for your reasons it is far better to draw out their own motivations. They do this by uncovering gaps between their current situation and an ideal state, and eliciting enough pain and tension that they feel compelled to act to close that gap, ideally with your plan, product, or idea.

Where have we all seen this before? Pretty much every time we’ve been to a movie. Every movie plot is essentially a variation of one narrative arc: situation, conflict, resolution. Think about it: the movie opens with a description of the situation, where we get to know the players and begin relating to them personally. Next an element of conflict is introduced, because without conflict there would be no reason to watch. If it’s an action movie, our heroes are faced with some danger; if it’s a romantic comedy, they meet a potential mate, but something is acting to keep them apart. As the movie goes on, the conflict grows to the point of crisis, where it’s hard to imagine it getting worse and equally hard to see how they will get out of it. But ultimately there’s a satisfactory ending.

Just as stories require conflict to make them work, selling—whether it’s a product or an idea—requires a need, one that is compelling enough for someone to take the risk and expense of buying into your solution.

But here’s the problem: if you tell your story to push the need on the buyer, you’re only increasing resistance and distrust because we all have built-in mental filters and barriers that resist persuasive messages. Anyone who has a small child knows that the surest way to get a certain behavior is to forbid it.

The best way around these filters is to make it their story, not yours. People love their own stories, in which they face a conflict that requires a resolution for a happy ending. When they are telling their story, they are actively engaged in creating the reality they want to see rather than passively or actively resisting what you tell them. The trick is to get the buyer to tell you their story: They are the heroes, they tell you their conflict, they feel their own pain, and they get excited about the potential happy ending, which just happens to be your solution.

How do you get them to tell the story? First, you establish the situation by asking questions about where they are today and where they expect or hope to go from here: how are they currently doing things, what are their goals and expectations for the future, what’s important to them personally? While you want to be reasonably open-ended with your questions to allow for learning something new, you can frame the conversation in the direction you want to go by choosing the topic to ask about.

What’s happening in this phase of the story? You’re learning, they’re opening up to you, and you’re steering the conversation in the direction you want.

You have to resist the temptation to jump straight to conflicts, because it may be too early. If you ask them about what problems they have before they are ready to talk about them, they can easily get defensive and close up. Most people won’t open up until some trust has been established, and letting them talk about themselves is an excellent way to develop trust.

As they talk about themselves and their situation, they’re almost sure to turn the conversation toward some of the conflicts they see, although sometimes you may have to ask about them explicitly. You can’t have a conflict discussion without what I call POCR chips, problems, opportunities, changes and risks. We all know to look for problems, which are known dissatisfactions with their situation, but there are several other areas that are also ripe for creating conflict: Opportunities may arise because a new technology now allows them to improve their processes in some way; changes happen all the time that they must respond to, such as their customers’ needs and preferences, competitive actions, new laws; and risks are problems that do not currently exist but might. Listen very carefully for words or phrases that signal problems, opportunities, changes and risks, and encourage them to expand on these when they come up in the conversation.

If they don’t introduce conflict into the conversation, you may need to help them a bit. The simplest way is just to ask them. How’s that going for you? How well is it working? Are you happy with the way things are going? What problems do you see? What areas would you like to improve? Ideally, what would you like to see?

These are fairly open-ended questions and in a best-case scenario the other person will completely open up and spill their guts about all the conflicts they see. But what if they don’t open up? Or what if none of the gaps they identified are something that you can help them with? You may need more targeted and more specific questions. Instead of, What changes are you having to adapt to?, you might ask, How are you adapting to the new antibiotics regulations? Are you concerned at all about supply reliability? Are you comfortable with your relative response times?

When they begin describing their challenges, the need is beginning to come out, but here’s the spot where too many sales are lost. It’s like a fisherman jerking the rod at the first nibble. As soon as the client describes a gap they try to stuff a solution into it, except the solution is too big for the gap. They need to make the gap larger, by getting the client to talk about the cost to them in business and ultimately personal terms. You say your process is too slow, so what? How does that affect your customer response times, and how does that affect your sales, and how does that affect you personally? Did you ever lose a customer because of it?

Don’t assume that they are feeling the pain just because they’re describing the issues. When you ask these questions, they won’t always tell you out loud how it affects their business, but at least they are thinking about it. Just like a good movie, you want to create a plausible crisis that they will feel compelled to find a way out of. This is where the “heart” part of the story really kicks in.

By this point in the story, they’re ready for the satisfactory ending. Your questions now switch to the positive resolution: How would speeding up the process impact your customer satisfaction ratings? What steps would you have to take to get it done by the first quarter? When they answer your questions, they are ready to hear your solution. And, when they hear it, it will be their own idea because it’s their own story, not yours.