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This is the fourth podcast in a series on how to use questions to help you persuade. In this one, however, I urge you to go beyond questions to produce a persuasive conversation that flows.
The Art of NOT Asking Questions
The most efficient and effective sales call I ever conducted took place in a boardroom in Atlanta where I met with the SVP of Worldwide Sales and several of his direct reports. I had barely set the stage with my value proposition when he cut me off: “Let me tell you what I want”, he said, and launched into a 60-minute soliloquy about his sales force and its struggle to adapt to a changing market. My participation consisted mainly of nodding, interjecting an occasional probe, and trying to take good notes. By the time he was done, George had answered every question in my sales call plan, I had checked off every one of my call actions, and we struck a deal on my largest sale to date.
If there is such a ratio as revenue per word spoken, it was easily the best sales call I’ve ever made. It flowed from start to finish, and the best part was, the sale was completely the customer’s idea! It reminded me of Napoleon’s advice to “Never interrupt the enemy when he is making a mistake”, except in this case it’s “Never interrupt the buyer when they are selling themselves.” By staying out of his way, I let George have my way.
That call was extreme, of course, but it is definitely worthwhile to strive to talk less and sell more. Good salespeople accomplish this by asking more questions; great salespeople do it by asking fewer but better questions, and by going beyond questions to achieve a similar flow.
How does achieving that flow help you sell? First, people like to talk about themselves so once you get them started, you may create a momentum of self-disclosure which can produce broader and deeper insight into their needs. Second, people like to feel important, so by being in charge of the conversation (or at least feeling like they’re in charge) can make them feel good. Finally, when they tell you the story you want them to hear, they own it, and they’re much more likely to stick to their commitments.
How to encourage conversational flow
Conversational flow doesn’t just happen; you can stimulate your customer’s willingness to talk by what you do before and during the call.
Before the call
Avoiding too many questions during the call does not mean skipping questions altogether during your preparation. The research and planning you do will help earn the customer’s trust without which they won’t open up. Besides, it’s the only way to know if the customer’s conversation is producing the answers you need. By knowing what you need from the conversation, you will have all these mental hooks on which to organize the incoming information.
It also does not mean that you should strive for a stream-of-consciousness type of flow, in which you get the customer to talk about anything that enters their mind. The most effective sales conversations have a particular structure—even if it’s not obvious. That flow is the SCR story structure: They begin by describing their situation, bringing out their conflicts, and arriving at a resolution.
During the call
There are two general ways to encourage the customer to take control of the conversation and run with it. First, you motivate them to talk and set the frame by carefully planning your call opening, and then you use following and reflecting skills to encourage and nudge the flow.
The first few minutes of the sales call are crucial to achieving conversational flow. Your goal is to get the customer eager to talk about what you want them to talk about. For this, you have three tools: value proposition, action, and agenda.
Your value proposition and action together deliver the lean communication imperative of ATQ: Answer the Question. In every meeting, the customer/prospect wants to know: “What do you want me to do, and why should I do it?” By being very upfront about it early, you dispel suspicion and jointly agree on the reason for the meeting. In the unlikely case you’re wrong, the customer will let you know immediately and you will have an opportunity to reset or pivot as necessary.
If the value proposition and action together set the destination, your written agenda is the road map that structures the conversation. In most cases, you’re going to be very explicit, even to the point of enumerating and explaining the agenda items and offering to add any issues they might have. I would estimate that a third of the calls I go on, I rarely need to use direct questions, because the customer sees the logic of the structure and willingly participates.
Even if the customer takes control and follows their own agenda, your effort hasn’t been wasted. When George began talking, I did not interrupt him; I simply slid my agenda across the table. He absent-mindedly straightened it out in front of him and kept talking—but within a couple of minutes, it became obvious that he was glancing at it and following the points I had prepared.
As the customer talks, you should strive to “get in front” of the conversation and simply nudge it in the right direction, using standard listening skills of encourages, probes and reflections. Try to be as non-disruptive as possible—don’t ask too many questions, and avoid leading questions that reveal an ulterior motive.
As Harry Truman said, it’s amazing what you can accomplish when you don’t care who gets the credit. When you achieve proper flow in a persuasive conversation, the other person will take credit for the idea, and that’s exactly where you want to be!
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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.
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Why are questions such powerful tools for persuasion? They are the principal means of achieving and properly applying all four pillars of Practical Eloquence. Do you remember what they are? They are outside-in thinking, content is king, preparation, and being your best self.
Outside-in thinking requires you to understand what the other person is thinking and feeling, and that means you may have to ask a lot of questions because we overestimate our ability to read others. I’ve heard that veterinarians are the best physicians, because they can’t ask their patients where it hurts. Imagine diagnosing someone without asking questions! Yet, that’s what we do all the time when we give advice or try to persuade others. (I know, I did it last night when speaking with Mackenzie about her and Matthew’s dilemma about whether to move to California.)
The second part of OIT is that the other person should also feel it, or sense that you are at least trying to use it, the old “They don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” How better to show someone you care than by taking an active interest in them? A couple of years ago, I had dinner with an old friend I hadn’t seen since high school. After an excruciating hour in which he told me all about himself and his family, and never once asked a single question about me or my family, I knew immediately why I hadn’t seen him since high school—and another 40 years will be too soon. You know exactly what I mean, but ask yourself if you just may be guilty of the same thing yourself.
Second, content is king, and questions are essential for getting the answers you need to ensure that you have the right content. Contrary to what most people think, most of the world’s content is not stored in google-accessible databases—most of the knowledge that you need to succeed in the world is locked inside the minds of the people you live with, socialize with, and work with on a daily basis. Questions are the most important technology we have to tap into those crucial unique personal databases.
And questions go beyond simply extracting knowledge; the best ones create knowledge by getting others to think about issues in ways they have not before. The answers may be in our heads the entire time, but we may not know it until someone asks the questions that spark the necessary connections and combinations. The Socratic method is the oldest and best-known form of this, and closer to today’s time, Toyota’s 5-whys forces us to drill deeper into an issue to get at root causes.
Questions are also the building blocks of pillar three, preparation. Proper preparation and planning starts with situation analysis, which requires you to take inventory of everything you know or don’t know that’s relevant to your situation. Questions are all about resolving DKs and by methodically asking them we will probably encounter (DK)²s as well. If we have a mental template of required information, we’ll need questions to fill in the blanks.
Finally, questions help you be your best self by letting the other person see that you genuinely care about them, and you don’t arrogantly assume you know it all.
So, if questions are so powerful, why don’t we ask enough of them?
First, we’re too self-focused, more worried about what we want to achieve in the conversation than about helping the other person realize how our proposal helps them. We’re also too impatient, and in our rush to get our point across we may not realize that it did not stick in the other person’s mind. Some of us are reluctant to ask questions because we’re afraid of looking dumb. Finally, despite our best intentions, we may be simply unprepared to ask the best possible questions.
To become a better questioner, you must first be aware of your own questioning frequency and practices. What percentage of time do you actually talk during most conversations? Are you truly taking an interest in the other person? Do you probe to get a deeper understanding of where they’re coming from? Next, cultivate two attitudes of humility and curiosity. Remind yourself going into the conversation, that you don’t know it all, and strive to get beneath the surface of what the other person is thinking and why they’re thinking that way.
In subsequent podcasts, I will address specific questioning techniques and methods that apply in various persuasive communication situations.
When you’re selling a differentiated product or service, you need to think about it forward, but sell it backward.
Think forward
Think forward simply means that you figure out how it’s going to help your customer in a linear fashion going forward. First, you identify your differentiators, determine how they will impact the customer’s business operations and processes, and then calculate the business and financial benefit.
Differentiators
Brainstorm what sets you apart from competing alternatives, including status quo. But you need to take a broad view of your differentiators and consider your complete offering. Too many salespeople focus only on the actual product differentiators, which is why I often hear them bemoaning the fact that theirs is a commodity. To which I reply: there is no such thing as a commodity. If you consider things such as packaging, delivery reliability, financing, convenience, durability, consistency, contract terms, your company’s financial strength, customer service, order size, time to implement, training, you can always find at least one edge to cut into commodity thinking.
Process Impact
A differentiator is only relevant to the customer if it affects their ground level operations in some way, so the obvious question to ask about each differentiator is SO WHAT? Every business conducts operations and processes in order to deliver value to their customers, and they are always happy to consider ways to improve them. There are four general types of improvements you can make, all of which fall under the acronym POCR (I call them POCR chips): problems to be solved, opportunities to exploit, changes to adapt to, and risks to mitigate. In a sense, you’re figuring out the actual physical impact, which moves the needle of one or more important process metrics, such as time, labor, throughput, yield, quality, etc.
Business Impact
With the “So What?” figured out, the next two questions are “How much?” and “Who cares?”. In other words, what’s the business and financial impact and who benefits from those? Financial impacts broadly fall into three buckets: revenues, costs, and asset efficiency. Additional business impacts include risk reduction, strategic impact, and personal satisfaction. This is the language you need to be comfortable with when speaking at top decision making levels, and it’s especially important when you’re selling a solution that is new enough to make possible disruptive change.
Sell backward
Once you have the broad outlines of your value figured out, your selling task is to get the customer’s agreement about it. But you can’t do it in the same forward linear fashion, for two reasons. First, jaded customers tend to tune out of product-first pitches, so you’ll be on the wrong foot from the start. Second, your analysis probably has a lot of holes in it, because until you talk to a customer and understand their particular situation, you won’t have the actual numbers. By asking questions to fill in the numbers, you get the customer involved in your thinking process and end up with credible numbers.
The solution is to structure your conversation or presentation backwards. Start with a discussion of their business goals and needs, then work backwards to get agreement on the process changes they need to make to achieve those goals. Once you have that, that’s when you talk about the specific differentiator that makes it possible. The most effective structure for backwards selling is the standard story structure: situation, conflict, and resolution. If you’re delivering a presentation, it’s a great narrative structure to pull them along, or if it’s a dialogue, you can order your questions to get them to tell you the story you want them to hear.
As I’ve said before, leave the product in the car. The best possible outcome, and I know it’s possible because I’ve done it a few times myself, is when the customer agrees to do business—and you have not even talked about the product at all. That’s the beauty of thinking forward and selling backward.
