Ask With A Purpose
- Dan Greenberg
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
As sellers, we are trained from the onset to ask questions. Discovery is a core part of what we do, and as we develop our core set of skills, conceptually, we learn to ask better questions, and respond to the answers to those questions in more productive ways. However, we don’t do that in a vacuum, we only get better at asking and reacting because we learn more and understand more about the power of questions and how they contribute to a conversation, a relationship, and an entire sales process.
Think for a moment; why do we ask questions? Most of us will immediately move in our mind to an answer that is generally related to the idea of acquiring information, or learning from the client. This is important because it helps us know our client, and therefore sell to them in a more personalized and direct way. There is nothing wrong with this answer, it is 100% correct. However, if we inspect the client / seller relationship more closely, there are other reasons for questions that are not immediately evident, and they are very important because understanding the other reasons consciously will help us ask better and more productive questions.
There are actually three reasons to ask questions in a sales setting. As mentioned above, the first and most obvious of those reasons is to gather information, which we discussed above.
This is where it gets more nuanced and interesting. The second reason to ask questions is to prompt the buyer to think about their problems and to discuss their ideal outcomes. Notice that it is still an informational, and intellectual objective, the only difference is that the receiver of the information is not you, it is the buyer themselves. Buyers think about their problems and solutions so often that they can become mundane and part of their operational existence. It is important for buyers to spend time thinking about the real implications of their problems, and the real mechanics of potential solutions. If the buyer spends time building a solution, they become a collaborator with you and will be doing part of your sales work.
This is a really important concept to grasp because done correctly, what you are really doing is choosing teams, and in doing so putting yourself and the buyer on the same team, with the enemy being something of your choosing. Sometimes it can be an outside force, or it can be the status quo, or it can even be a competitor that has caused frustration, but this is a scenario you want to be careful with. The point is that the natural state of relationship between buyers and sellers is often adversarial, or at the very least, guarded and siloed. This is because buyers have been trained to think of sellers as people attempting to take their money. Asking questions that encourage your buyer to collaborate with you on the potential solution flips that script.
The last reason to ask questions is to release emotion. The more the buyer talks about their problems, and their desired outcomes, the more likely they are to get frustrated, angry, hopeful, or excited, and all are good. Apathetic buyers don’t make proactive decisions, which means they tend to stick to the status quo. Inspiring emotion inspires action in decision makers. If you can harness frustration or anger with the status quo, or harness excitement of hopefulness about a desired outcome, you have put yourself in a better situation.
There are other emotions that you can draw out in buyers through good questions as well. You can inspire curiosity in a buyer by asking a question about their industry that challenges them to think about why they are doing something in a certain way. You can inspire confidence in a buyer by asking a particularly intelligent question about their unique situation. You can even inspire calm in your client by asking a question that sets them at ease regarding their place amongst their peers.
I could go on, but the point is to think about the emotions that you will be eliciting in your clients through certain questions and employ empathy that will allow you to understand what that person is looking for, and try to navigate in that direction.
What is the common thread in all of the emotion and conversational strategy above? It is that it mirrors basic human social behavior. Good conversationalists ask good questions and inspire emotions in their counterparts that move the relationship forward. We all have a lot of practice in basic human social interactions, and no matter if we realize it or not, our aim is actually to allow those we are interacting with to release negative emotions and help to replace them with positive ones. Think about every non-frivolous conversation you have ever had. One side starts with an issue, the two people talk through it, and hopefully the person with the issue feels a bit better having talked through it. That is a simple and repeatable roadmap for client interactions because client interactions are social interactions.
So often in our sales interactions we forget this basic behavioral rule. We focus on the business side of the interaction and forget that there is a social component that is just as, if not more, important.
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