Perfect Pitch: Questions

If giving compliments is the first step in rapport-building with a client, the second step is asking questions. Once again, uniqueness and originality are essential. Care about the answer to your question. Demonstrate this through your tone of voice and the expression on your face. By giving positive attention, you have a chance to get positive attention.

Ask unique questions that take some thought to answer. That’s the way to get greater connection from your client. Despite how it may seem, the person asking questions controls the direction and the flow of any conversation. Conversely, if you just start talking, you may seem to be in control – but there’s a good chance your client has simply stopped listening.

Your real purpose is to make clients know that you care about them. Even in a business conversation, people long to be heard and understood. You should genuinely want to find out as much as you can about their problems -- and especially how they perceive their problems. Because solutions to those problems are what you’re really selling.

Remember that all questions aren't equal. Some are much more effective than others – and what really defines an effective question is changing all the time. Clients today are much more aware of questions that seem to be insincere or manipulative. For instance, twenty years ago business conversations routinely included hokey phrases like these:

                “What would you say if…?”

                “What would you do if….?”

                “Would you buy today if…?”

Questions like these are thinly disguised traps for a client – but today nobody is going to fall for that. Nobody is going to be put in the position of letting you set a time limit or an agenda for their buying decisions. It’s much more effective to ask genuinely open ended questions that really show what’s on a client’s mind. Above all, you want to get the other person talking – and the more they talk, the better off you are. Some examples of open-ended questions are these:

What can you tell me about your organization?

How would you like things to be improved?

What are the barriers to making that happen?

How can we eliminate those obstacles?

Behind all these questions there’s a single insight; people want to know what you can do for them, especially by helping them solve their problems. But before you can do that, you need to know as much as possible about what their problems are. That’s why questions are so useful, and so important.