Today in class, we talked about how to keep the conversation going by staying away from binary questions. Binary questions are also known as closed ended questions with the answer only being “yes” or “no”. Having people answer open ended helps keep the conversation going and allows for you to ask sub questions such as “expand more on your answer” and other similar to that.
Professor Sweet also gave us two question to use when talking to people:
Using an “on a scale of 1-10” question which allows people to be honest and accurate and can expose an apparent “no” as a maybe.
The second question you can use when talking to a prospect to gain more information and keep things open is when the answer the “on a scale question” is to ask them the question “why didn’t you pick a lower number”. asking this question allows the person to talk about some positives whereas if you asked why didn’t you say a higher number, they would give more negatives instead.
BoweryJE22
I think this technique is super helpful to use in a sales conversation because it gets the buyer thinking in a completely different way and listing positives about an idea rather than just focus towards the negatives and why they want to say no. With the customer focusing on a few positives about an idea they leave the choice more open to maybe saying yes in the future. An idea or product is not completely put off the table with this sort of technique on buyers.
I thought this idea was so cool and the reverse psychology of it makes so much sense. Having them give a ranking 1-10 and then having them state why they didn’t say lower immediately makes them think intrinsically and start to think about all the positives that would come about from your product or service. It is all about getting them to understand and realize they need your company themselves rather than you necessarily doing it for them. You are just there to lead them to the answer.
Good post! Hope you have a wonderful night!
-Collier
I think the questions Professor Sweet introduced us to can be beneficial in a sales conversation to help us get to know our customers more. Asking the 1-10 question can help someone learn about the customers and gives us more questions to ask about why they chose that number and explain why they didn’t choose a lower number. This technique can help keep the customer from saying no and think about saying yes or thinking more about their answer.