Do you answer questions with questions?

Your answer to this question might be, why does it matter if I answer a question with a question? In this you would, in fact, be answering with a question, but you would also be clarifying the intent behind the question I asked, something very important in the sales industry.

Last semester, I decided to try something new that I hadn’t done before, so I joined the debate team here on campus. I was trying to learn all the basics with debate, and needed help with one specific part: crossfire. This is the part after your speech where your opponent gets to ask you questions for 2 minutes. This is also the part where many people lose the debate round, the main reason being that if you simply answer the questions that they ask, they are often baiting you in your answers to aid in their own points of their next speech. If you don’t try to understand where their question is coming from and what they are trying to do with it, it can absolutely wreck you in the round.

I needed to get better at this part of debate, knowing how to answer questions without falling into these traps that my opponents might bait for me. So two of my friends who are also on the debate team played a game with me. “It’s simple,” they said; “all you have to do is answer every question with a question. As long as you do that, you win the game.” At first I thought that this game was incredibly silly and didn’t understand how it was helping me to get better at debate. But then in a practice round later on in the semester, during crossfire, I realized that the whole drill was helping me learn not to simply answer a question at face value, but to think first and potentially dig at what exactly they’re trying to get out of asking that question.

This entire point about debate was to demonstrate Mattson’s rule #12: “Answer every question with a question,” which deals with the problem of smokescreen questions. Professor Sweet explained that prospects often ask questions that skirt around the problem that they actually want answers about. By answering their questions with clarifying questions, you are able to dig for the real issue and then answer in a way that will truly sell your prospect on what you’re offering.

So next time someone asks you a question, how are you going to answer? If you answered me with a question, then you learned something from this post! Yay!