NEVER Answer A Question Before Doing This

Description

Listen

Quoted on this wiki

Every place a page here uses this source, in the order the words come in it.

1. 0:30

   I'm supposed to give the right answer as quickly as possible, and that actually backfires in sales. Because if you don't understand the intent and the question behind your prospect's question and you just answer at face value, you'll actually more often than not answer in a way “where you over-answer, you under-answer, or you answer in a way that positions whatever” you do in a less than favorable light. And so today, I'm going to talk about some of the common pitfalls to avoid when you are answering your prospect's questions and how you can answer instead so that you get it right every single time. So let us get into things. And so let me give an example to make this real.

   In Ambiguous reply handling

2. 1:39

   can slice and dice that data and they never even have to bug you for access to that information. And he responded, well, dang, that's actually too bad because we don't let our attorneys look at that information. That's actually only stuff that our firm's executive committee is able to see. And the worst part here was we had the ability to shut that off for the attorneys, but because “I misinterpreted the question and didn't understand the intent behind it, I ended up torpedoing” my deal and I was able to backtrack a bit. But by then, there's so much friction that I unnecessarily introduced. I sent myself in the wrong direction. And so to avoid that pitfall, I should have calibrated my answer by understanding the question behind his question. And I could have said something simple like, yeah, Dave, I'm happy to talk about that.

   In Ambiguous reply handling

3. 2:49

   They say something like, Nick, can you tell me about your analytics functionality in the accounting system? Well, I don't know. Are they hoping to understand that just, yeah, we have it, or do they want to know way more detail about it because they've got a whole analytics module today and they want to make sure that they can get the same stuff. “I don't know the depth of answer that they're looking for or the type of answer that they're” looking for here. And chances are, I could probably ramble about our analytics and reporting for like a good 90 minutes. Cause I've done all this product training. I'm basically going to tell them that, and I'm going to say something like, yeah, I'm happy to talk about it. You know, I could probably talk about our analytics module for like a good hour and a half, but my guess is you don't want me to do that.

   In Ambiguous reply handling

Quotes are verbatim and belong to their publishers. Where a quote has been translated, the original wording is kept below it.