What If We Focused On The Questions, Rather Than The Answers?

We know questions are important, but somehow they seem to slow us down. Most sellers rush to providing answers, to pitching products, features, advantages, benefits. Sellers carefully filter through qualification and discovery questions, trying to narrow them to the critical few that enable them to launch into a pitch. Or too often, we bypass them altogether.

Most prospecting voicemails, emails, messages seem to assume I have a problem, focus on presenting a solution. When one responds to the outreach, the primary questions are, “how many seats, when are you making a decision, do you have budget, are you the decisionmaker….”

Or managers may see problems with their people’s performance. “You need to do this and stop doing that….” Without understanding the issue, the provide answers based on their past experience. They fail to recognize the person they are telling this do may be facing something different. They fail to recognize the importance of figuring things out.

AI systems measure our “ask/talk” ratio, guiding us to some sort of “optimum.” But they don’t tend to look at the types of questions that are being asked.

Maybe it’s time to rethink the purpose and value of questions, particularly deep questioning.

One of the most valuable purposes of questions is not to provide answers but to challenge our thinking, to help us rethink our positions, what we do, how we do things, why we are doing things the way we do.

Questions that cause us to think more deeply, get us to root issues. Would you be happy with with the following exchange with your doctor?

Doctor: What seems to be the problem?

Patient: This is what’s happening…..

Doctor: Here’s a prescription, try this for a while, if it doesn’t work come back.

This would be unacceptable to any of us, we know we have to get below the symptoms to understand the underlying issues/root causes, we expect the Doctor to drill down, developing a diagnosis.

The real power of questions—those we ask customers, those we ask our colleagues, those we ask the people who report to us, those we ask ourselves—is they help us learn. They help us understand. They help us consider different perspectives, approaches, and to assess change. They help increase our commitment–perhaps to what we already believe, but more often to change, to grow.

The process of deep questioning and learning, increases our confidence. The more we learn, the more deeply we understand, the more likely we will be confident in the answers we discover.

Roughly, 100 years ago, Sakichi Toyoda, developed the “5-Whys” approach to problem analysis. It goes something like,

Q: Why is this happening? A: Because of this….

Q: Why does that occur? A: When these things happen…

Q: Why do those things happen? A: These things happen because of these issues….

Q: Why to those issue cause a problem? A: They prevent us from doing these things….

Q: Why is the inability to do those things important? A: Because this the impact of those things on what we are trying to achieve….

There’s nothing magic about “5.” Sometimes we get to the root cause drilling down a few levels. Sometimes, particularly for very complex issues, we have to drill down more deeply, asking different questions.

But you can see the value of this process to both the questioner and the respondent. Together, we develop a deeper understanding of the issues. We discover more about a problem, a goal, an opportunity, a dream/aspiration. As we learn more, we increase our confidence–both that we understand, and that we are addressing the real/right issues. And from this, we gain confidence and commitment to take action based on what we’ve learned.

It seems to be human nature to leap to answers, without really understanding issues or problems. Perhaps it’s our impatience. I tend to think it’s more about fear. Asking deep questions, searching for a better understanding can be threatening. We may discover we have to change our beliefs. We have to reconsider our assumptions, biases. We may have to admit we are wrong.

But if we don’t do this, how do we learn, grow, improve, develop, and change? How do we help our customers, how do we help our people? How do we create real value?

What do we do about this?

There are a number of things that help us learn and execute better questioning, some ideas:

1. As leaders, we need to set an example by leading with questions–not giving answers. And the side benefit, is we understand, much better, the issues impacting our people, organization and results.
2. We need to encourage curiosity. We do this by recruiting those who are more naturally curious, we reinforce this with our own curiosity. We train around curiosity.
3. Mindset is critical. We need open, growth oriented mindsets. These mindsets are oriented to questioning, discover, learning, changing.
4. And curiosity can be trained. Everyone can improve their ability to be curious, to learn, discover, to change. Whether it’s training in curiosity itself, mindsets. In fact, if we look at young children, I haven’t encountered a three/four/five year old who isn’t curious (sometimes painfully so). It seems we train the curiosity out of ourselves.
5. We need to be better at asking questions. Rather than developing questions with an “agenda,” we need to learn how to ask questions that enable both the questioner and respondent to learn and grow. Our marketing materials, our product training materials, our sales enablement programs need to focus, truly, on deep discovery and learning.
6. Consider changing our training in “objection handling.” Usually, we are trained to respond–to handle the objection. Sometimes we learn to ask a clarifying question, followed by a qualifying question: “Can you explain what you mean…. If I can address that, can we move forward…” What if we started rigorously applying the 5 Why’s to our understanding of objections.

Buyers are overwhelmed! They are confused with conflicting information. They suffer from FOMU, they worry about making the wrong choice. They lack confidence. The majority fail in what they are trying to do, or have regrets with the decisions they make.

Our people face the same thing.

We don’t fail because of what we know. We fail because of what we don’t know.

Perhaps we should question our current approaches and look for something different.

It starts and ends with our questions…..