I have a question for you: what’s a better approach in sales?
- Telling a prospect what they need
- Asking a prospect what they need
Just the fact that I posed that as a question should tip my hand on my opinion. I was thinking about this as I read The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone’s Mind by Jonah Berger.
In the introduction, Berger writes that most people try to change minds through pushing: more communication, more facts, more reasons, more examples. But when you push, people have this tendency to push back.
That’s why warning labels often increase product use. It’s why banning books increases readership. People have a need for freedom and autonomy and want to believe that their decisions are their own.
When you tell someone to do something (or ask them not to do something) it “generates a psychological phenomenon called reactance. An unpleasant state that occurs when people feel their freedom is lost or threatened.”
If you are a salesperson trying to win someone to your offering, you reduce reactance by allowing for agency – “not telling people what to do, but…by guiding their path.”
Berger gives a few ways do that. The first is provide a menu, by which he means giving a limited set of options people can choose from.
The second is ask, don’t tell. When you ask questions, the listener doesn’t waste time counter-arguing because they’re now occupied with answering the question. Questions also increase buy-in from the listener because the answer is now their answer, something they came up with rather than someone else telling them what to do.
Go back to my opening question. If I replaced that with a statement like, “asking questions is the best sales approach,” how would that have changed your response?
You likely would have started coming up with all kinds of reasons why it isn’t the best sales approach. But because I presented it to you as a question with limited options, you probably chose the answer I wanted you to, but thought you came to it on your own.
See how that works?
There are lots of good books on my shelf about question-based selling (including one with that title), but my favorite is Questions that Sell by Paul Cherry. If you have other favorites, or favorite questions, would you share them with me? I’d love to add them to my reading list.