Rewrite closed questions as open ones, and follow up on an answer to go one layer deeper.
Ask questions the buyer has to answer in sentences, follow up on the words they use, and ask one question at a time. If you do that, the buyer does most of the talking and you find out what you need to know.
First meetings with new sellers often go the same way. Ten minutes in, the seller has asked a dozen questions. "Are you happy with your current provider?" gets "Yes, it's okay." "Do you have any concerns about cost?" gets "Not really." "Is this something you'd consider?" gets "Maybe." The buyer answers politely, one word at a time, and starts wondering when the meeting will end. The seller still knows almost nothing.
Asking a lot of questions isn't the problem. The problem is their shape: nearly all of them could be answered in a word. The three levels of listening in Lesson 3.1, "The three levels of listening", only work if the buyer is doing most of the talking. Changing the shape of your questions is how you get them to do that.
A closed question can be answered with yes, no or a single fact. Closed questions usually start with do, is, are, have, can or will: "Do you have insurance?", "Is the budget fixed?", "Are you the decision maker?"
An open question asks the buyer to describe, explain or tell a story. Open questions usually start with what, how, or the phrase "tell me about": "What cover do you have at the moment?", "How did you arrive at that budget?", "Tell me about how decisions like this get made in your team."
Closed questions are still useful. They confirm facts quickly, and near the end of a conversation you need some of them to agree a next step. A conversation built only from closed questions gives the buyer nothing to say, and you end up filling the silence with your own assumptions.
Turning a closed question into an open one is usually simple. Keep the same topic and start the question again with what, how or "tell me about", so the buyer has room to answer properly. "Are you happy with your current provider?" becomes "What's working with your current provider, and what isn't?" "Do you have any concerns about cost?" becomes "How are you thinking about cost for this?"
Strictly speaking, "why" questions are open, but they often sound like an accusation. "Why did you choose that plan?" can come across as "what were you thinking?", especially to someone who already suspects they made a mistake. A buyer who hears it that way gets defensive and starts justifying the choice when you wanted them to explain it.
"What" and "how" get you the same information with less sting. Ask "What led you to that plan at the time?" or "How did you end up choosing it?" Both invite the buyer to tell you a story, so they don't feel they have to defend themselves. To test any question, imagine someone asking it in a slightly irritated tone. If it sounds like a telling-off, rephrase it.
New sellers tend to prepare a list of questions and work through it in order. Each question on the list starts a new topic, so the conversation never gets below the surface. The question that goes deeper is usually a follow-up on what the buyer has just said. Pick up one word or phrase they used and ask about it. Keep follow-ups short: what makes that difficult, what happened then, how did that affect you, what else.
In this exchange, the seller asks three short questions:
Seller: "Tell me about how your team keeps track of sales."
Buyer: "We tried a CRM last year, but it didn't really stick."
Seller: "What made it hard to stick with?"
Buyer: "The sales team just didn't update it."
Seller: "What happened then?"
Buyer: "My boss stopped trusting the numbers, so we went back to spreadsheets. Now I spend Friday afternoons chasing everyone for updates."
Using only short follow-ups, the seller learns that the real problem is lost Friday afternoons and a boss who does not trust the figures. None of that was on the prepared list.
Nervous sellers stack questions: "So what's your budget, and when are you looking to start, and who else is involved?" The buyer answers the easiest one, usually the last, and the other two get lost.
Ask one question, then stop talking. Let the silence go on until the buyer fills it, even if that takes several seconds. If they genuinely didn't understand the question, they'll tell you. Usually they are thinking, and the answer you get after a pause is better than the one you would have got straight away. Staying quiet is harder than it sounds. You'll feel the urge to rephrase the question, offer an example answer, or soften it with "or whatever". Don't do any of these. Your question was fine, so give the buyer time to answer it.
Rewriting questions on paper is easy, but asking them in the moment, under pressure, is much harder. Asking closed questions is a habit, and habits come out when you are nervous. To change the habit, prepare open versions of your usual questions in advance and practise them until they are the ones that come out first.
Before you start the activity, think back over your last two or three conversations with buyers or clients. Write down the questions you actually asked, as close to word for word as you can remember, and keep that list beside you as you begin.
Write down ten closed questions you tend to ask, rewrite each as an open question, and add one follow-up question to each.
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