Questions: The Problems and the Possibilities

I recently accepted a cold call from an insurance guy because I was thinking of switching providers. Instead of facilitating my buying decision, the bias in his questions terminated our connection:

TODD: Hello Ms. Morgen. I’m Todd with XYZ. Are you interested in new car insurance?
SDM: I am.
TODD: Is your main concern lowering your costs?
SDM: No.
TODD: You don’t care about saving money?
SDM: Of course I do.
TODD: So your main concern IS lowering your costs?
SDM: No.
TODD: So what is it?
SDM: I’m interested in a personal connection, in knowing that if I have an accident I will be handled by someone who will take care of me.
TODD: I can promise you I’ll take care of you. My clients love me. Do you want to discuss how much you’ll save?

And, we were done.

Good sellers and coaches pose better questions than Todd’s, of course. But the conversation exemplifies how a Questioner’s biased questions can significantly influence outcomes.

THE BIAS INHERENT IN QUESTIONS

Questions restrict answers to the assumptions and biases of the Questioner; Responders respond within the limits set by the question. Asking someone “What did you have for breakfast?” won’t elicit the answer “I bought a lamp.” Even questions that attempt to open a dialogue, like “What can you tell me about the problem?” or gather data, like “Who’s in charge of decision making?” merely elicit top-of-mind responses that my not effectively represent – and indeed might cloud – the issue. Biased question; biased answer.

Sometimes questions are so biased and restricted that the real answer might get overlooked. ‘Do you prefer the red ball or the blue ball?’ excludes not only the green ball, but a preference for a bat, or a discussion about the Responder’s color blindness. But a question such as: ‘What sort of a game implement could be easily carried and engage all employees?” might elicit a response of a ball or marbles or Monopoly and include more team members.

Most questions pull or push the data sought by the Questioner, making it difficult to know if

• the communication partners make the same assumptions;
• the wording of the question is ideal;
• a better answer exists outside the limits of the question;
• the question encompasses the full set of  possible responses.

What if the best answer is outside of the framework of the question? Or the question isn’t translated accurately by the Responder? Or there is an historic bias between the Questioner and Responder that makes communication difficult?

FACILITATIVE QUESTIONS

Questions can be used to facilitate choice, to lead Responders to new options within their own (often unconscious) value system, rather than as set ups to the Questioner’s self-serving objectives. Using a Facilitative Question, the above dialogue would sound like this:

TODD: Hi Ms. Morgen. I’m Todd, an insurance agent with XYZ Corp. I’m selling car insurance. Is this a good time to speak?
SDM: Sure.
TODD: I’m wondering: If you are considering changing your insurance provider, what would you need to know about another provider to be certain you’d end up getting the coverage and service you deserve?

The question – carefully worded to match a Responder’s criteria for change – shifts the bias from Todd’s self-serving objectives to enabling me in a true discovery process; from his selling patterns to my buying patterns. How different our interaction would have been if his goal was to facilitate my buying decision path rather than using his misguided persuasion tactics to sell.

I developed Facilitative Questions decades ago to enable any Questioner to facilitate someone’s route to congruent change. With no manipulation or bias, they require a different form of  listening, wording, and objectives, thereby avoiding resistance and encouraging trust between sellers, coaches, consultants and their clients.

Take a look at your own questioning strategy to see if they might work for you:

*How are your questions perceived by your Responders? How do you know? What’s your risk?
*How do your questions address a unique Responder’s decision criteria?
*How do your questions bias, restrict, enhance, or ignore possibilities?
*What criteria to you use to choose the words to formulate questions?
*To ensure any new skills would work effectively with your successful skills, what would you need to know or consider before adopting additional question formulation skills?

Remember: your innate curiosity or intuition may not be sufficient to facilitate another’s unconscious route to change – or buy – congruently. You can always gather data once the route to change is established and you’re both on the same page. Change the goals of your questions from discovering situations you can provide answers for, to facilitating real core change. Before buyers or clients will work with you, they have to do this for themselves anyway. You might as well do it with them and create a trusting relationship.

____________________________________________________

Facilitative Questions follow a specific path and wording. I’ve trained sellers to use them for lead generation, to make appointments with the right decision makers (often helped by gatekeepers) and teach prospects to assemble Buying Decision Teams and reach consensus; to help coaches find – and keep – ideal clients, and facilitate their change efficiently. They are great for small and complex sales, for prospecting and lead gen, for team building, for coaching clients seeking change, for change implementations. And for doctors, lawyers, communication professionals, therapists, school administrators, and leaders.

If you’d like to learn how to formulate Facilitative Questions, either get this Learning Accelerator, or contact me to discuss team training or coaching: sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com. You can read about the use of Facilitative Questions and the full path of change in Dirty Little Secrets: www.dirtylittlesecretsbook.com.

Sharon Drew Morgen March 30th, 2015

Posted In: Listening, News

Using Buyer Personas During Pre-Sales Stages

Buyer Personas do a great job targeting marketing and sales campaigns to reach the most probable buying audience. But it’s possible to make them even more efficient.

Here’s a question: Do you want to sell/market? Or have someone buy? The belief is that if you can sell/market appropriately – the right campaign to the right buyer with the right solution at the right time – buyers will buy. If that were true, you’d be closing a helluva lot more than you’re closing. Sure, Buyer Personas make a difference in your close rate. But it could be higher.

Currently, your targeted campaigns blanket probable audiences and find buyers at the exact moment they are considering buying, merely closing the low hanging fruit. It’s possible to enter earlier and facilitate (and influence) the complete buying journey.

STAGES IN THE BUYING DECISION PATH

Sales and marketing address activities surrounding solution placement: solution pitch details, solution features, etc., vendor details, gathering needs. But neither facilitate the entire decision path which constitutes issues beyond choosing a solution. Some might call these ‘Pre-Sales’ events. I call it the Buying Decision Path, along which sales is merely one of the entry points needed to close a sale.

Briefly, here are the stages buyers go through prior to purchasing a solution ((Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it fully details each stage www.dirtylittlesecretsbook.com):

1. Idea stage.
2. Brainstorming stage. Idea discussed with colleagues.
3. Initial discussion stage. Colleagues discuss the problem, posit who to include on Buying Decision Team, consider possible fixes and fallout. Action groups formed. Research begins. New Team members invited.
4. Contemplation stage. Group discusses
* how to fix the problem with known resources,
*whether to create a workaround using internal fixes or seek an external solution, and acceptable type/amount of fallout from each,
*people who would need to buy-in.
5. Organization stage.
6. Change management stage. Group determines
*if more research is necessary (and who will do it),
*if all appropriate people are involved (and who to invite),
*a review of all elements of the problem and solution,
*the level of disruption and change management as per type of solution chosen,
*the pros/cons/possibilities of external solution vs current vendor vs workaround.
7. Coordination stage. Review needs, ideas, issues of any new members invited aboard and how they affect choices and goals; incorporate change considerations for each solution; delineate everyone’s thoughts re goals and change capacity; appropriate research responsibilities.
8. Research stage. Specific research for each possible solution; seek answers to how fallout or change would be managed with each solution.
9. Consensus stage. Buying Decision Team members meet to share research and determine the type of solution, fallout, possibilities, problems, considerations in re management, policies, job descriptions, HR issues, etc. General decisions made. Buy-in and consensus necessary.
10. Action stage. Responsibilities apportioned to manage specifics of Stage 9. Owners of tasks do thorough research and make calls to several vendors for interviews and data gathering.
11. Second brainstorming stage. Discussion on results of data gathering including fallout/ benefits of each. Favored vendors pitched by Team members.
12. Choice stage. New solution agreed on. Change management issues delineated and leadership initiatives prepared to avoid disruption. Vendor contacted.
13. Implementation stage.

Buyers have to manage these stages (most of which are not solution- or problem-specific) with you or without you. Without being directly involved with behind-the-scenes politics or processes you’re left waiting, pushing product data, and hoping to be there when they’re ready. And knowing the details of your Buyer Persona is insufficient.

Do you want to sell/market? Or have someone buy? Right now your efforts to sell and market are bringing in no more than 5% close rate (net). To become the vendor who truly helps buyers buy, to get an early leg-up on the competition and become part of the Buying Decision Team during the Pre-Sales process, sales (entering at stage 1) and marketing (entering at stage 3) can add another layer of skills, tools, goals, and touch points.

Buying Facilitation® is a Pre-sales Management model that I’ve developed and taught for 30 years with profoundly different results from using sales and marketing alone. It uses neither sales nor marketing thinking: it employs a new form of question, a different type of listening, and a systems-thinking role consistent with true consulting to facilitate the issues that bias the buying decision. And then you can sell earlier and faster, to the right people, on the solution placement end.

I can teach your sales team how to become facilitators, or show your marketing team ways to design the right questions to help buyers traverse each stage of their unique buying journey. See more articles on www.sharondrewmorgen.com. Or call me: Sharon Drew 512 457 0246.

Learn how to hear buyers effectively with Sharon Drew’s new book What?

Sharon Drew Morgen March 2nd, 2015

Posted In: Listening, News

Consensus: From Biases to Buy-in

When groups seek change – when considering purchasing a new solution, shifting strategies, reorganizing, for example – they need consensus. When families discuss putting a family member in a home, or start-ups decide to seek funding, they need consensus. How do groups achieve an outcome acceptable to all when their beliefs, goals, or convictions may be disparate?

While every group is different and each goal unique, the consensus meta-process is the same: the right people must

• be convened,
• approve the elements of the issue to be decided upon,
• find their way to agreement.

There are problems lurking at each stage:

1. Gather the right people. Not as easy as it sounds. If there is no existing group, say a Board or a City Council, what mix of people would successfully represent the community? How can the right team be chosen to carry the voice of a new decision? In my experience, sometimes choosing the ‘right’ people is a political decision and too often excludes folks with an important voice.
2. Include the appropriate elements to be decided upon. This is the biggest area of struggle: the correct criteria for agreement ends up being defined by folks with potentially divergent outlooks. Who gets to designate the acceptable criteria – and what is the cost of overlooking those unheard? Again, too often this decision is front-loaded, with the loudest voices carrying the most votes, and some important elements are ignored.
3. Reach agreement. Members of the decision team may have unique – and potentially opposing – criteria. How will the group ensure the final outcome is an accurate indicator of the population and good-enough to be acceptable, while addressing each member’s values during the process?  Until the outcomes and representative values of the group members – often hidden – are addressed, the search for agreement is a struggle.

BIASES ALTER REALITY

Unless it’s a small, homogeneous group, an outcome fully agreeable to all is pretty rare. Each member perceives problems and solutions according to their unique biases – individual beliefs and maps of the world – driving them to compete to be the arbiters of the group’s reality. And once members begin arguing about who’s ‘right’, some with softer voices may get overlooked.

From the studies I’ve read, group members are more willing to buy-in to an idea they are not fond of if they have had a chance to express their beliefs, ideas, and disagreements, and feel heard. How do we hear the full range of possibilities if we are each listening through our own biases? We don’t. So we need to listen differently.

In my new book What? Did you really say what I think I heard? I illustrate at length (from several expert sources) how close to impossible it is for anyone to accurately hear what another person means to convey. Sure we ‘hear’ the words. But we regularly misconstrue the intended meaning  because our biases, assumptions, triggers, memory patterns, and habits, automatically filter out words or ideas that offend our status quo, leaving us with the residue that we mistakenly believe is what was said – some percentage of what the speaker meant to convey. Makes it hard to find a path acceptable to all.

One way to help achieve that is to listen differently: it’s more likely to hear accurately by listening for more generic, acceptable themes, ridding the conversation of the bulk of the biases. So if an HOA seeks consensus on mandating guards at the resident’s doors during parties, for example, a general theme might be Building Safety. Once Building Safety is agreed on as necessary, then ways of being safe and responsibility for safety, might be discussion topics. Similarly if a group of hospital administrators seek upgrades to their technology amidst great contention, the ‘chunk up’ might be the need to capture patient data accurately and work backwards from there.

To accurately hear what our colleagues mean, we might shift our focus from

• promoting an idea, to encouraging win-win,
• getting agreement through compromise, to discovering how all voices can be heard,
• seeking a specific change, to collaborating around a more generic concept.

Then we have a better shot at achieving solutions that include creative ideas and acceptance from everyone. And everyone gets heard.

If you’d like to learn how to help teammates hear each other better, and add some skills to your approaches to consensus. go to www.didihearyou.com and get my  book called What? Did you really say what I think I heard? Then, consider getting the Assessment Tools so everyone understands each other’s biases. Or, consider an online team learning with me. Contact me: Sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com or 512 457 0246.

Sharon Drew Morgen February 9th, 2015

Posted In: Listening, News

Speaker or Listener: Who’s Responsible For Misunderstandings?

There’s been an age-old argument in the communication field: who’s at fault if a misunderstanding occurs – the Speaker communicating badly, or the Listener misunderstanding? Let’s look at some facts:

1. Speaking is an act of translating what’s going on internally into communication that enables others to understand an intent – choosing the most appropriate words for that particular listener in that particular situation. But the act of choosing is unconscious and may not render a full or accurate representation of what is meant.

2. Listeners translate what they hear through a series of unconscious filters (biases, assumptions, triggers, habits, imperfect memory) formed over their lives by their:

a) world view,
b) beliefs,
c) similar situations,
d) historic exchanges with the same speaker,
e) biases on entering the conversation (like sellers listening exclusively for need).

What a listener hears is fraught with so much unconscious filtering that their ability to hear accurately what’s meant is untrustworthy, except, possibly, when speaking with someone known over time.

3. According to David Bellos in his excellent book Is That a Fish In Your Ear?, no sentence contains all of the information we need to translate it. As listeners, are we translating accurately? What parts of what we hear is biased?

Since communication involves a bewildering set of conscious and unconscious choices, accuracy becomes dependent upon each communication partner mitigating bias and disengaging from assumptions; the odds of communication partners accurately understanding the full extent of intended meaning in conversation is unlikely. It’s quite a complicated mess of factors.

My new book What? Did you really say what I think I heard?  focuses on listening: how we mishear, misunderstand, and otherwise misinterpret, where and how the gap between what’s said and what’s heard occurs and how to avoid misunderstanding. [My next book might be titled Seriously? Did you really hear what you think I said? that focuses on speakers]. While researching and writing the book I realized that the responsibility for effective communication is heavily weighted in the court of the listener: if listeners don’t have skills to catch or prevent their biases or unhook from all subjective filters, the speaker’s words and intent are  moot: they may be misconstrued regardless of their accuracy. And yes, sometimes speakers mis-speak. But when a listener hears precisely what is being conveyed and respond accordingly, a speaker can hear any problems and correct them.

So the answer is: the responsibility for an effective communication lie with the listener.

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Sharon Drew Morgen is the NYTimes Business Bestselling author of Selling with Integrity and 7 books how buyers buy. She is the developer of Buying Facilitation® a decision facilitation model used with sales to help buyers facilitate pre-sales buying decision issues. She is a sales visionary who coined the terms Helping Buyers Buy, Buy Cycle, Buying Decision Patterns, Buy Path in 1985, and has been working with sales/marketing for 30 years to influence buying decisions.

More recently, Morgen is the author of What? Did you really say what I think I heard? in which she has coded how we can hear others without bias or misunderstanding, and why there is a gap between what’s said and what’s heard. She is a trainer, consultant, speaker, and inventor, interested in integrity in all business communication. Her learning tools can be purchased: www.didihearyou.com. She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com 512 457 0246. www.didihearyou.com; www.sharondrewmorgen.com

Sharon Drew Morgen December 22nd, 2014

Posted In: Listening, News

Assessment: How much do you suck at listening?

Answer these questions to see how accurately you hear what your communication partner intends you to hear.

1. How often do you enter conversations to hear what you want to hear – and disregard the rest?
2. How often do you listen to get your own agenda across, regardless of the needs of the speaker?
3. How often do you have a bias in place before the speaker’s points or agenda are known?
4. Do you ever assume what the speaker wants from you before s/he states it – whether your assumption is accurate or not?
5. How often do you listen merely to confirm you are right…and the other person is wrong?
6. Do you ever enter a conversation without any bias, filters, assumptions, or expectations? What would need to happen for you to enter all conversations with a totally blank slate? Do you have the tools to make that possible?
7. Because your filters, expectations, biases, and assumptions strongly influence how you hear what’s intended, how do you know that your natural hearing skills enable you to achieve everything you might achieve in a conversation?
8. How much business have you lost because of your inability to choose the appropriate modality to hear and interpret through?
9. How many relationships have you lost by driving conversations where you wanted them to be rather than a path of collaboration that would end up someplace surprising?

As I wrote my new book What? Did You Really Say What I Think I Heard? and asked folks I knew to provide feedback, I received similar notes from all around the world saying that the book was great – for their spouses. The consistent message was that they, themselves, heard every word spoken and had no communication problems around their listening skills. Ah, I thought, but do they hear what’s intended?

It’s physiologically impossible to accurately hear all that our communication partners intend to convey. Here are some reasons why:

• we have biases, filters, triggers, assumptions, and habits that uniquely contort what’s heard.
• people don’t always accurately represent what they say and mean for us to hear, leaving out details they assume will be understood and aren’t, or choosing words that have different meanings than how their listeners define them.
• the situation in which our communication is taking place has any range of situational biases that make shared understanding challenging.
• we all interpret what we hear uniquely, according to our education, family history, religious beliefs, political beliefs, age, and ethnicity.

Are you getting the picture here? Assured understanding is not even close to possible. Yet most of us assume we hear accurately. Sure, we hear the words. But do we understand what’s meant?

When my new book What? Did You Really Say What I Think I Heard? came out, I got notes from folks around the world telling me they listen accurately. And I wonder if they recognize the difference between hearing words spoken vs hearing what’s intended.

It’s physiologically impossible to accurately hear what our communication partner intends us to hear. We have biases, filters, triggers, assumptions, and habits that get in the way. And people don’t accurately represent what they mean for us to hear, leaving out details that they assume will be understood and aren’t, or choosing words that have different meanings for listeners. Or the situation we find ourselves in has any range of situational biases that make it difficult. We hear according to our education, family history, religious beliefs, political beliefs, age, ethnicity…..

Are you getting the picture here? Not even close to possible. So what is it we are defending? What is so important about believing we hear what’s intended when we don’t – and it’s not even possible?

My new book breaks down the good, the bad, and the ugly of how we hear, why we don’t, where we have problems (lots of assessments and fun exercises), and ways to fix it. Lots of funny examples of just plain dumb conversations between really smart people. And my snarky personality leads you through the process.

Contact me with questions about how to hear others without biases. or how to talk so others will hear what you intend to convey. And, I’ve designed some very affordable learning tools to help you figure out how to know exactly your particular ‘brand’ of bias, as well as one to lead you through the process of diminishing your biases and enhancing your ability to hear others. Let’s make ‘hearing what’s intended’ the new buzz phrase. Because if we all can hear what’s intended, we can make a huge difference in the world.

Sharon Drew Morgen | 512-457-0246 | sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com
www.buyingfacilitation.com

Sharon Drew Morgen October 29th, 2014

Posted In: Listening, News