How to Ask Great Questions

Hey, it's Jermaine Edwards, your customer growth guide, and we're going to speak today around how to ask great questions that get you answers that matter, starting from now. Hey, welcome back to the channel. If you're new, great to see you. If you're old, welcome back to the fold. We're going to talk about how to ask questions that get you answers that matter. But first, I've got a question for you. Are the questions you're asking your customers actually getting you the answers that matter to growing and building your relationship? Now, if the answer is yes, I have a second question for you, which is, are the results that you're experiencing the ones that you want? Now, if the answer to that is, I'm unsure, or it's not really quite doing the things that you want them to do, then I'm going to submit to you that we're probably asking the wrong questions or not asking enough of the right questions. So how do we begin to do that? Well, I've got a challenge for you and a couple of ideas. So let me start with the challenge. Before I do, you need to hit the like and subscribe button. Make sure you're getting my notifications so you can get them every Monday and Wednesday. Okay, so let me give you the challenge. The challenge is this: I want you to just think about, just for a moment, all of the questions that you typically ask your customer on a weekly, monthly, or even a quarterly basis that might be quite, you know, standardized for you. Now, you may have those questions written out on a piece of paper, maybe it's inside your customer relationship management system. Wherever they are, I just want you to just park it for the— to the side for the moment. And now you have that list, I want you to imagine that you can never ask those questions again. So those questions that you typically ask your customer, imagine you can never ask them again. Where would you go next? How would you ask the questions differently to get the same or different or even better answers from your customers. That's the challenge we have, 'cause question asking is a skill and it's an art, and questions are the answers. In fact, instead of coming with great answers, if you can come with better questions, you actually then submit yourself to better answers. So here's how we start to think about our questions. So number 1, Number 1 thing around asking questions. Questions are designed through deep listening. That's the first thing. If you, if you don't set yourself up to really listen well to your customers, you can't possibly design questions that really get to the root of a specific issue or get you at a higher level of thinking as well. That's number 1. Deep listening helps you to design better questions. The second thing is this, that the brain itself is motivated by emotion. And so if we're asking questions, if you want to get people to open up, start with questions that connect to their own personal values and motivations. Begin with questions that get them to open up into those areas of our own consciousness that help us to more openly share information. So think about those kinds of questions, ones that connect directly to the emotion and get people really thinking about how they can share and interact with you. Another carrier intuitive way in which you can think about questions is thinking about questions from the place of the actual person. What would they like to be asked, and rather than what you would like to ask them? What kinds of things that they may want to even share with you that might be really helpful, that if they knew the answers from you, it would actually help them build a better relationship with you as well? And some of those questions might be questions like, hey, how are we serving you today better than we did before? Or, are we serving you today better than we did before? Or, what would it look like 6 months from now if the service level between us went up by tenfold, by twentyfold? What do you imagine that experience might look like, Mr. Customer? Begin to really tap into those questions that they subconsciously or consciously may even want to ask you. Think about those kinds of questions. Last kind of question I want you to think about is perhaps the one that kind of really pulls you into a much deeper-seated view with the customer. And these are around questions that show and demonstrate your expertise and focus in their marketplace. Now, this requires you to do some effort, some real work, and put in the, the reading, the, the thinking around this. But if you really want to be the expert to the business, what you want to do is think about what are all the market challenges in your customer's industry. What are all the risks and what are all the opportunities? And then when you come to your customer, start to think about questions you could ask around those areas that gets your customer to think about, oh, wait a minute, these are some things that we haven't necessarily considered. Now your customers is thinking about you as the expert in that field, and now you have a much richer opportunity to explore new ideas. So come as the expert in the room, not necessarily to impose your opinion, but to allow the person to come to a higher level of thinking so that you can explore greater and better things together. So those are 4 ideas for creatively thinking about your questions, bringing new and better questions to the table. And if you wanted to know more ideas, I've got 10 questions you can ask below in the PDF. Get it today. Like and subscribe, and I'll see you in the next video.