4
ENGAGE!
When your prospect or client does most of the talking in a meeting, that’s usually a good thing. You are likely to hear what she likes, prefers, needs, and dislikes. It makes sense that asking questions is a great motivator to get a person talking, but it certainly isn’t the only one. In this chapter, we explore eight conversation motivators, how and when to use them, and how your movements and vocal characteristics support the flow of the conversation.
The eight motivators are:
1. Direct questioning.
2. Offering incentives.
3. Enhancing emotional appeal.
4. Boosting ego.
6. Easing fears.
7. Creating certainty or uncertainty.
8. Silence.
Direct Questioning
When people feel as though there is some vital or interesting piece of information they don’t know about a situation, product, or person, it’s like an itch that must be scratched. The more you can stimulate a person’s curiosity about you and the product or service you have to offer, the stronger the itch.
Behavioral economist George Loewenstein developed the “gap theory” of curiosity to explain how powerfully human curiosity motivates our decisions and actions. In his paper “The Psychology of Curiosity,” he states:
Curiosity has been consistently recognized as a critical motive that influences human behavior in both positive and negative ways at all stages of the life cycle. It has been identified as a driving force in child development and as one of the most important spurs to education attainment.... Curiosity has also been cited as a major impetus behind scientific discovery, possibly eclipsing even the drive for economic gain.1
Sometimes the best way to stimulate curiosity is by asking a question or two—a really good question or two.
Your questions should be thought-provoking and focused on a single idea or set of ideas. They should help take the conversation in the direction you have designed for the encounter and stimulate interest in what you have to offer the prospect or customer. A few basics on what constitutes a good question and a bad question will help you shape what you say in your meeting.
Good Questions
From cocktail receptions to formal meetings, bad questions pollute conversations. In general, they prompt incomplete or misleading answers and undermine rapport. On the other hand, good questions contribute to rapport-building and keep your conversation moving in a direction that you have in mind.
According to James O. Pyle, who taught questioning techniques to military interrogators and is the co-author with Maryann of Find Out Anything From Anyone, Anytime, the good questions are direct, control, repeat, persistent, summary, and non-pertinent. To describe them briefly:
• Direct. You pose a simple question with a basic interrogative. These are the best: one interrogative, one verb, and one noun or pronoun. Examples are: “What do you like about the contract you currently have with your public relations firm?” and “How did vendors who supplied this to you before fall short of your expectations?” Good, direct questions start with who, what, when, why, or how.
• Control. You already know the answer to your question when you ask it, but you want to find out whether or not the person is informed, uninformed, trying to deceive you, or perhaps not paying attention. Control questions are about discovery of behavior, patterns of speech, and level of truthfulness or accuracy and they often relate to something you talked about before with the person. For example, you might ask a client, “What can you tell me to help make absolutely sure I understand what your CEO thinks is critical in this accounting program?”
• Repeat. You ask two different questions that seek the same information (not the same question; we get to that in the next bullet). You’ve probably used this technique a hundred times and not even realized how essential it is to your success! Your question is “How many people are on the technical support team?” The person you’re speaking with says: “We have 18 in the field.” Later on, when you’re talking with her about a related subject, you might ask, “How many service regions does the company have nationwide?” She says, “22,” which is a way of alerting you to the fact that the tech support team in the field doesn’t match the number of regions covered by the company. It’s not an absolute test, but it gives you a reason to ask intelligent questions about who is covering what territory for the company. They are two different questions that cross-check the information provided. It’s common to uncover discrepancies in using repeat questions, but do not assume the person is trying to deceive you. In many cases, these repeat questions focus on company issues your contact wishes she had thought of! Just go with the flow, show respect for your contact, and display a sense of trust—even when it looks as though the “facts” aren’t matching. But keep your notes so that you can revisit the veracity and value of the exchange later.
• Persistent. Here is where you ask the same question more than once—that is, you ask for the same information more than once. You will want to change the wording somewhat, and space the queries apart, but you are essentially asking the very same question at different points in the conversation. The objective is to help you explore all facets of the desired information; you are just trying to get a complete answer. Like repeat questions, persistent questions are also useful if you suspect that the person has deliberately not divulged everything you need to know or provided an incomplete answer because another topic overtook the conversation. After a long and animated conversation, you are not clear on why a potential donor to your interactive children’s museum will not commit to a large contribution. You have asked the question before about her investment in children’s education—“What is your legacy?”—but you ask it now again, in a different way: “How do you want to children to benefit from your gift?” The persistent question, done well, often builds on your active listening and puts the key sales issue front and center.
• Summary. You ask a question that is designed to allow the other person to have an opportunity to revisit his answer. To differentiate this from repeat and persistent questions, summary questions do not come out of your concerns about the truth or completeness of what was said previously. This is questioning that feeds back to the person what he has said; you give him a chance to go over the information in his mind so he’s confident he said what he wanted to say. You might start off with “Let me see if I got this right.” When you do this in a straightforward manner, it is obviously meant to clarify key information. You won’t look inattentive or mistrusting. This is no different from someone asking a doctor at the end of a physical, “Please tell me again what the various tests you did mean; I think I get it, but I’m not sure.” You want to come across as someone who’s interested in what the other person has to say rather than someone who is too dim-witted to understand it.
• Non-Pertinent. It’s sometimes useful to ask a question that merely shows interest in the person or her situation rather than drives toward a close on the deal. You are giving yourself and the person you’re meeting with a bit of pause-time with a non-pertinent question, possibly mitigating some tension that has built up in the course of your conversation. Maybe the question just gives you time to think or refer to your notes. You probably don’t want it to be as off-track as “Is it normal to have this much rain in May here?” However, it could be a “soft” question related to the company: “How has everyone adjusted to the new headquarters location?”
Keep in mind that questioning is a two-way street: You are driven to know something, but the person who is your source of that information will probably have questions as well. You may initiate the questions, but don’t forget to pause occasionally and let the other person interject some questions of her own.
Be aware of your facial expressions when a question is posed to you. Remember those eight expressions that are recognizable around the world: fear, anger, surprise, disgust, sadness, contempt, happiness, and pride. What if your face inadvertently adopted one of the first six when you’re asked a question? There is no doubt that the person you’re meeting with would be able to identify the emotion associated with the expression even if you’ve only held it for a second.
Paul Ekman has a training program to help people to pick up micro expressions, which are facial expressions that occur within 1/25th of a second and expose a person’s true emotions. Ekman notes that “micro expressions occur when people are deliberately trying to conceal the emotion they are feeling. They can also occur when someone is totally unaware of how he or she is feeling.”2 Even without a training program like Ekman’s, you—or your customer—may sense an emotional response that the other person manifested for just a millisecond. It would be one of those times the highly perceptive individual might say, “I’m not sure why, but I got the feeling that he found my question unsettling.”
Flip the circumstance around so you are reading the prospect or customer. If you ask a discovery question like “How serious an issue is cyber security for you?” and you see a look of fear, you don’t even need a narrative response to tell you that the client feels threatened by hackers and other threats.
If your brain is registering fear, anger, surprise, disgust, sadness, or contempt, therefore, it’s possible that your face is, too. Just be aware that your face may have just interrupted the conversation—and the connection—with the client. Later in the chapter, we look at how to flow into other conversation motivators to move forward and perhaps even get your rapport building back on track after a facial faux pas.
Bad Questions
A facial faux pas isn’t the only thing that can take your interaction off-track, of course. The question itself may cause consternation or evoke an undesired response. In most situations, avoid bad questions such as the following:
• Leading. The name suggests precisely what they do: They lead the other person toward an answer. That sounds as though it might be helpful in a sales situation—and it could be if you’re nearing the close—however, you need to know when to and how to use it. If you are in the discovery phase of a conversation with a prospect about one of the software solutions you offer, then a leading question will get in the way. You may end up directing the person’s attention toward a product that is not the best one for his needs. You’ve sabotaged your pitch by embedding your own assumptions or preferences into the question. Here is how that might play out: You ask, “How would you integrate Solution A into your current human resources activities?” instead of “How would you integrate one of the solutions we offer into your current human resources activities?” You may have thought it’s very clever of you to call out Solution A because it’s the most expensive, but if it isn’t the most suitable one for the customer, then you may have undermined your credibility and chance to sell anything to him.
• Negative. Use of a negative in a question often muddies the meaning. For example, you ask, “Have you never wanted to fix this problem once and for all?” What answer are you looking for? The question could be “Have ever wanted to fix this problem once and for all?” Or better yet, ask a question requiring a narrative response: “What are your thoughts on a permanent solution to this problem?”
• Vague. These are questions that are either unclear or not concise enough to make the point quickly. It is very easy to make the mistake of asking a vague question simply by stuffing too much into the question. Let’s say you know the prospective donor to your hospital foundation injured himself badly while rowing for Harvard University. You ask, “Given that you know what it’s like to need the best medical care, and probably feeling fortunate that you got it through Harvard, how important do you think it is to have great care available to people who can’t afford it?” By the time you get to the actual question, you’ve already buried it in platitudes.
• Compound. Listen to any U.S. presidential press conference and you will hear a string of compound questions. In defense of the journalists, the reason they dovetail multiple questions together is because they generally have only one chance to pose a question. Even so, they provide classic examples of awful questions. Here are the strung-together questions of NBC News’ Chuck Todd at a 2013 press conference with President Barack Obama: “Given that you just announced a whole bunch of reforms based on essentially the leaks that Edward Snowden made on all of these surveillance programs, does that change—is your mindset changed about him? Is he now more a whistle-blower than he is a hacker, as you called him at one point, or somebody that shouldn’t be filed charges...and should he be provided more protection? Is he a patriot?3
Even if you are squeezed for time with your customer, don’t replicate the mistake of people in the White House press pool: Ask one question at a time.
Offering Incentives
Human beings are more inclined to want immediate gratification rather than wait for an incentive that comes later—even if it’s better than the quick choice.
Studies involving brain scans indicate that decisions about the possibility of immediate reward activate parts of their brain associated with emotion. In your sales presentation, if you therefore spark a sense that you have the ability to relieve a persistent “pain” for the client or make a positive impact on relationships with the board of directors, the client is more likely to want your help now. If you say the same thing in the context of spreadsheets or charts aimed at engaging analysis, you may still close the deal, but you’ve done it by appealing to the cognitive part of the client’s brain. For a lot of people, the emotion-related parts of the brain win out over the cognitive parts of the brain.
Remember that we’re talking about conversation motivators here. Your ability to stir emotion is therefore within the context of a sales encounter. It’s part of your toolkit to keep forward movement going and not meant as a substitute for number-crunching or whatever other analytical exercises are an important part of your sale.
Look for a facial expression of happiness and attentive posture—leaning in, perhaps mirroring you, a genuine smile, eye contact—as signals validating that your incentive has been well received.
Enhancing Emotional Appeal
Use your awareness of your own, and others’, positive emotions and negative emotions to keep your contact engaged in the conversation. Also think in terms of a desire for a positive result versus an aversion to a negative outcome or “pain.”
This next statement may come as a surprise, or it may not, depending on what your sales efforts are focused on. There’s a big reason why it may be easier to get your prospect onboard if he’s motivated by anger, disgust, hurt, envy, fear, or anything else in the family of negative emotions: People tend to spend more time and energy thinking about events that evoke strong negative emotions than strong positive ones. It should go without saying—but we’ll say it anyway—that the negative emotions should not be directed at you, but rather at the need, situation, or demands that got you a meeting with the prospect in the first place.
This is one reason why it can be so tough for a fundraiser to get major donations from people who have the means and, theoretically, the connection to the cause. Logically, the pitch is often aimed at the higher good, the benevolent action, the grace of the action. When it comes to arts and education funding, those approaches may put you on solid ground. But consider how effective the “Memorial and Honor Giving” program is for the American Cancer Society. You lose someone to cancer. It’s painful (negative emotion) and you have a hard time doing anything to relief your grief (negative emotion). Making a donation to ACS has a healing power because the money will help both people experiencing cancer and the families affected by the challenge.
The really compelling factor is the personal connection, however. Personal contact with a prospect has been shown by multiple sources4 to yield more money that a phone or email contact would.
With a nod to the power of romantic and spiritual love, which are thought by many experts to be the most powerful motivators of all, in most situations that kind of love doesn’t come into play.
Maintain an awareness of your own emotional state, as well, and how it affects the flow of the conversation. We have probably all heard pitches from fundraisers, politicians, and people selling everything from cars to cosmetics in which the person comes across like a religious zealot. There is so much emotion present, it’s hard to hear the message about the product or service. As a sales professional, you will not motivate conversation with an excess of emotion unless—and this is uncommon for most professionals—you are “preaching to the choir.”
Your own deviations from baseline give away your emotional state. If you are amped up, your illustrators will be overly energetic and you are likely pick up the pace of your speech. The opposite will occur, along with use of adaptors and barriering, if a negative emotion—like fear of failure—starts to take over.
Boosting Ego
For just a moment, rein in your cynicism about the value of compliments. Voicing acknowledgment of a person’s value, contributions, or presentations is a legitimate tactic that tends to make people more positive about and cooperative with the source of compliments.
Although we acknowledge this is a pop-culture example of how this works, Scientific American began an article titled “Flattery Will Get You Far” with the following:
Here at Scientific American we understand the wisdom of our readership. Your intellect sets you apart from the rest of the population, and we are gracious to have you as visitors to this website. As someone of exceptional judgment, we know you will be interested in subscribing to our exclusive online material, appropriate for only the most discerning intellectuals, and available to you for only $9.99/month.5
Compliments based on valid observations work time after time because the simple fact is this: People enjoy feeling good about themselves. Our brains are fertile ground waiting for the seeds of affirmation, and people who understand how and when to plant valid compliments can gain a psychological advantage over others. When you offer a compliment, watch for the body language of acceptance—openness in illustrators and a facial expression of happiness or pride.
In using your active listening skills, you will undoubtedly pick up something about the expertise, experience, or priorities of the person with whom you’re meeting. It will only help you to point out that you place value on it.
Deflating Ego
At the outset, we caution you that undermining your prospect or customer’s ego needs to be done with skill and caution. You’re in perilous territory if you mishandle this. At the same time, if you do it well, you can forge an even stronger connection with the person because you convey honesty.
In covering “fear selling” in Chapter 9, we look at ways that a deliberate and somewhat aggressive approach to deflating ego moves the selling conversation forward. The essential technique is attacking a person’s sense of self-worth, which can enable you to move the person into a vulnerable emotional state and make him more compliant. Deflating ego is useful in more subtle ways in other forms of selling, however.
Done well, it is used in conjunction with efforts to boost ego to make him or her feel better. You bring the person out of a self-esteem slump by following a challenge with a genuine compliment: “I can see how the current program has not yielded your bottom-line goals, but the strategy behind it is spot on.”
Observe the body language of someone whose ego has been deflated by something you’ve said. If you detect defiance, then you risk making the person angry. Your open body language—projecting trust and vulnerability—is important in supporting whatever positive remark you offer next. In contrast, if you see head down and other indications that she is using a barrier to keep you at a distance, you’ve undermined her sense of self-worth. At that point, you need to give her an immediate path to reconnect; invite her expertise.
These images show the difference between a defiant response, generally requiring open and conciliatory body language and conversation, and one of hurt and the need to reconnect. Notice that one of the big differences is in the way that the person uses barriers. In one case—the defiant client—you are being blocked by physical indications that you are not invited any closer. In the other, you perceive that the person is protecting herself. She is shielding herself from direct contact with you.
Not only in the use of deflating egos as a conversation motivator, but also in the use of any of these techniques, the way a person uses barriering will tell you a great deal about what you need to do next to connect.
Easing Fears
When you can mitigate or remove a fear harbored by your prospect or customer, you have arrived! Your ability to offer protection—financial, psychological, social—to help boost the person’s feeling of security and trust in you, gives you impetus to continue the conversation.
In fundraising, for example, a donor’s consideration may be how he or she is perceived within the community of donors. What you offer to call that person (“diamond ambassador,” “premiere donor,” and so on) could make all the difference in the world in terms of mitigating fears of how that individual will be perceived within her social community.
It’s more of a bottom-line consideration in commercial environments when the issue is related to fear that the product or service will or will not please the “powers that be.” You need numbers, spreadsheets, and other documentation of hard data to ease fears and move the conversation forward.
Creating Certainty or Uncertainty
Let’s assume you have 100 percent belief in your product. You go into the meeting projecting that certainty with confident body language. Good start—except that you need one more thing to keep the conversation going: how your product knowledge connects with the person’s needs. In short, motivating the conversation with certainty reflects your homework. When the other person’s body language mirrors yours in terms of energy and confidence, there is a sense of shared certainty.
You can use uncertainty to your advantage just as much. People feel a little off balance and out of control in the face of uncertainty. If your prospect is in that state of mild confusion—not completely dis-oriented, but a little off balance—you can move his thinking toward your product or service by suggesting how certain your results will be. When he feels comfortable enough to reduce or eliminate the use of barriers, makes eye contact with you, and shows facial signs of happiness or pride, then you know you have moved him degrees closer to a state of certainty. Again, this technique is part a conversation, so keep moving toward the close.
Silence
Shin.
In Japanese, it’s an awkward silence. Your client glances at his laptop, shifts his position in the chair, and looks at the conference room door as though he hopes someone will enter. At some point, he can’t tolerate it any longer and says something.
At the same time, you are calm, not using any barriers, and relying on the body language of active listening. Your attentive posture and relaxed demeanor suggest that you are looking forward to hearing whatever the other person has to say—whenever he decides to say it.
Creating intentional silence as a conversation motivator is a technique that we have used doing drive-time radio interviews in which the maximum time to deliver a sound bite is about 10 seconds: You stop after you make your point. Just stop. Wait for the other person to talk because you have said what you need to say. In Nothing but the Truth, Maryann drew on neurological research in asserting: “The modern human’s aversion to silence can be so strong that it arouses fear. When there is no tapping on a keyboard, no humming of an air conditioner, no traffic noise in the distance, people can feel alienated from their environment.”6
Your silence is often the only thing that will get other people to talk. And getting the other person talking is a key objective in the meeting.
Using Conversation Motivators
The interplay of conversation motivators in a meeting helps you build momentum and control the flow. Here is a condensed version of how this would work in a sales situation, with the flow of motivators being:
• Creating certainty/uncertainty.
• Easing fears.
• Boosting ego.
• Deflating ego.
• Offering incentives.
• Silence.
• Direct questioning.
The scenario is that Roseanne owns a small public relations agency based in Silicon Valley. Her challenge is to get the people in the meeting representing a startup technology company to agree to put her agency on retainer. The two decision-makers are the company founder, a young software engineer, and the company’s 50-year-old CEO, whose career had been in household consumer products. Here is a condensed version of how she could use the eight motivators in the order listed previously.
Roseanne sees immediately that the founder exhibits pride and certainty; he looks as though he is already on board. The CEO, however, shows all the signs of skepticism and uncertainty. She focuses on him first.
Creating Certainty/Uncertainty
“You’ve probably had lots of dealings with PR people in the past and often wondered if they were worth the money,” she begins. She sees a nod and the hint of a smile from the CEO. She has nailed the cause of his uncertainty.
Easing Fears
Roseanne follows that by easing his fears over finances and deliverables: He will get weekly reports with the option to cancel with two weeks’ notice, versus the 30 days that is standard for most agencies like hers.
Boosting ego comes easily because she has a sincere conviction that the business model and product offering are sound and worthy of media attention.
Deflating Ego
She does not shy away from the fact that the CEO would not be an ideal spokesman, however. The company needs a face and voice that projects youth and familiarity with the technology; it is ego deflating, but his body language indicates he is neither offended nor defiant.
Offering Incentives
He acknowledges his shortcomings as she moves on to the founder and puts some immediate media opportunities on the table. She had spoken with two journalists just that morning that she could pitch for interviews with high-profile online news media. Both men now have an incentive to move forward.
Enhancing Emotional Appeal
Then Roseanne evokes a little pain: Their website needs some immediate upgrades to make it media friendly. Can they tackle that right away?
Silence
Roseanne has put the pressure on, and then she stops talking. She waits for them to absorb her enthusiasm, grasp of opportunities, and timetable. The CEO breaks the silence with an invitation: “Besides the website upgrade, what else do you need from us so you can get going right now?”
She then turns to direct questioning to take the discussion all the way to the close. She has confidence that, once the two provide all the information she needs to begin the campaign, this is a done deal.
To get different variations on how conversation motivators work, watch a television show or movie in which someone has to sell an idea. It could be a defense attorney trying to sell her client’s innocence to a jury or a young man trying to sell himself to his prospective father-in-law. You might also want to watch a few commercials pitching products.
As you observe and listen in both situations, make some mental notes about the conversation motivators being used. Are they being used well? So, for example, you find yourself convinced by the defense attorney or growing to like the goofy guy trying to impress his fiancé’s dad.
What kind of body language are you observing in the people giving the pitch and receiving it? Are you falling for the approaches used in the commercials, or are you turned off? If the latter, what was said that alienated you from the pitch?
Summary Points
• Use the eight conversation motivators to help you keep the person engaged and to give you maximum control over the exchange.
• Keep an eye on the other person’s body language and listen for changes in voice to make sure you are on target with your approach. Shift to another motivator if you don’t see the result you want or expect.
• Remain aware of what emotions your face displays; use your movements to support your mood and message.