Asking Attitude Questions

by Diane Sanchez, Stephen E. Heiman, and Tad Tuleja

Customers usually make decisions emotionally and then justify them logically. Because of that, we recommend an untraditional addition to the usual questions about needs and specifications and results: Ask questions to determine your customers' emotional Wins. Ask them how they feel about what you're trying to sell them.

We say "untraditional." We might just as easily have said "radical" or "unthinkable." The fact is that, as useful as it is to know how your customers will Win, it still is considered intrusive, if not actually rude, to ask a customer directly what's in it for him. Salespeople are reluctant to do so for two related reasons. First, it violates the comfortable fiction that customers don't have personal interests, that they may be treated safely as passionless agents of the corporate machine. Second, it embarrasses people by introducing an allegedly nonprofessional, "touchy-feely" element into the buyer-seller exchange. We've been told countless times by our clients that they "couldn't possibly" ask a customer how she felt; it "wouldn't be appropriate," and besides, "There's no way on earth she would answer such a question."

Wrong on both counts. Not only is it perfectly appropriate to sell from emotion -- sales professionals have been doing it for centuries -- but the answers you can get from asking questions about customers' attitudes often will be as useful to you as they are surprising.

Maybe it's the very rarity of such questions that makes them so useful. Customers are accustomed to having salespeople ask them informational questions and "closing" or commitment questions. But it's widely considered bad etiquette to talk about feelings. So, when they do get asked an attitude question, customers respond much more volubly than you might have expected. Rather than being offended by the supposed effrontery, customers are actually disarmed and pleasantly shocked -- ready to release those personal and emotional insights that custom supposedly dictates they keep inside.

Whether or not this analysis is correct, the facts coming in from the field are very plain. When you probe for a customer's personal Wins, you do get responses. Responses that are invariably useful in managing the sale...

Listen to David Duff, an account manager at AEI Music. Acknowledging the difficulty of probing for "something as subjective as a Win," Duff concludes "They're not so hard to determine once you ask. And that's the only way you're going to find out what's really on the customer's mind. Almost nobody does it, but it works, and here we're way past the point of having it embarrass us. I ask people all the time, 'If we get this account, what will it mean to you?' You'd be surprised what people will tell you, if you only ask."

From Selling Machine, by Diane Sanchez, Stephen E. Heiman, and Tad Tuleja. © 1997 by Miller Heiman, Inc. All rights reserved by permission of Random House, Inc.