Question Shock: Are You Giving it to Your Customers?

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by Stephen E. Heiman, Diane Sanchez with Tad Tuleja

It's no secret that when it comes to talking, few people can match a sales professional. Unfortunately, that's not something we should be proud of. Selling is a form of teaching, and we encourage you to follow the example of the world's best teachers—precisely because those teachers are such good listeners.

In a separate article, we explained how talking too much can result in disaster and how important it is to ask questions. In this article, we'd like to pass on what we've learned about asking questions. You probably won't be surprised to learn that even when salespeople ask questions, they still tend to talk too much.

According to studies done by educational researchers a number of years ago, the most effective teachers almost invariably employ an instructional style with the following characteristics:

The teacher and student participate in a mutual dialogue, rather than one being the "sender" and another the "receiver."

There are longer and more numerous pauses between questions and answers than you typically see in less effective teaching styles.

Establishing an effective dialogue with someone involves longer pauses between questions and answers. That's not an incidental observation. Nor is that seemingly simple feature—the extending of the length of time between questions and answers—merely a teaching or conversational gimmick. It is a universally reliable technique for creating superb communication. But unfortunately, this simple technique is not popular among salespeople.

Many salespeople, when they take the time to ask questions at all, seem less interested in hearing the customer's responses than in getting as quickly as possible to the end of a list. You know the kind of rhetorical, rapid–fire questioning we mean. It's the style the Music Man uses when he asks then answers his own question: "Am I right? You know I am." It's the style that the old-time drummer uses when he asks, "What can I sell you today? " and immediately responds, "How about a nice bottle of Sam's Slick Superfine Snake Oil #31? " And it's the style that seems to be favored by journalists in political press conferences; "I have a follow–up question, Mr. President, and then a follow–up to the follow–up."

This type of questioning style—throwing all your queries in the listener's lap at the same time—may be unavoidable in a thirty–minute press conference, where each questioner is jockeying for position with twenty competitors. But it seldom leads to superb communication. In fact, what this machine–gun interrogation style usually leads to is exactly the opposite. The person being questioned clams up or dodges the question or scratches her head in bewilderment.

You see this all the time in press conferences, and it doesn't necessarily happen because the person being questioned is being evasive (although that's obviously sometimes a factor). Sometimes it happens because he is suffering from Question Shock. Question Shock is what happens when Sam Donaldson strings together fourteen probing queries in one sentence and asks the politician to field them all at once. Sam's got the questions written down and he's rehearsed them, so there's little chance that he'll get confused. But the politician doesn't have them written down, and he hasn't rehearsed fourteen replies, so there's a better than even chance that he will be confused. No matter how bright you are and how experienced you are at thinking on your feet, if somebody zaps you with more demands for information that you can adequately process on the spur of the moment, you are going to experience some level of cognitive confusion. That confusion is what we call Question Shock.

This is just as relevant to selling as it is to politics. If you assault your customers with a steady barrage of questions, if you are continually ready to pounce with a follow–up probe, if you anticipate their answers or answer your own questions, you are going to send your customers into Question Shock. And you are going to throw a logjam into the information flow.

Our application of educational research to selling has revealed some startling statistics. We actually measured, with a stopwatch, the conversational pauses in sales transactions. This is what we found:

In many sales encounters, sellers who are questioning their customer can deliver five or more questions every minute.

After asking a question, sellers often wait only about one second or less before either rephrasing the question, asking another question, answering the question themselves, or making some other comment.

After receiving a reply to a question, many salespeople tend to wait less than one second before commenting and moving on to another point.

These findings suggest that in probably the majority of selling situations, salespeople inhibit the positive flow of information by trying to move things forward much too rapidly. How much real thought can you expect a customer to give to your question if you give her only one second to answer it? How much thought can you give to her responses if you spend less than a second analyzing them before moving on? As a result, the typical rapid–fire questioning style has no connection to superb communication.

It's not surprising that the figures we've given here are so low. Salespeople have traditionally been told that silence is the death of a sales call. Keep it moving, we're always told. Don't give them too much time to think. And—probably most pointed of all—if your mouth is moving, you're in control of the sale; if the conversation lags, you've lost control.

But these slogans are as wrong as they are common. They arise from confusion about "control" vs. "domination." In a sales call dialogue, the person who does most of the talking may be dominating the call, but it is the person who is doing most of the listening who is actually in control. The key to really controlling the call and the key to creating superb communication, therefore, are the same: to ask one question at a time and then wait for the answer.