Power Questions

Build Relationships, Win New Business, and Influence Others

Andrew Sobel, Jerold Panas

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118218495
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

An arsenal of powerful questions that will transform every conversation

Skillfully redefine problems. Make an immediate connection with anyone. Rapidly determine if a client is ready to buy. Access the deepest dreams of others. Power Questions sets out a series of strategic questions that will help you win new business and dramatically deepen your professional and personal relationships. The book showcases thirty-five riveting, real conversations with CEOs, billionaires, clients, colleagues, and friends. Each story illustrates the extraordinary power and impact of a thought-provoking, incisive power question. To help readers navigate a variety of professional challenges, over 200 additional, thought-provoking questions are also summarized at the end of the book.

In Power Questions you'll discover:

• The question that stopped an angry executive in his tracks
• The sales question CEOs expect you to ask versus the questions they want you to ask
• The question that will radically refocus any meeting
• The penetrating question that can transform a friend or colleague's life
• A simple question that helped restore a marriage

When you use power questions, you magnify your professional and personal influence, create intimate connections with others, and drive to the true heart of the issue every time.

The Power Questions

1

Good Questions Trump Easy Answers

We're sitting comfortably in a sun-filled office on the fortieth floor of a Chicago skyscraper. We ask the CEO, “What most impresses you when you meet someone who is trying to win your business? What builds trust and credibility with you early on in a relationship?”

This executive runs a $12-billion company. We are interviewing him about his most trusted business relationships. These are the service providers and suppliers his company goes back to again and again, the individuals who are part of his inner circle of trusted advisors.

“I can always tell,” he says, “how experienced and insightful a prospective consultant, banker, or lawyer is by the quality of their questions and how intently they listen. That's how simple it is.”

In a direct but sweeping statement about what builds a relationship, he tells us what hundred of others we've advised and interviewed also affirm: Good questions are often far more powerful than answers.

Good questions challenge your thinking. They reframe and redefine the problem. They throw cold water on our most dearly held assumptions, and force us out of our traditional thinking. They motivate us to learn and discover more. They remind us of what is most important in our lives.

In ancient history, transformational figures such as Socrates and Jesus used questions to great effect. Their questions were teaching tools and also a means to change indelibly the people around them. We'll meet both in later chapters and learn their techniques.

But you'll also meet corporate leaders, a minister, a billionaire, an attorney, a medical center CEO, and dozens more. They are all fascinating people (some you may know), for whom a power question becomes a pivotal turning point.

In the twentieth century, towering intellectuals such as Albert Einstein and Peter Drucker loved to ask provocative questions.

One morning a young Einstein watched the sun glittering off a field of flowers. He asked himself, “Could I travel on that beam of light? Could I reach or exceed the speed of light?” Later, he told a friend, “I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.”

Drucker is considered to be one of the most profound thinkers in the field of management. He was famous for his intense questioning sessions with clients.

Rather than offering advice, Drucker would pose simple but penetrating questions such as, “What business are you really in?” And, “What do your customers value most?”

When a journalist once referred to him as a consultant, Drucker objected. He said he was actually an “insultant”—a nod to the tough, direct questions he liked to ask his clients.

Great artists have always understood the role of questions. It is no accident that the most famous dramatic passage in all of literature is built around a single question. “To be, or not to be, that is the question,” says Shakespeare's Prince Hamlet as he contemplates life and death.

We use the phrase power questions as the title of this book. That's because the questions we select have the power to give new life to your conversations in unexpected and delightful ways. They are powerful tools to get directly to the heart of the matter. They are the keys to opening locked doors.

Each of the next 34 short chapters recounts a conversation or situation that was transformed through one or more power questions. We've used real-life examples in order to illustrate how and when to use the questions. In the final section of this book, called “Not Just for Sunday,” we list another 293 power questions. Using these additional questions will help you succeed in a variety of professional and personal situations.

Learning to use the power of questions can dramatically increase your professional and personal effectiveness. This book will help you build and deepen relationships. Sell more of your products, services, and ideas. Motivate others to give more effort than they ever thought possible. And become more effective at influencing clients, colleagues, and friends.

Are you ready to use the transformational power of great questions? Read on.

2

If You Don't Want to Hit Bottom, Stop Digging the Hole

Even when I think about it today, it still makes me cringe. It was an embarrassing moment of youthful naïveté. I wanted to shine, but I fell flat on my face.

The 1960s pop group Procol Harum said it perfectly when they sang, “My befuddled brain is shining brightly, quite insane.”

We're meeting with a major telecommunications company that my consulting firm wants to do business with. I'm a newly promoted partner in the firm. I am eager—oh, so eager—to make my mark by acquiring a major new client.

I'm determined to make this meeting a success. I arrive armed to the teeth. Masses of supporting evidence. We will establish ourselves as not just the best choice but the only consultant of choice for this company.

There are three of us and five of them. Several of their group are vice presidents with significant responsibilities. Not at the top, but senior enough. They invite us into a spacious conference room. It's not the boardroom—the table has a black laminated top instead of hardwood. But it's sufficiently elegant. We look around approvingly.

I bring thick binders for them. Hefty decks of PowerPoint slides. Plenty of in-depth documentation.

It turns out that was absolutely the wrong kind of preparation.

I should have studied Woodrow Wilson. He said, “If I am to speak 10 minutes, I need a week for preparation. If 15 minutes, three days. If half an hour, two days. If an hour, I am ready now.” I was certainly not prepared for brevity.

Then the first question from the client, the initial salvo. It's a softball pitch. Hard to mess that up.

“Tell us a bit about yourselves.”

I want to leave no doubt in their minds that we are uniquely qualified to help them. I tell them about the history of our firm, how it was formed by the merger of two other consulting firms. Having lived through it myself, I thought the story fascinating.

I describe our client base. I walk though some of our most important methodologies. I tell them about our joint-team approach to collaborating with clients. About how well we listen (I am too young to appreciate the irony of that claim).

I cannot bear to spare any of the essential facts. Facts that I know will impress them and make them quick to retain us. On the spot.

I am so focused on our qualifications, however, that I pretty much forget the client on the other side of the table. I don't realize how fast time flies when you're talking.

After nearly 30 minutes, my colleagues and I finally stop our presentation. There is silence.

One of the vice presidents reaches for something in a pile of folders. Is it a copy of their strategic plan they want to share with us? An organization chart to illustrate who else we should speak to at the company?

No. She is grabbing her appointment book. “This has been very helpful, thank you. I really do have to run to another meeting now.”

It's too late! We have built little personal rapport—actually none. We have achieved virtually no understanding of their goals, their issues, or their challenges. We lost our chance. Now we're being escorted out.

(Writing this, I hear the refrain from Bob Dylan's song “My Back Pages” echoing in my head: “Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.” I'm reminded there are no mistakes in life, only lessons).

Fast forward. It's now a year later. I am on a very similar sales call with my senior partner, DeWitt. He is a veteran of hundreds of such meetings. A wise sage. And the client asks us the same question: “Why don't you start by telling us about your firm?”

DeWitt pauses thoughtfully. He looks up, and asks, “What would you like to know about us?” Then he is silent.

(Often, we ask a question, and when there is even a small silence we ask it again in slightly different words. We can't resist filling the silence. Not DeWitt—he is very comfortable with silence. He long ago told me, “Once you've made your p...