The Business Analyst’s guide to questions: 6 – The questions Sales People use

In the previous post in this series we realised that Sales People use questions primarily to control the conversation and to foster specific emotions.  Now let’s take a brief look at what questions they use to do these things.

We’ve already looked at what Hopkins calls “the tie down”. Annoyingly, the entire planet under the age of 30 is using it, i’n'n’it?  You did practice using tie-downs, didn’t you?  Don’t they come naturally after a while? (What?  You didn’t practice them?  Shame on you!)

Hopkins considers three other main categories of questions in sales to be

• The Alternate of Choice
• The Porcupine
• The Involvement Question

 
The Alternate of Choice

This is a question with two answers, either one of which takes you forward.

Shall we go by bus, or tube?

Would you rather wash, or dry? 

Shall we eat before the show, or afterwards?

Stating only two options means the questioner can imply that other options aren’t really available – in these cases those might be taking a taxi, leaving the washing up until the morning, or eating in.  

This is a great question structure for facilitators.  You can make the session feel participatory but still maintain control and drive it along:

Shall we break for lunch after this session, or the next one?
(Don’t think we are having lunch yet boys and girls!)

Will Suzanne distribute the actions list, or will Pete do that?
(Either way, it’s not gonna be me…)

Shall we park that, or do you want to take it as an action, Simon?
(You won’t side track this meeting by mounting your irrelevent hobby-horse).

Exercise: Whenever you are in a well facilitated meeting, simply listen out and jot down the alternative of choice questions.  (You’ll seem really diligent – takeing all those notes!)

Exercise: Practice offering an alternative whenever you propose a course of action, even if it is just a choice of pubs for Friday night. 

 

The Porcupine 

At its simplest this is merely answering a question with another question which lobs the ball back into the other person’s court:

Me: Shall we go by bus or tube?

You: Wouldn’t it be quicker if we took a cab?

But it can be used to regain control of the conversation and point it in another direction

Me: Shall we go by bus or tube?

You: If we had a map we could walk – do you think that newsagent sells them?

… and suddenly we are just a few seconds away from chocolate… mmm…. chocolate…

Again this is a good tool for facilitators and it is certainly useful  in requirements interviews, but it really comes in to its own if you are training.   We’ll look at how teachers and trainers use questions in later posts in this series, but the great joy of the porcupine in the training room is that it keeps the students thinking.

Exercise – Keepie Uppies – (we’ve done this before and w’ll do it again) – two or more of you conduct an entire conversation in questions.  If you cannot find anyone todo this with you, just make everything you say a question for an hour or so or half a day if you can manage it.   Make your your questions subtle enough not to be noticed, but effective enough to get a reply.

 

Involvement questions

Involvement questions are questions which make the person being questioned imagine themselves in the future:

When we’ve finished our shopping and have a whole load of bags, wouldn’t it be easier to get a cab?

This really brings out the benefit of taking a cab because it involves the person you are talking to in the to-be situation, and makes them imagine it in some detail.  All that shopping.  All those bags to carry.   For that reason alone, these questions should be second nature for a BA.   But BAs can sometimes miss the fact that this is a very persuasive structure for a question, and sales people use these questions because they help the prospect feel the good feelings that only come with owning the sales person’s product.  

These are great questions for bringing issues and risks into sharp focus, and this is a good way to improve your practice as a BA.

Compare:

What about the risk that the system won’t deliver the security features that the vendor promised?

With:

What would the headlines be if we had a security breach because the system didn’t deliver the security features that the vendor promised?

You can see that asking what the world be like where the risk has already happened is a much more powerful way to get people to engage with the consequences of the risk.

Exercise: run through your issues or risk log at work, take each issue or risk and frame a question which places the team in the future where the worst-case scenario has already happened.

Exercise: if your team doesn’t currently have an issues or risk log, then do a search on typical project risks and work from that – here’s one I did earlier.

As you can see, sales people use questions in ways which go far beyond the simple investigative questions of Rudyard Kipling, Aristotle and Lewis Carroll and, as you can see, many of their techniques are directly applicable to Business Analysts.  Play about with them.  Practice.  Have fun.

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 This is the sixth of these entries and you can find the others here.  There’ll be a gap for a couple of weeks because I need to get some pre-publication feedback on the posts about how doctors and teachers use questions. They’ll be worth the wait though.
A reminder:  This work by Ben Warsop is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.