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Posts Tagged ‘questions for customer service’

Business Communication Skills – Influence by Asking Questions

When selling a product, service, or idea, people often think that providing more information is better. The more data points, the more likely the other person is to be persuaded. This is not necessarily the case. Excluding data hounds, most people don’t like to be overloaded with information. But people do appreciate the opportunity to talk about what they want and need. So if you want to sell something, give people a chance to talk.

I’ll never forget one of my first sales calls, early in my career. I was selling Dale Carnegie Training. After calling a prospect for six months, he agreed to spend ten minutes with me. Feeling rushed, I laid out all of our training brochures and quickly told him about every program we offered. Then I asked if he wanted to buy anything. He didn’t.

If I had asked a few questions and listened to his answers, I could have provided information on just the training programs he needed, instead of giving him a list of likely irrelevant options.

Selling a product or service is no different from selling an idea. You are trying to persuade someone to your way of thinking. Resist the temptation to persuade solely by educating. Instead, ask questions, listen to the answers, and then tell the person what you heard her say. If you’ve taken a listening class, you learned the practice of paraphrasing what someone said. Paraphrasing is a very old, very effective practice.

People need to feel heard and understood. From my experience, asking relevant questions, demonstrating that you listened to the answers by paraphrasing what the person said, and providing pertinent and succinct information is what people need to make a decision.


Increase Customer Retention and Satisfaction: I’m Losing Customers and I Don’t Know Why

Read my column in this week’s Denver Business Journal and increase customer retention, satisfaction, and service:

We’ve all had customers we thought were satisfied, and the next month they’re off our books and we don’t know why.
Your customers are under no obligation to tell you why they replaced you. In fact, they have no incentive to give you feedback. Why would customers risk your defensiveness? It’s easier for customers to disappear than tell you what they don’t like about your products or services.

If you’d like to read the column in it’s entirety, please visit: http://www.bizjournals.com/denver/blog/broadway_17th/2013/02/im-losing-customers-and-i-dont-know.html?page=all


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