Hey friend, welcome to the trend report. I'm glad you're joining me today for another conversation with just me and you in our newly implemented 10 to Win series, where I share short episodes 10 minutes or less with you on a topic that hopefully will help you grow and your business grow. I'm Sid Meadows and I'm a business leader, a coach, a consultant and a longtime student of the Office of Entrepreneurship Industry, and in this podcast we have powerful conversations about the role of industry leaders and innovators and others that are making an impact in their business and our industry. My goal is simple to provide you with valuable insights and information and resources and some tools that'll help you grow and your business grow and will help our industry move forward. So let's dive into today's 10 to Win. I love this topic.

Today we're gonna talk about the art of the follow up question. I'm gonna kind of look at this as your guide to asking meaningful, probing and open-ended questions. You know, each and every day, we all ask questions. Think about it. We ask questions to someone we know maybe we work with, maybe a potential customer, and a whole lot of other people our family members, right? We're all asking questions. And even though asking questions is part of our daily activity. Most of us don't realize that there's actually an art to asking questions, especially the follow up question. Think about the last time that you were talking with a potential client or a customer, or maybe interviewing for a job or a similar situation where you needed to ask a follow up question. Maybe an interview, maybe you're talking to your boss tons of opportunity or situations you're in or you need to ask the follow up question. Well, what type of question did you actually ask? Well, if you're like most people, including me, it's a hard habit to break you tend to ask questions that get a short, simple, one or two word response. Your question got you the answer you needed, but was it a meaningful, probing, open-ended question? Probably not. So before we can really talk about the art of the follow up question, I wanna take a second to remind you of one of the most critical components of any conversation. I've talked about this before. I've written columns about this. I think I've even done podcasting about this.

What I'm talking about is listening. Yes, listening, listening is the most critical component of any conversation, but as human beings, it's honestly the one skill that we are really bad at. We can do a bad job at listening and it's unfortunate, but most people listen to respond when they should be listening to understand Sales people, especially, including me. I am raising my hand If you're watching on YouTube. I'm raising my hand because we can be really bad at listening, especially listening to understand, as our potential customer is talking about what they want and what they need the vision for their workspace.

I guarantee you, most of us are formulating our next question and we're getting ready to pounce as soon as the client or the person we're talking to takes a pause. I know, you know it's true, right? I want you to think back for a minute to your most recent conversation. Maybe you had this happen. Did you pounce? Did you pounce in the head? Ask a simple, close-ended question. I want you to be honest, and it's okay if you say yes, that's what you did. Just reflect back on it in a minute, because I know we're all guilty in one way or another of listening to respond and actually, according to statistics, we can recall 50% of what we heard immediately after someone talks to us. However, we only retain 20% of what someone said to us in the days and weeks following the conversation. So the question that I have is how can we improve these statistics?

I think the answer is by listening intuitively to the people that we're engaging with. If you follow me for a while, you know what I mean when I say listening intuitively, because I'm going to share it again with you. But listening intuitively means listening to what's being said and perceiving what's not being said. So you're listening to what they're saying, but also what they're not saying, and this means we're listening with all of our senses. We're observing body language, facial expressions, tone of voice and other cues, and we do this by listening intuitively. There's a couple of things here that we need to be sure that we're paying attention to, and that is things we need to do.

So when you're having a conversation with somebody, in order to listen intuitively, you have to be present, and being present means turning off your phone, closing your emails, silencing notifications and really being connected to the person that is across the table from you or sitting next to you. So, rather than listening to respond, good listeners listen to understand, and it's not easy. You've got to be present, like we just talked about in this situation, to really be able to understand what your client or anyone else is saying. When you use time and you take the space to formulate your next question instead of truly listening, you miss out. You miss out on what the client is saying. When your brain is thinking about the next question, you're missing what the client's telling you. You're likely going to miss some really important information. So why ask follow-up questions? It's a pretty interesting question, isn't it? But when you think about this, why is listening such an important part of asking the follow-up question? Well, I'm glad you asked.

If we don't listen intuitively to our clients, our follow-up question is going to fall flat and we're going to fail to get the response that we really needed, and I think we all will agree that that's not good. A follow-up question should be powerful, should be open-ended. That gets the client to think, maybe brainstorm with themselves and to engage with us. Strong follow-up questions get to the heart of the issue. It gets the client to actually prompts the client actually to share specific feedback so that we we're the solution providers. Right, this helps us. This helps us create the right solution to solve their problem.

You know, if you're on a call with a potential client, let me give you an example and the client's basically saying hey, I want to purchase 100 new chairs and you only ask direct questions, which we are all guilty of. This, right? Think about this. Is there on a call with our client who, or potential client who, wants to buy 100 new task chairs from us? And we typically are going to say, well, tell me the type of chair you want to buy, what color chair do you want to buy? What features are you looking for? Those are all important questions, right, but we're only going to be able to sell them chairs when we ask those types of questions.

We need to get those answers, but maybe before, what we need to do is look at asking better and stronger questions, like what's happening, mr Customer, in your organization that has created the need for new seating, or maybe what made you realize that you have a need for new chairs in your facility? The customer, in this case, will likely share with you what's happening and guess what? You're likely going to uncover that their need goes well beyond 100 task chairs. For example, if someone says well, one of the reasons we need new tasks seating is because we've noticed that our employees are complaining about lower back pain and that they're having some issues with the adjustments of the chair and they just can't get comfortable and it's causing pain in their bodies. What does that tell you? Well, hopefully, if you're thinking through this the right way, what that tells you is yes, they need new task chairs, but they also need a height adjustable desk, if they don't already have it. Why? Because it's important for us to stand up at least 20 minutes every hour. Because that relieves the stress on our body. It makes us stand up and opens up our body cavity. We breathe differently. We become healthier when we stand up. You know all of this right, and so by asking these types of questions, like what's happening in your organization that created a need for new seating, it's going to lead you down a path that potentially could open up the opportunity to something well beyond 100 chairs. So think about that.

When you're asking the right follow up questions and you're listening intuitively to what they're saying to you, right, I think we can uncover more opportunities. Now I want to be clear. The goal here is not to upsell them. I'm not trying to tell you take advantage of them in upsell and upsell and upsell. But if you truly listen to them and you hear what their needs are, this is when you're going to understand why the client is seeking us, why they need us. Maybe we can provide a more better, comprehensive solution for that.

So let's get into formulating the follow up question. Good follow up questions Give the listener the freedom to respond however they see fit and they can provide an answer from their own perspective, which is going to give me and you much more meaningful information than the dreaded yes or no answer. You know the R to the follow up question is simple. It's a question that engages the person in front of you or the listener. Follow up questions are open ended. They seek clarity, they probe and, honestly, they challenge and they're thought provoking, their future directed and solution oriented. And that's a lot right. But you can impact all of that into one question.

But I want to give you a few examples. All right, you ready? All right, here's a close-in question Did you have a good day? Well, you're going to get a yes or no, right? I'm sure most of us, if we have children like me, we've asked that question. You get yeah, who's good? Well, our better question is tell me about your day. Here's another example Does your current solution work?

We're talking to a client. That's a yes or no. Well, here's a better way to reframe it. How do you feel your current solution is working? More engagement, more open-ended? Another example Do you like your current vendor? Easy yes or no, right? Maybe a way to reframe it is why are you interested in changing vendors? Another example is what's your moving date? How many times have we all asked that question, right? What's your moving date? Maybe a better way to ask it would be what does your moving schedule look like? You get a lot more information when we ask about their schedule and the phasing of it, right? Another example what's your favorite color? Maybe a better way to ask that is what colors do you like the most? For those of you that are picking finishes, right. So, rather than what's your favorite color, monts Blume ask what colors do you like the most? And the list goes on and on.

I'm sure you can add a lot of questions to this, but the fact is that you can reframe any question to be a powerful, open-ended question. Just kind of think about it. You got to take a pause before you ask it. I'm not talking about a 30-second pause. You'll be able to quickly reframe it. But give you a tip, a pro tip here If you ask the question and you hear it come out as closed-ended, then just stop actually and say you know what? Let me ask that question differently or let me reframe that question. I do this a lot when I catch myself asking a closed-ended question, I quickly reframe it so that I get more information right.

The art of the follow-up question is not really hard. It just takes practice. So start practicing today. Start listening, better listening, intuitively, start asking open-ended questions and it's really going to help you, I think. Discover the success that you're looking for and practice with your friends If you want to, your spouses, your partners, your children. Kids are a great way to practice open-ended questions, because they don't like to talk right At least mine don't but practice it. You can also practice it yourself, but I think if you work on asking better questions, you're going to get better information, and better information is going to lead to better solutions for your customers and more revenue into your business.

Hey, thanks for joining me today. I hope that you enjoyed this short maybe not too short episode about the art of the follow-up question. If you did get some value out of today's conversation, head over to Apple and leave us a rating or review, if you haven't done so already, but if you do want to give me some feedback, I welcome you to send me an email text message, shoot me a message on LinkedIn. I'd love to hear from each and every one of you, and thanks for joining me today. We'll see you again soon. Go out there and make today great. Take care everyone.