There used to be a genre of jokes that asked how you could tell it was going to be a bad day. A memorable one was when your secretary (that’s what they were called back then) called you on the intercom and told you that Mike Wallace and a crew from “Sixty Minutes” were waiting to see you.
Now in his 80’s, Wallace has been grilling bad guys since
the inception of Sixty Minutes back
in 1968. Imagine being General William Westmoreland (commander of
MIKE WALLACE (SIXTY MINUTES): Isn’t it a possibility that the real reason for suddenly deciding, in
the summer of 1967, to remove an entire category of the enemy from the order of
battle was based on political considerations?
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: No
MIKE WALLACE: …in your
August 20 cable?
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: Yeah.
No, I…
MIKE WALLACE: I have a
copy of your August 20 cable.
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: Well,
sure. OK, OK, all right.
The above exchange was a lead in to a recent interview on National Public Radio. What really caught my attention, however, was the subsequent conversation between NPR’s Steve Inskeep and Wallace on the power of asking good questions:
INSKEEP:
I think more than most interviewers the
questions that you ask can be as interesting as the answers that they elicit. And...
Mr. WALLACE: Well, a lady by the name of
Faye Emerson1, who was a good friend of mine a million years ago,
told me, `Mike, there is no such thing as an indiscreet question.' And
you know what? It's true.
INSKEEP: You know,
it's not just the substance of the questions with you, though, sometimes. It's
the way that they're asked.
Mr. WALLACE: I couldn't agree more. If
you've done it a long time, as you apparently have done, and as you know I
surely have done, you learn that one of the most persuasive ways to get
somebody that you're interviewing to open up is to write down maybe 50
questions ahead of time, and when you sit down with an interviewee under those
circumstances, you become co-conspirators. They suddenly realize, `He knows a
lot about me, so I'm going to help him draw a round picture of me.'
Obviously,
what struck me about this exchange on investigative reporting is how it
generalizes to our craft of selling. Anyone who has participated in training
programs led by either Harry Koolen or myself, knows
that we place an emphasis on the twin investigative skills of questioning and
listening.
This is
based on our own research of exemplary sales performers, where we consistently
find that they spend more time planning and asking good questions than their more
typically performing counterparts. Our findings are supported by the published
studies of Neil Rackham (SPIN Selling,
1989) who, based on 35,000 sales interview observations, reports that the most
persuasive verbal behavior is the question.
Still,
we typically field push back in our workshops from some well meaning
participants who feel awkward about asking questions that may be perceived as
“indiscreet”. They fear that asking an “indiscreet” question may put the
prospect or client off and create a barrier to building the relationship.
Good
questioning is informed by science (the studies by Rackham and others) while
the practice is an art. The objective is to reach the position described by
Wallace when your prospect or client receives you as a “co-conspirator” in
learning as much about them as possible.
Once
there, it is time to get to a deeper level of understanding by asking questions
about performance and not just execution. We call them questions that deal with
the consequences of a current
condition or course of action. Often they begin with the preface...”What would
happen if…?”
Dedicate
yourself to your craft like Mike Wallace dedicated himself to his. For your
next call prepare, not just what to say, but what you intend to ask. Like Mike
Wallace, write down as many questions you can think of before the interview.
When the timing is right ask something like, “What would happen if…..?”
After
all, Faye Emerson was right, “There is no such thing as an indiscreet question”.
1 Faye
Emerson was one of the first hosts of television talk shows and was known as
the “First Lady of Television”. Wallace
practiced a little hyperbole in his reference to knowing her a “million years
ago”. Emerson died in 1993.