1Why this session is company-wide
This is your copy to keep. The gold Going deeper boxes go past what the session covers, for anyone who wants the fuller picture.
Everybody here gets asked questions by clients, and most of us answer them faster than we should. A technician is asked whether a firewall is worth replacing. A coordinator is asked on the phone what a project would run. Somebody at a networking event is asked what we charge. In every one of those, the answer given in the first thirty seconds is built on almost no information, and once it is out it is the thing the other person remembers.
This session covers one technique and a rule for when to use it. The technique is answering a question with a question, softened so it does not sound like a challenge. The rule tells you when that applies and when it does not, because on a support ticket from a client who pays us it does not apply at all.
It builds on the four sessions before it. Session 03 covered the up-front contract, the agreement made before a conversation about its time, its purpose, their agenda, our agenda and what happens at the end. Session 04 covered pain, the compelling reason a client has to do something about a problem and what it is costing them. This session is how you get those answers out of somebody who came into the room wanting to ask the questions themselves.
The method here comes from the Sandler Foundations course. The examples, and everything about how it applies here, are ours. The chapter PDFs are in the reference folder of this program if you want the source.
2The seventy-thirty rule
In a conversation where you are trying to find out whether we can help somebody, the client should do about seventy percent of the talking and you should do about thirty.
Take a 45-minute first meeting, used here only as a model figure. Seventy percent of 45 minutes is 0.70 times 45, which is 31.5 minutes of them talking. Thirty percent is 0.30 times 45, which is 13.5 minutes of you. Thirteen and a half minutes is not very long, and almost all of it should be questions.
Most meetings come out the other way around, and the cause is not nerves or enthusiasm. It is knowledge. The more of what you know you put on the table, the more of the talking you are doing. Those two move together, always, and you cannot raise one without lowering the other.
3What product knowledge costs you early
The finding that displaying product knowledge early in a conversation works against you is called the dummy curve. Holding that knowledge back on purpose is called dummying up. Those are the names in the source material, and they are worth knowing because they are the vocabulary, but the plain version is more useful: know everything you can about what we do, and be slow about saying it.
Three reasons to hold it back.
| Reason | What it means | What it looks like here |
|---|---|---|
| It is unpaid consulting | The advice is the product. Giving it away in a first meeting means the meeting was the deliverable | A prospect leaves with a list of what to fix, done by us, at no charge, and does the fixing with somebody cheaper |
| You learn nothing while you are talking | Information moves one direction at a time, and the direction you need is toward you | An hour of good explaining that ends with no idea what their outages cost, what they can spend, or who signs |
| You solve the wrong problem | The question somebody asks first is rarely the thing that is actually wrong | A careful answer about server replacement for a business whose real problem is that nobody is watching their backups |
None of that is an argument for knowing less. What you know is what makes the questions worth asking, and it is still there to spend on the answer once you know what the answer has to cover. The argument is about when it gets spent.
Four short phrases buy you a question instead of an answer. They are the cheapest tool in this session and they work in any seat:
- "I am not sure I follow."
- "Help me out here."
- "Say more about that."
- "I do not know, what do you think?"
4The question you answer and the question you do not
Holding back an answer feels like withholding help. If that is your reaction to section 3, it is the right reaction, and there is a line that tells you when it applies.
Two cases. A client with a signed agreement opens a ticket in Syncro saying Outlook keeps prompting for a password. That answer goes back as fast as we can produce it, and nothing in this session applies to it. A prospect with nothing signed asks in a first meeting what it would take to move fifty users off an aging on-premises server to Microsoft 365 and what their tenant should look like. Answering that produces the migration plan, and the migration plan is what we would have been paid to build.
The test, in two questions:
| Ask yourself | If the answer is | Then |
|---|---|---|
| Has somebody already paid for this answer? | Yes, they are a client under agreement | Answer it, fully and fast. This is the job |
| Does the answer take recall, or does it take work? | Recall, even for a prospect | Usually answer it. Refusing a fact anybody could look up costs trust and buys nothing |
| Does the answer take recall, or does it take work? | Work, and nothing is signed | That is scoping. It gets an agreement about what it is worth before it gets done |
For anything in between, there is a plainer check: if the answer would end up written into a proposal, it is the proposal.
One more thing this is not. Answering a question with a question is not a refusal to answer. You will answer, later, and the answer will be better because by then you will know what they were actually asking and why it mattered to them.
The awkward case is a client under agreement who asks a scoping question on a ticket, which happens constantly. "While you are in here, what would it cost to do the whole office?" The answer is not to reverse them like a prospect, because they have already trusted us with their money. It is to say that it is a good question and a bigger one than a ticket, and to put a short conversation on the calendar for it. That is the up-front contract from session 03 doing its work: agreeing what the conversation is for before having it.
5The client's picture
A medical practice asks us to quote twelve replacement workstations. Looking at the environment, we think they also need multi-factor authentication, meaning a second proof of identity beyond a password, on their remote access. So we tell them. What comes back is a defense of the setup they already have, and the workstation quote now has an argument attached to it that it did not have five minutes ago.
Here is what happened. The client walked in with a picture of what they need, complete, before we said a word. Every addition you make to that picture without asking causes resistance, and the resistance is to the addition being made for them rather than to the thing itself. They did not put it there and they did not see it there.
The same move, done as a question: "When one of your staff logs in from home in the evening, how do you confirm it is really them?"
If the answer worries them, they have added it to the picture themselves and it is now their idea, which is the only way it survives the drive home. If it does not worry them, nothing has been damaged and the workstation quote is still clean.
The rule is what that example just did: a feature you want a client to consider is raised as a question, never asserted.
6Reversing, and the softening statement
A prospect asks what we charge per user. You say "why do you ask?" It is a reasonable question and it lands like an interrogation. They give you a short answer and stop volunteering things.
Now the same question with a sentence in front of it: "That is a fair question. Before I give you a number that could be wrong, what made you ask about price first?" The question did not change. The sentence in front of it did.
Reversing is answering a question with a question. A softening statement is the short acknowledgment that goes in front of it so the question reads as interest rather than resistance. Every reverse has both, in that order, with no pause between them.
| Softening statement | The question after it | The question it answers |
|---|---|---|
| "That is a fair question." Example from the source chapter | "Before I give you a number that could be wrong, what made you ask about price first?" | "What do you charge per user?" |
| "I am glad you asked." Example from the source chapter | "What would the number need to be close to for this to be worth continuing?" | "Roughly what would something like this run?" |
| "That is worth getting right." | "What is happening now when somebody has a problem, and what does that cost you by the time it is fixed?" | "How fast do you answer when we call?" |
| "We get asked that a lot." | "What is it about your setup that made you want to check that first?" | "Do you support Macs?" Or any single capability question |
| "That one comes up for good reason." | "What have you been told you need, and who told you?" | "Do we need to be on the cloud?" |
| "Tell me a bit more first." | "What happened recently that made you start looking?" | "Can you send over a proposal?" |
| "I would want to know that too." | "What went wrong with the last one, so I can tell you honestly whether we would be any different?" | "How is this going to go differently than the last provider?" |
| "That is the right thing to be asking." | "If it turned out you did need it, what would have to be true for you to do something about it?" | "Are we actually at risk of getting hit?" |
Say them out loud before you use them on a client. The first time anybody says "I am glad you asked" it sounds fake, and the second time it does not.
Three reverses, not one
It usually takes three or more reverses before you get the real reason. The first two answers tend to be intellectual, the reasons a person gives while they are still deciding how much to tell you. The third tends to be the real one. So when the first answer sounds thin, that is expected, and the move is another softening statement and another question rather than giving up and answering.
The exception matters as much as the rule. When somebody asks the same question twice, answer it. A question that comes back unchanged comes from a person who wants an answer, and reversing it again reads as evasion.
The reason three works is that a reversed question gets redefined. Ask somebody why price came up first and they rarely repeat the same question back. They narrow it, or they attach a reason to it, and the second version tells you more than the first did. Three reverses is really three versions of their question, each one closer to what they meant. That is also why the identical question twice is the exception: nothing got redefined, so there is nothing further to get.
7The question nobody asked
A prospect says: "We are happy with our current provider."
What most people do next is answer the question "why should we switch to you?" They talk about response times, about being local, about twenty-two years. Nobody asked that question. It was invented in the space of about a second, and now we are arguing with somebody who was not arguing.
That sentence was a statement, and the mistake is treating a statement as a question. It happens most when the statement sounds like an objection, because an objection feels like something that has to be answered right now.
A statement gets a reverse, the same as a question does. "That is good to hear. What do they do that you would want us to keep doing?" What comes back tells you what is working, and what is missing from the answer tells you what is not. Either way you now have information instead of a disagreement.
The rule: never answer a question that was not asked.
8Practice
- Write down three softening statements in your own words. Not the ones in the table, unless you would genuinely say them. The test is whether you could say it to a client without feeling ridiculous.
- Write down the one question you get asked most often and do not enjoy answering. The exact words it usually arrives in.
- Write the reverse you will use on it next time: one of your three softening statements, then a question.
- Use each of your three at least twice this week, in any conversation, including internal ones. Write down what came back.
- Find one thing you wish a client would buy and write it as a question rather than a statement, the way the remote access question was written in section 5.
- Once this week, when somebody makes a statement that sounds like an objection, reverse it instead of answering it. Write down what they said second.
9Check for understanding
Take a 45-minute first meeting as a model figure. Under the seventy-thirty rule, how many minutes are yours, and if the split came out the other way around, what is the most likely cause?
A client with a signed agreement opens a Syncro ticket asking why Outlook keeps prompting for a password. A prospect with nothing signed asks what it would take to move their fifty users off an aging server to Microsoft 365. Apply the test to both and say what you do with each.
You are quoting twelve replacement workstations for a medical practice and you think they also need multi-factor authentication on remote access, which they have not raised. Why does telling them so tend to go badly, and what do you do instead?
You have reversed a prospect twice and they ask the identical question a third time. What do you do, and why is the obvious answer wrong?
A prospect says "we are happy with our current provider." What do most people do with that sentence, and what would you say?
Why does a reverse need a softening statement in front of it, and what happens to the conversation without one?
10Before the next session
- Do the practice steps in section 8 and bring your three softening statements, the question you get asked most, and what came back when you used them.
- Know the three reasons for holding product knowledge back, and the two-question test for when that applies.
- Optional. Chapter 5 of the Sandler Foundations workbook in the reference folder.
Next session. 06 - Uncovering Budget. How to find out what a client is willing and able to invest before we write anything, why the number they say first is rarely the number they have, and what to do when the answer is that they have not thought about it.
11Glossary
- Seventy-thirty rule
- In a conversation to find out whether we can help somebody, the client does about seventy percent of the talking and we do about thirty.
- Dummy curve
- The finding that displaying product knowledge early in a conversation works against you.
- Dummying up
- Holding that knowledge back on purpose and asking instead.
- Reversing
- Answering a question with a question.
- Softening statement
- The short acknowledgment placed in front of a reverse so the question reads as interest rather than a challenge.
- Rule of three
- It usually takes three or more reverses to reach the real reason, because the first two answers tend to be intellectual and the third tends to be the real one.
- Unpaid consulting
- Work given away inside a conversation, where the advice was the thing we would otherwise have been paid to produce.
- Unasked question
- A question nobody actually asked, invented by treating a statement as though it were one.
- Scoping question
- A question whose answer takes work rather than recall, asked by somebody with nothing signed.
- Multi-factor authentication
- A second proof of identity beyond a password.
- Up-front contract
- An agreement made before a conversation about its time, its purpose, their agenda, our agenda and what happens at the end. Covered in session 03.
- Pain
- The compelling reason a client has to do something about a problem, and what it is costing them. Covered in session 04.
12Sources
- Sandler Systems, Sandler Foundations, chapter 5, Questioning Strategies: chapter PDF.
- Sandler Systems, Sandler Foundations: full workbook PDF.
The dummy curve, dummying up, reversing, the softening statement and the rule of three are Sandler's terms. The seventy-thirty arithmetic, the medical practice and workstation example, the test for answering versus scoping, and everything about how this applies at Hermetic are ours.