Happy ears: Why you shouldn’t necessarily answer every prospect question

The urge to answer all questions asked

School days. Happy days. Many memories. Exuberance. A total lack of worries. School friends. The long school holidays in the south of France. The teachers I loved. The ones I liked … less. And those happy moments when, when the teacher asked a question, I knew the answer, I raised my hand and I was so keen to share my knowledge with the teacher and my classmates.

Unfortunately, I realised that this eagerness to answer questions was a terrible habit that was not helping me while selling. Because the value of a sales person, me or the teams with work with when rolling out B2B sales training programs, isn't based on the ability to give information but to collect it…

Four reasons to fix this urge

So, I'd picked up bad habits at school (and so did all sales people) and it is important to control this urge. Here are four reasons for doing this

1- Prospects never ask you the real question:

They don't ask the questions they want to ask and use these questions as a means of gathering the most information. They ask "higher-level", more generic questions. Let's take a trivial example. If, on a Friday evening, I'm back home and I realise we've run out of milk and my wife is still on her way home, I'll call my wife and ask her: "Where are you?". I wouldn't ask her: "Have you passed the little corner shop?". I first want to understand if she's still in the metro, if she's already got out, how long it will be before she's back, etc... The same applies in a sales context.

A prospect will ask questions at a much higher level than they really want to know. That's human nature. For example, they'll say "Who do you work with?" when the real question is "Do you have any convincing results in our sector?

2- Our happy ears

More often than not, when a prospect says things like "that's interesting", optimism and happy ears are activated. The assumption is that the prospect is genuinely interested, a so-called "buying signal". There's a need to be liked and so any question that follows that statement - which the prospect has strategically made to activate those happy ears - is followed by immediate answers to develop that "relationship".

But one question can have so many different readings. For example, for a company that sells sandwiches, a question such as "I understand you work with Carrefour and Leclerc, is that right?" can mean "your quality and hygiene must have been rigorously controlled", which can be positive, or, on the contrary, "I'm not sure you'll be interested in my business, which is smaller in volume than that of these major distributors". By qualifying the question, we show a healthy scepticism and avoid our happy ears getting the better of us.

3- We don't hear what's being asked of us

Human beings are extremely complex animals who understand and see the world in so many different ways. We have many filters (as a result of education, culture, personal experience, etc.) that we have developed to help us understand how the world we live in works and to give it meaning.

These 'filters' can be very different from those used by the person asking the question, and can completely distort our understanding. Hence the importance of making sure we understand the question properly. And to have a pen and paper to write down what our prospects say when they talk to us, so that we don't get carried away.

4- Develop an equal partner relationship

During a conversation with a prospect, sales people often have the impression that the prospect holds all the cards because he or she has the money (a big mistake). So they want to please in the same way that we want to please our teachers by answering their questions immediately. But it's important to remember that a commercial relationship is a two-way street.

Prospects buy from people they trust. And this trust is developed by understanding the other person. Challenging prospects on their questions is one way of establishing this equitable relationship.

So there you have four reasons why it's important to control our innate desire to answer all the questions asked by prospects and to have a mechanism that enables us to clearly understand what the real question is. Can you think of any others?