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Questions serve to many objectives.
One of the key concepts of marketing is that you need to know
what your customer wants
to be able to meet these desires.
This goes for selling products to people,
but also to identify what arguments to use
in a job interview, where YOU are the product,
or how to negotiate with your wife that fishing trip over the weekend.
If you know what the other side wants
you can adapt your arguments and your actions
in order to meet these desires improving your chances of success.
One of the most direct ways to get information is to ask
but there are many ways to ask
and not all are effective to achieve this goal
It is true that in general questions are used to obtain information,
but they can sometimes serve other purposes.
For example:
Imagine the father out of the house, at the elevator's door and the son already late
for school ) sitting on the couch watching Tv. Then the father says:
" Shall we? "
Now , this is not a question ,
it's a " turn off television because the elevator has arrived ."
He is not asking if the child wants to go to class or not !
Incidentally, in this case, he didn't have to ask anything
Any sentence would have more or less the same sense.
Another unorthodox use for questions is when you don't need to know the answer
the case of sarcasm . You do not search the information
just asks to say something ( usually
wanting to fight ) .
For example : Imagine a husband who comes home late and finds his mate waiting in the
room . As soon as he opens the door , she asks : " Will you tell me you were working
until this hour ? " The question is a " closed " one ( we shall see that it is technically
wrong to gather information ) , but in this case this is not exactly "information " what
she wants , right?
Keep imagining the previous scene . The good boy could answer with another question : " What
is it ? Now you will turn to babysit me ? "
Although the possible answers are YES / NO , also in this case he does NOT WANT INFORMATION
( quite the contrary ) . It is an " anything goes " out of an embarrassing situation ...
Technically, sales , questions serve three purposes :
1. To get information; 2. To mislead concepts in the interlocutor
and 3. To conduct the interview (conversation)
to a predefined goal .
In the following sessions we will see each of them in more depth .