One of the coaching exercises we play on my “Survive To Thrive Group Coaching” is the question game. The goal is to build a playbook of great questions for sellers and buyers. Knowing that people will not change their mind but they will make a new decision based on new information, your goal is to help your clients self discover the reason for making a new decision. The second principle is people will resist what you tell them but they are all in when they are making the decision.

Let’s say you are prospecting expired listings for seller listings. If the only question you have is “are you still interested in selling your home and the seller responds with no, the conversation is over if you don’t have any additional questions. As I tell my coaching clients, the conversation is not over until you run out of great questions.

Examples

• If your home would have sold, where were you moving to?
• What’s important about moving to _____________?
• When would you like to be in ___________? What would that do for you?
• It seems like you have given up your goal to move to ___________ so you can be closer to family?
• Why do you believe your home didn’t sell? ………….In my experience when a home doesn’t sell that should have like yours, it’s usually because of price, presentation or marketing. What would you change next time?
• What did your offers look like?
• If you knew that $435,000 was the right price, what would you do differently next time?
• If a buyer showed up tomorrow with a full price offer, would you reject the offer?
• If I were working with that buyer, would you want me to bring you the offer?

In his book “Never Split The Difference” Chris Voss teaches us to use calibrated open ended questions that take take the aggression out of a confrontational statement. The beauty of calibrated questions is the fact that they offer no target for attack like statement do. Avoid words like can, is, are, do or does. These are closed ended question that can be answered with a simple yes or no. Instead, start questions with who, what, when, where, why and how.

Play chess – not checkers. In other words, be strategic in your communication. Think like an attorney who is cross-examing a witness. Asking yes – no questions is a great strategy when you are using the question to set the next question. But, only use them when you know the answer. Same goes for tie-downs. They can be very effective as long as you know that the other person will agree.

Remember that people are more motivated by avoiding pain than they are by going towards pleasure so “harms way questions” can be very effective when used at the right time. Go to pain and park on pain.

Logic makes people think and emotion makes them act. So lead with logic and close with emotion.