Suddenly Big Boss asks what you think of a certain data. What can we do if the answers are not answered?
Editor’s note: This article comes from Everyone is a product manager , author Stella.
We will find that only about 10% of the speeches in a day can be prepared in advance, such as formal departmental meetings, work reports, etc., and the remaining 90% are random, and need to be flexible. This is also a headache for many people.
The triggering of this kind of temporary speech often starts with a problem from the other party. For example:
-
You are introducing new product information, and the customer suddenly asked “Why is your product 30% more expensive than company xx?”
-
Reporting to the superior, but was questioned “Isn’t this incident passed last time? Why hasn’t it been modified?”
-
Dine with the boss and he suddenly asks you “what do you think of the activity plan for next month?”
According to my observation, many people are facing such sudden questions, often they are indifferent or say something that is not logical and incomprehensible. After the incident, I regretted the answer and thought I could have spoken better.
So it’s important to learn how to answer every question calmly.
Most people have a cognitive habit: when they hear a question, they need to answer it immediately, and being able to blurt out without thinking is a powerful performance. Actually, this is not the case.
Actually, there is a “key 5 seconds” between hearing the question and actually answering it, and you need to hold it firmly.
What do you want to do in this “critical 5 seconds”? You can do two things:
-
Acknowledge the other’s question;
-
Clarify each other’s issues
There are several benefits to doing this:
-
The other party feels respect, which makes it easier for the atmosphere camp to create dialogue instead of confrontation;
-
Understand what the person asking the question wants to know, and make sure you are talking about the same thing with the other person.
-
Give yourself time to organize ideas and improve the quality of your answers
01 Acknowledge the other’s question
Okay, let’s look at the first thing first and recognize the other person’s question. Recognition is actually an acceptance of emotions and facts.
But recognition also requires skill, otherwise it will make the other person feel uncomfortable. For example, many people blurt out when they recognized, “This is a good question.” This statement is the wording of the other party with more power from the other party, which makes people feel that you are standing up to you and speaking to him.
For example, your boss can respond to your question this way, but the other way around is very inappropriate. Therefore, try to avoid using “this is a good question”, or the other party will feel that you are perfunctory.
So what exactly is going to be done? You can start from three areas: recognize the questioner, recognize the facts, and recognize the feelings.
-
The most common type is to recognize the questioner. You can praise and thank each other, such as “Thank you for asking this question, I think other people may have the same questions …” or “Thank you for paying so much attention to our products …”.
-
In addition to recognizing the questioner, you can also acknowledge the facts he mentioned. You can mention facts or information again and comment “as you mentioned …”.
-
Finally, if you feel the other person has emotions when asking questions, you can also recognize the other person ’s feelings and say, “I can see that xx questions make you unsatisfied …”, and then let the other party share more Information, release emotions.
02 Clarify each other’s problems
After approval, all you have to do is to clarify and further confirm the other party’s problem.
Many times the other party’s questioning is inaccurate. You need to clarify and further dig into the other party’s true questioning intention.
You can respond, “I’m not sure if I understand your question, you mean …” or “Can you repeat the question, to be more specific?”
Of course, you can also ask the person who asked the question to give an example, make the abstract question concrete, and narrow the scope of the answer, such as “Can you give an example, specifically explain the problem?”
Okay.Basically after approval and clarification, you have a clearer understanding of the question to be answered, and the next thing to do is answer. When answering, you can flexibly use the “efficient expression formulas” mentioned in the previous lessons, set the theme, set up a frame, fill in materials, and quickly conceive a structured expression.
Let ’s take a look at a real-life scenario and see how we can use the skills we learned today to respond to our customers ’problems.
Assuming you are a salesperson, your job is to sell the company’s products to some companies. One day you communicated with a customer, and the other person suddenly asked: “I do n’t see the customers you worked with before. It seems that none of them are well-known and no big company is using your products. Is your product really useful?”
This is an extremely acute question, because the other party questions the quality of the product. If you haven’t taken the course, you might blurt out, “Our product is certainly useful …”, and then start talking about the advantages of the product until the customer is interrupted again. From the perspective of the customer, his doubts have not been eliminated. Instead, your quick response has made him explain, you are guilty, or have never even thought about it.
What would be more appropriate? At this time, the “key 5 seconds” technique can come in handy. You can pause for a while, try to use recognition and clarification to help yourself get more information, and organize your ideas.
You can say, “Manager XX, thank you for your question. You can see that you really value this procurement project. Did you just ask our former customers, what concerns do you have?”
The other responded, “I just want to confirm the strength of your company.”
In this way, if you understand what the other party actually cares about, you can continue to explain it in a targeted manner. Very good. Just because you are in a different industry, you may not know it well. For example, xx company is a leading company in xx field in China. They signed a purchase agreement with our company last year …
Next, you can use the FAB sales structure (attribute-advantage-benefit) to explain further.
To sum up, the response formula is: approval + clarification + structured answer. You can use it in your work to see if it has a different effect.
-
-
-