Can a Single Question Unlock Behavioral Change on Your Sales Team?

I’ve been reading Sharon-Drew Morgen’s latest book, HOW? Generating new neural pathways for learning, behavior change, and decision making, and I’m fascinated by her contention that the right questions can unlock behavioral change that can otherwise be unattainable.

In sales, we focus a lot on changing the behaviors that inhibit sales effectiveness. We talk about coaching and supporting the right behaviors on our teams. Yet even when we get all of that “right,” salespeople have a habit of “rubber banding” back to old behaviors, or simply avoiding correct ones, even when they know what to do, how to do it, and why they should.

Morgen suggests that what’s happening in these cases is that there are unconscious beliefs and barriers that prevent the behavior change. And the only way to actually get the behavior change is to ask the right questions to unlock the unconscious mind to solve the problem in its own way.

How A Single Question Unlocked Weight Loss for a Tortilla “Addict”

Morgen tells the story of a woman who wanted to lose weight, but couldn’t^*. She had tried and tried. She’d been to the doctor, and tried lots of different plans. She knew that eating a lot of tortillas and other high calorie foods was causing her health problems. She knew what she needed to do to change it, and she knew why it mattered.

She just couldn’t sustain the changes she needed to in order to achieve what she wanted. Like a salesperson with bad habits, she kept rubber banding back to old ways of eating.

But eventually, a wise person found the question that unlocked her ability to change her behavior for good.

The question was: What has stopped you from continuing to eat your new foods (the healthier ones)?

Her answer: I need to have my family love me.

This was not the expected answer! But the question had unlocked access to a deeper need that the woman was trying to meet, one that mattered more to her than her health: Her family’s love.

In following this lead, it was discovered that the woman was making tortillas for her family every day, and they would all stop by her house to pick them up. She’d hand out bags and visit and hug each of them, and this was her primary source of interaction with her extensive family.

She was making 150 tortillas a day, and then she and her husband would eat the rest. She tried to stop eating tortillas by not making them anymore, but then her family stopped coming by in the mornings and she felt unloved. So she went back to making tortillas, and then back to eating them.

The next question led the woman to her solution: What would you need to know or believe in order to make different food choices and still get your family’s love in a healthy way?

This unlocked for the woman a new plan: Her daughter would make the daily tortillas and hand them out. And on Fridays, everyone would come to her house for a healthy meal together.

This plan enabled her to lose the twenty pounds her doctor told her was necessary for her health, and still receive the more valuable good of her family’s love and attention.

In NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) terms, the questions got the woman to address a deeper level of change that enabled her to actually get what she wanted.

Can Better Questions Unlock the Potential of Sales Teams?

Morgen has invented a new form of question she calls Facilitative Questions to facilitate congruent, values-based change directly from the brain. By using these, they reduce the time it takes prospects to reach decisions. In fact, she suggests that we will never get the behavioral change we want unless we learn to do this.

The most powerful questions help a person discover their own answers.

The key, she says, is that coaches, managers, trainers, and consultants have to stop asking questions out of curiosity, and start asking them out of the desire to help the salesperson unlock their own potential. And be prepared for the answer to be unexpected.

I am convinced that questions have such power to change things.

Instead of focusing on solving the problem for them, we can focus on opening doors for them to solve deeper problems their own way.

I want to share some example questions here, but Morgen feels that they are difficult to convey correctly out of context. Instead, I recommend you check out her book or Learning Accelerators to explore the framework in more detail.

Better Questions Can Unlock Behavior Change in Customers, Too

How we coach our sales teams has ramifications for how our sales teams perform, including how they interact with and sell to our prospects and customers.

For instance, instead of salespeople focusing on “objections” from customers, they can focus on helping customers uncover their own unconscious motivations and beliefs that get in the way of making a decision.

Morgen suggests that the right questions, structured and sequenced correctly, can take someone out of the usual “superhighways” of their brain wiring into an observer mode that enables them to see the problem in new ways and adjust their behavior for new outcomes.

In the sales industry, we do talk a lot about asking the right questions, but I think Morgen is on to something deeper. I think we often ask questions only for the purpose of discovering information. But the most powerful questions are the ones we ask to help the other person discover their own answers.

What do you think? 

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