Using Inquiry to Diagnose Before You Prescribe

You can build credibility with your clients and customers simply by using inquiry, and listening before you jump to a solution.

Alright guys, let’s talk about this idea of diagnose before you prescribe. We’ve got to understand before we take action, we’ve got to seek first to understand before we seek to be understood.

This whole idea is really: listen. Pay attention.

And it’s more than just your ears, it’s your eyes. It’s really dialing into that client. Great inquiry helps this. It helps expose the opportunities. You can guide the client in such a way that they expose and discover new things for themselves.

Now, understanding this is powerful. Oftentimes, people have said, “Hey, if I don’t share with them a solution, if I don’t share with them something, I won’t have any credibility.

Let me ask you a simple question: If you walked in to a doctor, and the doctor jumped right into a solution, would you deem them as credible? If you had a cut on your leg, and you limped into their office, and they said “Hey, I don’t need to see it. Let me tell you what I do to help people who limp.” My hunch is you wouldn’t put a whole lot of credibility in that.

What if that doctor took the time to diagnose? What if that doctor said “Hey, let me take a look at that, OK, you’re going to need some stitches. Now, before I stitch you up, let me ask you: put some weight on this, do you feel a tingle? Do you feel some numbness?”

If the doctor can walk you through with some detail, and help you become aware of feelings or sensations that you weren’t previously aware of, would that doctor have credibility? Even before that doctor gave you a prescription, or a solution to this issue?

So credibility often can be gained, not in showing how powerful we are, all these options that are solutions. Credibility often can be gained in the ability to diagnose and understand.

Now the word diagnose suggests a problem, so it’s much more than this. Understanding is bigger. Understanding their problems they want to solve; understanding the goals they want to achieve; understanding the strengths that they have they’d like to protect and preserve; understanding the preparation they must do to protect against future challenges that are going to come their way.

So that’s Sales Star 1, if you understand the Sales Stars. It’s also understanding how it impacts the internal customer: themselves personally, the team around them, the company. And the external customer: the people that they serve and buys from them, which could also be a community.

It also helps to understand and get on the table how it rolls out competitively. They have external competetion they have to deal with, they also have internal competition, because they have challenges and limited resources, so they have to make choices.

So helping the client understand really well their own situation, and that comes through guiding, really helps you build credibility. So: understanding, understanding.

And it’s not just understanding what they say, it’s guiding them in a way so they discover beyond what they say. If they can spit out what their issues are fluently, they’ve probably just recently spoken about this stuff or talked about it, it’s top of mind, and they possibly spoke about these things with your competition.

If you can guide the conversation into areas they haven’t considered, and you can see that drop in fluency, where they’re not as fluent, where they have to think about it for just a moment, that is powerful, and every single time I’ve witnessed this, credibility, as perceived by the person who’s being understood, that credibility goes up in the person who guides this.

So your credibility can take a huge jump without talking about you: it’s really an understanding of them.

So there’s one little tip. Focus on that. Practice: inquiry, inquiry, focus, focus, it’s all the same drill, guys. Joe Thomas, in St. Charles, Illinois, we’ll see you on the next video.