Man watches porn – hardly news, is it?

It’ll be “dog bites man” next.

Let’s face it, in the list of Bad Things done by this government, making me pay for Jaquie Smith’s husband’s skin-flicks isn’t that much of a deal. It’s cost us collectively – what – less than fifty quid, certainly less than a couple of hundred.

It’s piss-all compared with the tens of thousands of pounds that the bail-outs and refinancing has added to my very own personal tax bill over the next few decades to pay for Gordie’s end to boom and bust.

Now that annoys me.

MS Word renders me speechless

Why did we let Bill Gates control the language of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Orwell and Hemingway?  See screenshot below:

 

'... a owner ...' PUH-lease!

Arrrgggh!

The faint thudding you can hear is the sound of a brick wall not crumbling as my head hits it repeatedly.

The Business Analyst’s guide to questions: 6 – The questions Sales People use

In the previous post in this series we realised that Sales People use questions primarily to control the conversation and to foster specific emotions.  Now let’s take a brief look at what questions they use to do these things.

We’ve already looked at what Hopkins calls “the tie down”. Annoyingly, the entire planet under the age of 30 is using it, i’n'n’it?  You did practice using tie-downs, didn’t you?  Don’t they come naturally after a while? (What?  You didn’t practice them?  Shame on you!)

Hopkins considers three other main categories of questions in sales to be

• The Alternate of Choice
• The Porcupine
• The Involvement Question

 
The Alternate of Choice

This is a question with two answers, either one of which takes you forward.

Shall we go by bus, or tube?

Would you rather wash, or dry? 

Shall we eat before the show, or afterwards?

Stating only two options means the questioner can imply that other options aren’t really available – in these cases those might be taking a taxi, leaving the washing up until the morning, or eating in.  

This is a great question structure for facilitators.  You can make the session feel participatory but still maintain control and drive it along:

Shall we break for lunch after this session, or the next one?
(Don’t think we are having lunch yet boys and girls!)

Will Suzanne distribute the actions list, or will Pete do that?
(Either way, it’s not gonna be me…)

Shall we park that, or do you want to take it as an action, Simon?
(You won’t side track this meeting by mounting your irrelevent hobby-horse).

Exercise: Whenever you are in a well facilitated meeting, simply listen out and jot down the alternative of choice questions.  (You’ll seem really diligent – takeing all those notes!)

Exercise: Practice offering an alternative whenever you propose a course of action, even if it is just a choice of pubs for Friday night. 

 

The Porcupine 

At its simplest this is merely answering a question with another question which lobs the ball back into the other person’s court:

Me: Shall we go by bus or tube?

You: Wouldn’t it be quicker if we took a cab?

But it can be used to regain control of the conversation and point it in another direction

Me: Shall we go by bus or tube?

You: If we had a map we could walk – do you think that newsagent sells them?

… and suddenly we are just a few seconds away from chocolate… mmm…. chocolate…

Again this is a good tool for facilitators and it is certainly useful  in requirements interviews, but it really comes in to its own if you are training.   We’ll look at how teachers and trainers use questions in later posts in this series, but the great joy of the porcupine in the training room is that it keeps the students thinking.

Exercise – Keepie Uppies – (we’ve done this before and w’ll do it again) – two or more of you conduct an entire conversation in questions.  If you cannot find anyone todo this with you, just make everything you say a question for an hour or so or half a day if you can manage it.   Make your your questions subtle enough not to be noticed, but effective enough to get a reply.

 

Involvement questions

Involvement questions are questions which make the person being questioned imagine themselves in the future:

When we’ve finished our shopping and have a whole load of bags, wouldn’t it be easier to get a cab?

This really brings out the benefit of taking a cab because it involves the person you are talking to in the to-be situation, and makes them imagine it in some detail.  All that shopping.  All those bags to carry.   For that reason alone, these questions should be second nature for a BA.   But BAs can sometimes miss the fact that this is a very persuasive structure for a question, and sales people use these questions because they help the prospect feel the good feelings that only come with owning the sales person’s product.  

These are great questions for bringing issues and risks into sharp focus, and this is a good way to improve your practice as a BA.

Compare:

What about the risk that the system won’t deliver the security features that the vendor promised?

With:

What would the headlines be if we had a security breach because the system didn’t deliver the security features that the vendor promised?

You can see that asking what the world be like where the risk has already happened is a much more powerful way to get people to engage with the consequences of the risk.

Exercise: run through your issues or risk log at work, take each issue or risk and frame a question which places the team in the future where the worst-case scenario has already happened.

Exercise: if your team doesn’t currently have an issues or risk log, then do a search on typical project risks and work from that – here’s one I did earlier.

As you can see, sales people use questions in ways which go far beyond the simple investigative questions of Rudyard Kipling, Aristotle and Lewis Carroll and, as you can see, many of their techniques are directly applicable to Business Analysts.  Play about with them.  Practice.  Have fun.

---

 This is the sixth of these entries and you can find the others here.  There’ll be a gap for a couple of weeks because I need to get some pre-publication feedback on the posts about how doctors and teachers use questions. They’ll be worth the wait though.
A reminder:  This work by Ben Warsop is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

A meme on modelling

Craig Brown of Better Projects has launched a modelling meme for BAs and PMs.

He asks us to 

Recall the first and last analysis model you used at work. 

An interesting question for a BA.  

My first diagrams were probably Wide Area Networking diagrams from back in the day. Admittedly my job title wasn’t “Business Analyst” but it was still all about balancing requirements, technology and budget.  

For a while after that they’d have been web page designs, and then the branch and workarea diagrams for Interwoven TeamSite installations.  Since then I’ve done every sort of process diagram, dataflow diagrams and influence diagrams, soft systems diagrams and of course a shed-load of UML.  

It’s been a while since I’ve done any modelling at work though I was messing around with Visio and a process flow today.

My two most recent models haven’t been done on my employer’s time.  One is a model of investigative questions, and directly relates to The Business Analyst’s Guide to Questions, which is a series of posts I am publishing over the next few months.  

 

Question grid based on Kipling's honest serving men

The other hasn’t been drawn yet, but will plot quantative research vs qualitative research in a 2×2.  This is something I’m thinking about as a result of my MSc.  These two research methodologies are normally  considered to be opposing poles of the same scale, but I wonder if there’s something useful to uncover if we model them as two different dimensions which sit at right angles to each other.   Surely collecting statistics about how pople feel is BOTH quantative and qualitative and sits out there in the middle of a 2×2.  I’ve not done the analysis yet, so we shall see.

The Business Analyst’s guide to Questions: 5 – Why Sales People ask questions

How to Master the Art of Selling - Tom Hopkins

Sales people, advertisers and politicians use questions to pull our strings.  They use questions every day face to face, in speeches, advertisements, and advertorial. Why do you think that might be?  It’s to get us to think what they want us to think.   (Find the other posts in this series here). 

In this post and the next one we are going to look at how sales people use questions to guide the conversation and make us feel safe enough and eager enough to buy their wares.  We’ll also consider how these techniques can help the Business Analyst define scope, facilitate workshops and influence stakeholders. 

So – Don’t you want to find out what sales people are doing when they use questions to persuade us to buy shiny new toys?

You do!  Of course you do!  

Sales people have a very clear agenda – to find out what you want to buy and if needs be to help you want their particular product enough to buy it from them. Of course they cannot force you to buy something you don’t want, but they can nudge you along if you are undecided.  The simplest and best structured introduction to sales questions that I have come across is How to Master the Art of Selling by Tom Hopkins. Hopkins is no stylist, he is the antithesis of an academic and he is certainly cheesy, as a lot of the Amazon reviews point out.  But he really understands how questions work. It’s a book I recommend to anyone who wants to understand questions regardless of whether or not you work in sales.

Hopkins lists these reasons for a sales person to ask questions

1. To gain control
2. To isolate areas of interest / isolate objections
3. To acknowledge a fact 
4. To receive minor agreements
5. To arouse and control emotions
6. To answer objections

 

Gain control

Whoever asks the questions owns the conversation.  We’ve seen this already in the second post in this series when we looked at how control passed between Mrs Thatcher and Mrs Gould in their exchange and at the control exercised by Jeremy Paxman and by the Girl in Paradise by the Dashboard Light.    If you want to take control in an exchange then answer a question with a question.   (See the clips in Questions: 2).

Exercise:  Go to YouTube and watch some interviews by Michael Parkinson or David Letterman, and see how they use questions to change the subject and steer the conversation.

 

Isolate areas of interest / Isolate objections

This is about defining what matters and what doesn’t matter.  In the BA’s world we call this scope.  There is no point in designing solutions to problems the Business do not care about, any more than there is  any point in selling features or benefits the customer isn’t interested in.   As a sales person, you are wasting your breath and my time and yours if you go on and on and on about how fast the SuperTurbo car accelerates if what I want is fuel economy.  

Exercise:  Imagine you want to buy a car (or move house, if you prefer).  Draw up a list of your criteria and be very clear on what is vital, what is nice to have, and what doesn’t matter one way or the other.   Work out what questions the car dealer should ask you so he doesn’t waste your time or his selling you something you don’t want.   What is the optimum number of questions?  (Too many and it gets ridiculous,  not enough and there’s ambiguity).

Exercise: Someone else takes the role of the car buyer so that you can take the role of the car dealer.

If you do those two exercises you’ll get a feeling of deja vu.  Yes, this is like the game of 20 questions, with the advantage that you can ask open ended questions.

 

Acknowledge a fact – compare:

Me: Nasty weather today
You: Yes

with

Me: Nasty weather today
You: Isn’t it?

It’s a subtle difference, but the first one can be rather abrupt while the second one indicates a willingness to have a conversation. Saying “isn’t it?” instead of “yes” is a habit which makes minor interactions with people serving in shops and waiting in bus queues softer and friendlier, and which encourages minor agreements between two people.   This will quickly become an unnoticeable habit, and one it does no harm to acquire.

 

Gain minor agreements.

You can see how easy it is to use questions to gain minor agreements, can’t you?  Simply turning a statement into a question is really effective, isn’t it? It can get irritating, can’t it? But isn’t it powerful?  And wouldn’t it be worth learning to do it ‘invisibly’, so you can use it when you are facilitating a workshop? 

Exercise: Find a news story and mark up the positive statements.  Ignore the speculation and supposition, you are looking for statements of fact.  Then re-read it, and turn each one into a question seeking agreement.   (Isn’t it, doesn’t it, wouldn’t it, etc). Practice putting the question element at the beginning, in the middle and at the end.

 

Arouse and control the emotions.

This is the interesting one.  This is the one where the sales person’s true skills lie because it has to be done without annoying the prospect, and when it is done well the effect is irresistible.  Surprisingly enough, it doesn’t matter if the prospect knows what is happening; in fact there is a saying in sales that a sales person is the easiest person to sell to.  

It is immensely irritating when a sales person tries to reinforce an emotion you don’t feel, but a good sales person doesn’t try to do that.  Instead, they will use those scoping questions to uncover what turns you on about what you want to buy and only then will they use questions to reinforce the emotion.  For example, I told the estate agent that I wanted a house with a view, and when I first stood by the the window of the house I now live in, he said to me  ”You said you wanted a good view, you couldn’t ask for a better view than that, now could you?” His question reinforced the emotion I was already feeling, because it is a good view.

There is no special format for these questions.  They are all about context and you just don’t notice them when they are done well.

Exercise: Watch QVC or another shopping channel for as long as you can bear to, and see how two or more presenter use questions between each other, and how a single presenter will use rhetorical questions to make the product enticing and to deal with any concerns a buyer might have.  Don’t buy anything!

 

Answer Objections.

This draws in every technique a sales person has at their disposal because in the end using questions to answer objections is just another instance of using questions to persuade.

 

Questions don’t have to be big to be effective.   In fact, the more subtle the question, the more easily it slips under the radar.  And because of the human need to answer a question, questions are  far more powerful than statements if you want someone to agree with you, a thing it is useful for every BA to know.

As Tom Hopkins says:

If I tell you something is true, then that’s my opinion. If you tell me something is true, then it’s true.

---

This is the fifth of these entries and you can find the others here.  Next week we’ll look at the actual questions sales people use.
A reminder:  This work by Ben Warsop is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.