Description Have you ever agreed to something in a sales conversation and later wondered how you got there? In this episode of Selling With Sabine, I discuss how leading questions and assumptive selling techniques are used in high-pressure sales environments, and how those communication patterns can quietly influence customer decision-making before a true agreement has even taken place. Transcript: Welcome to selling with Sabine. I am your host and certified sales trainer Sabine Taylor. Thank you for giving me your time today. I truly do appreciate it. Today, I want share my thoughts on leading and assumptive style questions, the kinds that are often used in high pressure sales environments. But for this episode, I also want to connect that conversation to something much more personal. My experience representing myself in court, my background as a certified sales trainer, and what I have observed influencers saying online to sell their high-ticket coaching program. So let me explain… What started as me being represented by counsel in a child support case led me to basically firing all of my attorneys and representing myself as a pro se litigant. I did that because I did not feel they were asking the judge or the witnesses the right set of questions. And questions are important because this is how an attorney begins to influence the judge to rule in their favor. But the key is to ask the right style of questions. So when I started representing myself, I had to learn how to frame the questions correctly. You see, at court, judges manage extremely heavy caseloads. There is very little patience that they have for litigants who appear appear unprepared to ask the right questions even when that litigant has no formal education in law. With that said, if I ask the question that the judge deemed was argumentative, improperly framed, or if I failed to follow procedural standards surrounding questioning, that judge would automatically interrupt me requiring that I reframe the question or threaten me to move proceedings without allowing me the opportunity to question my witness. And remember, in the courtroom, being able to ask questions is critically important to winning your case. Now what helped me adapt in the courtroom was my background as a sales trainer. My experience in sales coaching taught me how to think on my feet and reframe questions in real time. And that only happened for me in sales because I was teaching sales reps and telling them the same message over and over and over again. So naturally, I developed an ability to reframe any questions at a drop of a dime. Now when I hear certain sales influencers teaching overly scripted leading questions and pairing them with assumptive sales tactics, I want to become that lawyer in the courtroom. And I want to say, objection. Leading questions, your honor. So that way, the judge will magically appear and say sustained. Rephrase your question, counsel. Rephrase your question, salesperson… So for an example, a leading question that you might hear from an influencer with a high ticket coaching program that they are trying to sell you will sound something like this. So…what if I told you that you would be meeting with me weekly…and twelve other ambitious women on a Zoom call, and all of you would be working through the necessary steps to confidently close high ticket sales and build financial freedom? Would that make you feel like you were joining a community of high achieving women focused on growth and accountability? Would you then agree that joining this coaching program would help you build generational wealth to support your family? So would you then agree that breaking up the payments into four installments would make it possible for you to join this community… Pause. And wow. When I hear that, I'm like, okay. If anyone is trying to sell like this, that customer needs to run for the hills and run for the hills fast. These are the type of influencers that often appear on a headline news for scamming their customers out of thousands of dollars because they're using sales techniques like this. Pause. And what makes this leading question very powerful is when that influencer pairs it with assumptive sales techniques, and that assumptive sales technique can sound like this. So when we get started…or once we're in community… again, pause. This is where my brain says, hold up. Wait a minute. When did this moment become a we moment? At what point did I suddenly become a we? Did I agree to something already? Because…grammatically, something very powerful is happening. That influencer has shifted from I and you into we. So at first, the conversation with the influencer starts like, oh, I can help you with that. Your business can benefit from this. But then suddenly, the language changes…to when we get started, as we move forward, once we begin implementing, and psychologically…that shift…matters. Because the moment we enters the conversation, that influencer no longer sees that customer as an independent decision maker with the ability to decide whether the deal is good or bad for them. But linguistically, they are being moved as a customer into partnership, into agreement, into participation for some product or service that they have no intention on buying or signing up for. And, typically, these types of tactics are used on customers who are quiet or who the influencer feel is a bit gullible. But just because… someone or a customer is silent, that should never automatically be interpreted as an emotional commitment. See, this is where ethical communication matters, and it matters a lot in sales, especially in highly regulated industries like finance, insurance, health care, and real estate, and the list goes on. These are the type of high pressured sales tactics that can create legal problems for that influencer, especially if their customers feel like they're being pressured into signing up for a service or a product that they don't fully understand. And when that happens, they can sue. And any judge or attorney involved in that type of case will be quickly be able to tell if the question the influencer used was proper or improper. And no seller wants to be before any legal professional in a case revolving around assumptive or leading questions because, quite honestly, this is their world. As judges and attorneys, they dissect questions for a living. So with that said, when the sales process begins to rely heavily on high pressure sales tactics, that seller is compensating for a skill deficiency that was never properly addressed through trading. Pause… If a sales professional truly understands their product and knows how to actively listen and has practice objection handling every day and can confidently navigate around different customer personas, there is no need to force momentum through psychological pressure. Pause. Real confidence in sales does not come from manipulation. It comes from preparation. Pause. It comes from practicing your role plays with your role play buddies. Pause. Because when salespeople do not know how to sell through skills, they often attempt to sell through force, and force based selling eventually damages customer trust, brand, and credibility and could land that seller in front of a judge, and that is a big pause… So with that said, if you're serious about improving your sales approach or training your team to operate at a higher level without relying on aggressive outdated sales techniques that I just talked about, I would love to connect. I've trained thousands of sales and customer service professionals in highly regulated industries working across retail and call center environments in the business to consumer space. And I would love to help you shift behavior in a way that drives measurable and sustainable sales results. So you can reach me at SellingwithSabine @gmail dot com. That is simply the name of this podcast followed by at gmail.com. And, of course, if you found the value in today's message, and I really hope you did, please consider sharing this podcast with your friends and your family plus colleagues, particularly anyone who's thinking about going into business for themselves or already in business. And I encourage you to visit my LinkedIn page and I will leave my LinkedIn profile in the show notes. And with that said, I thank you for listening and have a great day. Bye bye for now https://www.linkedin.com/in/sellingwithsabine/
