Closed questions are those that require a specific, one-word yes or no answer.
For example:
Are you considering cooperation?
Want to see another model?
Are you satisfied with this delivery time?
What are the goals and results of chinese student data package closed questions? They are used to confirm agreement, understanding, acceptance of conditions. With their help, information is clarified, misunderstandings are eliminated, and facts are finally clarified. The seller mostly asks closed questions at the end of the conversation, when the situation as a whole is clear to him and it remains to clarify the details.
Features of closed questions
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The inconvenience of closed questions for full communication is obvious. They have the following features:
With their help, we receive insufficient, limited information from the interlocutor.
The interlocutor is forced to choose between two options, which limits his choice and is felt as pressure, discomfort. This leads to the person ending the conversation.
Closed questions do not make the buyer want to talk about their problems or share valuable information.
In business communication, using only closed questions is an unproductive technique. With this approach, your interlocutor feels like an object of manipulation, he is deprived of a choice and cannot express his own opinion. Closed questions, according to psychologists, are not suitable for starting a conversation, since for full-fledged communication it is necessary to initially create the right environment, arouse sympathy and trust of the interlocutor, help him open up. Avoid closed questions if there is a risk of a final refusal in the form of a decisive "no".
Psychologists and business communications experts advise using closed-ended questions with great caution and as little as possible. No one likes being asked to immediately choose between two options. Only sometimes can this be useful, for example, when the client has already made a decision but is hesitant to take the final step. A specific question can help him with this.
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Why do salespeople keep asking closed questions?
Why is the topic of open and closed questions being raised more and more often today? Because out of habit, we automatically ask closed questions all the time. Receiving visual and other information, we draw conclusions about what is happening, we build our reality. We are sure that we correctly understand the signals from the outside world, and we test our conclusions on those around us. Hence questions such as:
Are you in a bad mood today, did you get up on the wrong side of the bed?
Are you feeling unwell?
You're upset, did you have a fight?
In other words, we rush to draw our own conclusions without much interest in the true motives of the interlocutor.
Sometimes such "proactive" questions are even written into sales scripts. For example, a question like searching for landmarks, a "guessing game".
Features of closed questions
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It happens that the buyer is not used to opening up to strangers and limits himself to a few words. Trying to understand what is on his mind, the seller begins to guess: "I see that you doubt the quality?..", "Is there something you don't like?", "Should I pick you a simpler model?" and so on.
This approach is not only useless, but sometimes even destructive to successful communication with the buyer. In each situation, our brain analyzes a million reasons and produces the same number of possible scenarios. We choose the most familiar and automatically assign the buyer to one category or another. It is this decision (usually erroneous) that prevents the seller from personifying the client and asking useful open questions.
If the buyer is tense and does not make contact well, psychologists advise not to ask open and closed questions, but to use a structure called “verbalization of emotions or situation + open question”:
I see something is bothering you. How can I help?