7 Strategies to get a Business Owner to open up
This blog post was created from Everything Business Consulting podcast episode 71, 7 Strategies to getting a Business Owner to open up. To view the episode page, click here.
Want tangible tips that you as a Business Consultant can use to engage business owners and take the conversation deeper than ever before?
Before looking at the seven strategies, let’s start by looking at why this is something important to the success of a Business Consultant, Coach, or Advisor.
Purpose of getting business owners to open up
Improve your understanding of their business, and get a good grasp on what is happening in their business.
Gain insight into their personal and professional challenges and pain points.
Build trust and rapport through conversation as you’re getting them to open up.
Use your ability to converse to build and demonstrate authority and expertise.
Ultimately you will set yourself up to acquire clients which is done by creating a highly compelling proposition for individual business owners, where you understand why they’re in business, what they want and need in their business, and the challenges they want to solve. Then you can present yourself as the trusted person with expertise and understanding to partner with them.
The Seven Strategies
Ask broad questions
Listen
Refrain from judgement or advice
Use minimal encouragers
Be inquisitive
Use open body language
Use your intuition
Ask broad questions
These will be open-ended questions that prompt open conversation, opposed to closed questions that will only give you a yes or no answer. Open questions start ‘W’ and ‘H’ - who, what, why, when, and how.
The exact question you ask will depend on the situation and how far along you are in the progress of getting to know a business owner or potential client/lead. But this strategy remains the same, getting them talking and opening up. Founder of ConsultX, David Thexton’s personal favorite question when first engaging with is “How’s your business going?”.
When you’re further along to discover process, you might ask a question like;
How do you measure what’s going on in your business?
When do you know you’ve achieved the goals you’ve set yourself and your business?
What causes you stress and keeps you awake at night?
Asking broad questions spark conversation and will give you an idea of where to direct the conversation deeper.
2. Listen
The simple act of listening is one of the most powerful tools in the arsenal of a successful Business Consultant. If you’ve just asked a wide-ranging question that’s going to prompt discussion, then you should be listening very, very intently. Because they’re going to say things and give you answers and reactions that are going to prompt the next question you want to ask. This helps you go deeper into their business and keep the conversation flowing.
By listening with the sole intent to understand it helps with the following:
Listening gives you the opportunity to learn about their business.
Ernest Hemmingway said “I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.”
It will give the speaker the spotlight, making them feel heard, appreciated, and positive about you.
Demonstrate sincerity and respect - building trust and rapport.
You will be able to hear and process exactly what is being said.
Give you the opportunity to pick up on verbal and even non-verbal cues.
Listening with intent will give you the ability to understand what’s going on in the business, and often the personal life of the owner. So if you’re doing 90% listening and writing notes, and 10% asking them further questions, they will tell you what they want to buy. It’s a sales influence tactic for them to work with us.
Those notes will also come in handy later on because what they say is what they believe.
3. Refrain from judgement or advice
When you’re getting a business owner to open up, offering up judgement or advice isn’t going to help. You want to create a situation where the business owner is comfortable sharing their thoughts and experiences with you. Your entire being, your questions, tone of voice, facial expressions, body language should all be relaxed and completely non-judgmental.
This will put the business owners in a position where they’re relaxed and where they feel like they can open up to you. They won’t be afraid that you’re going to judge them, and they’ll have the confidence to give you honesty, which is what you need to have a good and meaningful conversation.
The second part of this; when getting a business owner to open up - it’s not time to give advice. Free advice is not valuable to them as you haven’t built enough credibility yet, and you haven’t understood enough about their business to be able to do that. You likely don’t know the full picture, so to ensure you’ll give the best advice later on, it’s 10% asking questions, and 90% listening to the answers.
By stopping and giving advice, you’re stopping the business owner from talking. This leaves a chance for them to disagree or feel threatened by the advice in such early stages, which could jeopardize the relationship. By positioning yourself as being an expert in all things business and leave all your advisory work till later, the business owner will have a sense of comfort to open up, where they won’t be judged or force-fed advice. It will also stop a chance of leading the conversation down a tangent, and involving discussions that you don’t want to have in this situation.
4. Use Minimal Encouragers
By using questions you are encouraging the customer to communicate, building rapport, establishing their needs, directing the conversation, diffusing tension, and inviting discussion.
The next level of questioning techniques is called “minimal encouragers” to deepen the quality and detail of an answer. These are words or phrases that allow your prospect to go into more detail. Here are a few that you’ll want to try to see how the technique works:
Meaning…
Such as…
Tell me more about that…
I see…
Right…
Yes/Yep/Ah huh/go on...
Minimal encouragers are a simple way of getting a deeper conversation with a business owner, giving you a better connection and a more thorough understanding.
5. Be inquisitive
Being inquisitive and chatty often produces golden results.
This can be a technique to start a conversation, show a business owner you’re interested in them, and their business, or allow you to find out that little bit extra when you’re working with a business. Be attentive, take notice, and don’t be afraid to ask questions.
We’ve said it here before and we’ll say it again - their business is usually their personal pride & joy, a labor of love, and something they’re proud of. This is no matter how well, or poorly it’s going because they've poured their heart and soul into it. They want to talk about it - in the same way, a parent wants to tell you how amazing and unique their child is.
An example of being inquisitive as a conversation starter - you can observe something going on in a place of business and make that a point of conversation.
ConsultX Partner, Julius Bloem remembers an example from his consulting experience- “I can think of a time when I was talking to a business owner, trying to book a discovery meeting, and I was in a pretty sticky situation. I was met with a lot of resistance from this particular lead who clearly didn't want to know about what I was doing there, and he was actually getting a little bit worked up. I looked around his office, his waiting room, and I saw a travel magazine on his desk with a photo of Rarotonga or a one-page spread of Rarotonga open. And that's a small tropical island in the South Pacific for those of you in the Southern hemisphere, may not know it.
And I quickly asked him, are you going to Rarotonga? And that became the catalyst that sparked a really in-depth conversation that lasted almost an hour. And we did talk about Rarotonga for a little bit, but it went in all different directions. And I eventually found out that this business owner was fed up with the business he was working in and it was in the process of being sold. So for that particular business owner, I was just a little bit too late, but I did manage to find a way to spark the conversation and then find out more about his business once the conversation was flowing.”
The entire persona of the business owner changed - he went from being standoffish to being incredibly open and friendly to the point he was telling me about himself, but also other local business owners that wish they could do what he was because they felt stuck in their businesses - perfect referrals!
You never know where it’s going to take you - being inquisitive can help you to get on with a prospect, prompt discussion, and find out valuable information about a business.
6. Use open body language
Body language can be used as a way to communicate, without words - so you can show emotion, understanding and build rapport without stopping the business owner from talking and opening-up
Focus on the person you’re talking to. Face, eyes, ears are all entirely directed at and focused. If you’re taking notes, make sure you’re maintaining eye contact as much as possible. Give them 100% of your focus, don’t think about the grocery shopping after the meeting.
Use your eyebrows, tilt your head, and nod encouragingly three times- sounds weird, but it’s not, just practice! Open your body up, we reveal a lot about our attitudes, emotions, and motives by the way we hold our bodies, especially when using closed or open postures. So open your arms, sit upright and widened your shoulders directed at the speaker, and sit with your palms up.
Show you’re open, relaxed, and have a strong willingness to listen and interact - these non-verbal will often give the business owner sub-conscious cues that they can be confident and open because of you’re posture.
Have a genuine smile, which not only stimulates your own sense of well-being, it also tells those around you that you are approachable, cooperative, and trustworthy. A genuine smile comes on slowly, crinkles the eyes, lights up the face, and fades away slowly. Most importantly, smiling directly influences how other people respond to you. When you smile at someone, they almost always smile in return. And, because facial expressions trigger corresponding feelings, the smile you get back actually changes that person’s emotional state in a positive way.
These techniques help show that you're interested, it shows that you are interested and want to help them, , rather than looking around, looking out the window and being disengaged in the conversation.
7. Use your intuition
When you’re in these conversations with business owners, leads, or prospects, you need to be paying full attention. If your gut is telling you that they’re disguising the truth, or not telling you the full picture, you’re probably right and need to address it.
But this needs to be addressed with compassion, understanding, your full attention, and come to them from a place of hope. If your gut is telling you that a business owner is struggling with a particular area, trust that, follow that path and gently prompt the owner to give you more information.
Summary
These seven techniques will help you to get a business owner to open up and share with you their problems and their desires. Number one, you should ask broad questions; the who, the what, the how, the when, and the why so you get a nice long answer. The second technique is to listen, listen with two ears and one mouth. Three, refrain from judgment or advice. Four, use those minimal encourages, those little prompts for guiding the conversation and going a little bit deeper. Tell me more about that? How does that make you feel? I see. Go on.
Number five, be inquisitive, be chatty and look for things to talk about and create conversation. Six, use open body language. Put this potential lead at ease by showing that you're relaxed and then get them to open up more and build rapport by holding yourself and acknowledging them with your body and your head. And the seventh method is to use your intuition and trust your gut.
If you'd like to get business owners to tell you what their biggest challenges are, what kind of growth and success they'd like to see in the future, all you need to do is demonstrate that you're a trustworthy expert and business owners will be ready to become clients.