As I was writing my last book Practical People Engagement, I came across Daniel Pink’s To Sell is Human. I’m so glad I did. I find Daniel Pink is one of those communicators who does much of the heavy lifting for us across the social sciences, in particular in the fields of cognitive psychology. He communicates effortlessly whether speaking or writing.
In To Sell is Human he discusses a concept called the “Bank of Pitches”, standard short forms of a key message. For example, there is the Twitter Pitch (reducing your message to 140 characters or less) and the One-Word Pitch. In the video below, I discuss and illustrate the Question Pitch.
So often we are over-eager to get our argument across at the first meeting. We seem to bludgeon the other party with our proposition. That’s too fast and can backfire on us.
It’s far more honouring if we invite the other party to five their opinions first and it echoes the strategy of “dealing with the difficult”. I’ve seen it work quite powerfully.
Do you have an example of gaining people’s trust by asking them a question first? Leave a comment below.