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189 – How To Succeed With Better Questions

19 Comments

Discover how asking hard-hitting questions can help grow your business.


Podcast: Download (Duration: 2:57 — 2.8MB)

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In this week’s business update:

00:10 – Do you know this Question Technique?
00:15 – Challenges not problems
02:13 – Asking questions forces clarity and innovation
02:25 – Today’s action step is….

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Transcription:

James Schramko here with a business tip. This is a really powerful technique for overcoming challenges. This is called my question technique.

When Challenges Come Along
When things come along, when challenges come along, firstly I don’t call them problems. I refer to them as challenges. And the second thing is, I turn them into a question.

So, yesterday, I went to a breakfast meeting with someone and when I got there, he’d already eaten his breakfast and then he talked to me for the next 45 minutes about his business. And I was getting very very hungry. He didn’t offer tea or coffee or breakfast or anything. And by the end, we shook hands and I left. I didn’t enjoy the meeting at all.

Create An Agenda
So the question I ask from this challenge is, “How do I avoid being in this situation again?” And what I do is I come up with the answer. I create a need for an agenda. So, when someone wants to meet me with my valuable time, and they want to suck my brain, then what I’m going to do is ask the agenda, or say:

“Hey, what’s the meeting about?”
“Where are we meeting?”
“When we’re there, is it a breakfast meeting, or is it just a coffee?”

And I want to make sure, because I could have eaten breakfast before I went to this meeting, had I known that it was a fake breakfast meeting.

The Big Deal
So, here’s the big deal. When you’ve got challenges in your business, ask yourself the question. The best tool that I use for this is a whiteboard. I put up on the top of the whiteboard the question and then I answer it or I might even ask for help from my friends or peers.

Ask hard-hitting questions

Ask Hard-hitting Questions

Question For Today
So the question today might be:

“How do I drive extra traffic to my business?” or
“How do I drive extra traffic to my business without using Facebook?” or
“How do I convert more of the traffic that comes to my website?” or
“How do I convert more of the traffic that comes to my website without changing the offer?”

In other words, how do I improve the usability or the conversion process. Or I could say, “How do I improve the conversions for traffic coming to my websites by changing the offer and not changing the layout of the site?” This forces clarity. It forces innovation and hopefully it’s a self-diagnostic questioning technique that’s going to grow your business.

Your Action Step for Today
I’m James Schramko. I hope you’ve enjoyed this. Today’s action step of course is to go and ask yourself a hard hitting question. See if you can get a good answer, and then implement it and see what results you get.

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Comments

  1. Thanks James, great advice. Seems so obvious but a very powerful technique. I can think of a few challenges I need to whiteboard right now!

    Reply

  2. Great article James :-) Getting better outcomes so often hinges on asking better / different questions of ourselves! I love your tip of changing out the word problem for challenge too. A problem feels more like a brick wall, whereas a challenge more like a bump in the road to get around or over!

    Reply

  3. Very simple but important tip you mentioned, I learnt his myself the hard way. Wherever possible have an agenda and ideal outcome(s) when having any form of meeting. Helps keeps things focused and also makes the meeting more productive

    Just one small mention, and this is aside from the video itself and more to with the layout of your site ..and I say this without sounding picky but rather more constructive. But your social media sharing buttons are hidden away way down the page beneath your transcription …maybe placing them immediately below the video might work better for the person visiting your site

    Like I said thats just my opinion, either way loving your content

    Reply

  4. Good advice James. I looked at what it was that was sucking my energy from my real direction/goal. What was it that was my biggest potential drain? I made two tough decisions which involved resigning from a senior position at work and resigning from Rotary, these have now freed up a lot of energy that I am pouring into my direction and ultimate goal.
    Choices can be hard but I make choices and not excuses.
    Tim

    Reply

  5. Great session James. I remembered when you spoke about not having problems but having challenges and the part after that where you talk about turning the challenges into questions was like the missing link. Good stuff.

    Reply

  6. Hello James,

    This is solid advice, I might not have your marketing knowledge but I know this questions technique works because I’m using it all the time.

    Often I use a twist on this technique, instead of coming up with just 1 answer to the question I’ll try to come up with three.

    For me the first answer is always an obvious one (based on past experiences), the second one sucks most of the time, the third takes some time and is always the most creative and sometimes best one.

    Hope this helps anyone. Keep up the great stuff !

    Reply

  7. Nice ideas brother.
    Have you read the 4 Hour Workweek yet? It’s got some life changing ideas in it.

    If I went to breakfast with you I would make sure you were super well fed and I’d give you all the time in the world to talk to your heart’s content.

    Thanks – Martin

    Reply

  9. Yikes! No breakfast for you?!? Dang, I would buy breakfast anytime. I would want to hear you talk. In fact the cost of the meal would be negligible compared to the value of lessons learned from you. Plus I could eat without having to worry about talking with my mouth full as I listen… my mom would be proud of me :)

    Reply

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