How To Use Clean Language Questions In Sales

Can Clean Language questions be used to improve the way we sell things? The answer, I believe, is an emphatic “YES”!

In this blog post, I’m going to explain how.

What I’m not going to do is discuss whether David Grove’s Clean Language questions should be used in sales. David created this question set for a specific purpose – as a precision toolkit for investigating autogenic metaphor in the context of psychotherapy – and there may be people who believe that using them in sales is wrong in some way. That debate is for another day.

I’ve used the Clean Language questions in sales for years, but my success has been distinctly mixed… until recently.

Over the same period, I’ve heard my husband use them in successful sale after successful sale for his business. We often work in the same room, so I could easily study what he does. What was his secret? And more to the point, how could I apply it myself?

I think I now have (at least a large part) of the answer.

It turns out that the Clean Language questions can play a useful a role in specific parts of a sales process.

They are absolutely brilliant for:

• Directing a prospect’s attention with great precision

• Deepening a person’s “pain” and helping them to feel very unhappy with the current situation. (They’re so good for this that most Clean Language trainers make a rule that beginners should “go for the good stuff” and avoid developing metaphors for problems)

• Getting absolute clarity on what the prospect would like, and how they will know when they’ve got it.

But that’s not the whole process of making a sale! There’s usually something before all of that, and something that comes afterwards.

Before

In order to even get to ask ask your Clean Language questions – with any expectation of a reasonable answer – the prospect needs to trust you. Where does trust come from? Perhaps you’ve been highly recommended, or perhaps the prospect has read your book/watched your YouTube etc and feels they know you already. Then you might get away with a quick “How was your journey?” to establish rapport.

But more often, you need to establish credibility. And what works here is a different kind of question: a kind which contains just enough content to attract your prospect’s interest and let them know that you know your stuff. In Question Based Selling, Thomas Freese calls these “diagnostic questions”.

For example: “Do you use a PC or a Mac?” hints that you know something about computers. Followed up by two or three more questions of the same kind, preferably packed with jargon, and you quickly come across as a software guru.

In his new book Ask, Ryan Levesque takes up a similar theme, expanding these “diagnostic questions” into whole online surveys designed to clear the way for a Cleaner kind of conversation.

After

You’ve got the conversation started and established your credibility with diagnostic questions. Using Clean Language questions, you deepen the client’s pain and clarify what they would like instead, and how they will know when they’ve got it. What happens next?

I suspect you already know the answer to this, don’t you? They’re often so badly done, we can all hear the clunk… it’s the dreaded Closing Question. “Do you want that in red or blue?”

And it’s still true that in order to close a sale, there probably needs to be some kind of closing question. Freese’s model seems quite elegant: “So, if we can achieve conditions A, B and C, would you be ready to go ahead? Is there anything else?” From there, it could be as simple as, “When shall we start?”

• This model has been working very well for me in recent weeks, in the limited number of “sales conversations” I tend to have. Next, I’ll be hitting the phones for a wider test – using my natural curiosity to overcome my learned “sales reluctance”.

• Why not try it out for yourself? Let me know how it goes for you in the comments field below.