Power Questions: Build Relationships, Win New Business, and Influence Others Author: Andrew Sobel | Language: English | ISBN:
B006V879WC | Format: PDF
Power Questions: Build Relationships, Win New Business, and Influence Others Description
An arsenal of powerful questions that will transform every conversationSkillfully redefine problems. Make an immediate connection with anyone. Rapidly determine if a client is ready to buy. Access the deepest dreams of others. Power Questions sets out a series of strategic questions that will help you win new business and dramatically deepen your professional and personal relationships. The book showcases thirty-five riveting, real conversations with CEOs, billionaires, clients, colleagues, and friends. Each story illustrates the extraordinary power and impact of a thought-provoking, incisive power question. To help readers navigate a variety of professional challenges, over 200 additional, thought-provoking questions are also summarized at the end of the book.
In Power Questions you’ll discover:
- The question that stopped an angry executive in his tracks
- The sales question CEOs expect you to ask versus the questions they want you to ask
- The question that will radically refocus any meeting
- The penetrating question that can transform a friend or colleague’s life
- A simple question that helped restore a marriage
When you use power questions, you magnify your professional and personal influence, create intimate connections with others, and drive to the true heart of the issue every time.
- File Size: 1077 KB
- Print Length: 224 pages
- Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (January 5, 2012)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B006V879WC
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #11,111 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #12
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Skills > Communications - #17
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Business Life > Personal Success - #41
in Books > Business & Money > Skills > Communications
- #12
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Skills > Communications - #17
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Business Life > Personal Success - #41
in Books > Business & Money > Skills > Communications
I do not know of another business thinker, indeed another person, who asks better questions than Andrew Sobel does and that is a talent he has developed over several decades. Each of his three previously published books was written in direct response to an especially serious business question and his latest book is no exception: How to build relationships, win new business, and influence others? Sobel and co-author Jerold Panas offer and discuss 337 "essential" questions that can obtain information that will help to achieve these three separate but interdependent objectives.
How so "interdependent"? If an organization does not build and constantly strengthen relationships with everyone involved in the given enterprise, it will lose its most valuable employees, clients, and allies and, for the same reasons, fail to replace them. True, this company "influences others" but in all he wrong ways.
Sobel and Panas organize their material within 35 chapters that contain a total of 42 questions (five in Chapter 35) within a narrative significantly enhanced by anecdotes that illustrate the power of questions that can either strengthen or weaken a relationship, increase or reduce the chances of achieving a desired objective. Then 293 additional "Power" questions are provided in the final section, "Not Just for Sunday."
I really appreciate how cleverly Sobel and Panas frame their material in a reader-friendly fashion. For example, they pose a question and then suggest how and when to use that question most effectively. One of my personal favorites is "Is this the best you can do?" apparently one that many others such as Steve Jobs and Henry Kissinger have frequently posed.
Power Questions has a simple but powerful thesis: That asking thought-provoking questions is a far better way to connect with people and build client relationships than trying to show how smart you are. We all know this but we often can't help ourselves. We end up talking too much and learning very little about the other person. I've enjoyed Sobel's other excellent books, such as Clients for Life and All for One, which focus on developing long-term client relationships. Power Questions extends this theme in a very readable, entertaining, and even inspiring book. I have tried using some of the questions, and they really do work. They can help you create very deep and interesting conversations.
Power Questions will help you equally with clients, colleagues, friends, and family. Rather than just a list of interesting questions, the book is built around a series of actual conversations that were transformed by a question. Sobel and his coauthor Panas are great storytellers, and I found myself drawn to read the next chapter as soon as I finished the one I was on. The questions they highlight are a mixture of ones you would use in a professional situation and others that might be more appropriate with family and friends. Here are some that I liked: Chapter 7--"How did you get started?" Here they recount a conversation with Rich DeVos, the founder of Amway. Chapter 8--"Do you mind if we start over?" The idea here is that when you get off on the wrong foot with someone, you can reset the conversation rather than keep digging a hole. Chapter 11--"Is this the best you can do?" This describes how Steve Jobs used this question to drive Apple engineers to the brink of insanity--and great results.
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