Has anyone listed the customer requirements? I am often obliged to ask this a question. In answer I get surprised silences or mystified looks. I work in a business environment involving IT solutions, projects or meeting customer requirements, I also prepare support staff in international call centers.

In these environments I often find myself thinking: A whole industry of consulting has developed because common sense is not always that common. I can also think of a number of lightbulb jokes to illustrate this point. Very often, especially in large organizations, it takes whole teams to solve things that just a few people could have solved if they were inclined to ask the right questions from the right people, at the right time. That is what consultants do. The good ones do anyway.

Much literature has been written about asking questions. Asking the right questions at the right time is important in most environments. Selling, marketing, consulting, coaching, the medical profession The list is endless. Surely it is fundamentally important that professionals train themselves in the art of asking questions.

Ask questions as an integral part of your selling skill. Ever heard of the elevator pitch? Throw yours away! Every competitor has one just like yours! It is possible to ask just a few short questions that can be answered by yes or no or some detail that can set you apart from your competition. Everybody has heard the elevator pitches before. You even get interrupted by them while your trying to eat dinner dont you?!

Make asking questions part of your consulting repertoire. Good consultants volunteer no answers until they have spent enough time gathering information through effectively asking the right questions of the right people at the right time. Because consultants are stereotyped into the experts it is easy for them to be seduced into simply delivering their professional opinions prematurely. This is best avoided.

Coaches are trained to ask questions and hold back from volunteering solutions. This is the fundamental difference between coaching and consulting. A coach cannot facilitate another person into realizing their own ambitions or potential if it is not first established what the ambitions are and what is clogging up the process. Hence the importance of questions!

Asking questions is imperative in the arena of selling complex solutions and services to large organizations on a global scale. The prospective service organization has to establish a strategy to win over the vote of all the buying influences in an organization. Before that can be done all those influencers and their preferences also need to be determined.

Questions help you establish and build your own credibility, questions help you meet the right requirement at the right time, and appropriate questions also help you close deals and bring closure in other environments like consulting or coaching. Conveying interest in your customer will reap more benefits that you regurgitating your sales pitch.