Questioning Techniques · Open and Closed Questions
Questioning Techniques
What are questioning techniques?
- Open to widen, closed to lock in
- Depth comes from chaining two or three probing questions
- Ask 'what prompted' instead of 'why'
The conclusion salespeople often take away from questioning training is “open questions good, closed questions bad.” Memorize that, and you end up repeating “What challenges are you facing these days?” to every customer. Questioning technique is not a list of good questions. It is the skill of choosing a question’s shape based on what you want from the conversation right now. Open up to widen, close down to firm up. The real skill is the order and ratio in which you mix the two, and a conversation that uses only one turns into an interrogation or small talk.
There are about five types to learn. Open questions start with 'how, what, which aspect' and get the other person talking at length. Closed questions elicit a yes/no or a number and pin down facts. A probing question picks up the previous answer and goes one level deeper, for example "Which of those had the biggest impact?" A confirming question summarizes what you heard and asks whether it is right, and a hypothetical question widens thinking by adding a condition, as in "What if delivery were two weeks shorter?" A leading question has the answer built in, so its uses are narrow.
How you use them changes with the stage of the conversation. Early in a meeting, start with one or two easy closed fact questions, widen with open ones, and when an important answer comes, go deeper by chaining two or three probing questions. At the close, lock in agreement with confirming and closed questions. Throughout this funnel, the basics are to ask only one thing at a time and to wait about three seconds after asking. If methodologies like SPIN cover what to ask and in what order, questioning techniques are the underlying skill that covers what shape to give each question.
Where things go wrong in the field is the question that starts with 'why'. "Why did you use that vendor?" is open-ended, but it sounds like a demand for an explanation. Swap 'why' for 'what criteria' or 'what prompted' and you get the same information without putting the customer on the defensive. Another trap: in the urge to get through every prepared question, you jump to the next one the moment you hear an answer, and the customer feels like they are filling out a survey. Bundling two questions into one sentence is also common, and customers answer only the easier one. The quality of your questioning shows in whether each question grows out of the previous answer.
John KimAuthor of B2B Marketing Design and CEO of Nanum Consulting
Jaehyuk ParkHands-on instructor in B2B technical sales and AI-driven sales strategy| Category | Open questions | Closed questions |
|---|---|---|
| Answer format | In full sentences | Yes/no, numbers, choices |
| Purpose | Drawing out background, views, and priorities | Confirming facts, locking in agreement |
| Right timing | Mid-conversation, needs discovery | Opening and closing a conversation |
| Example | What is the biggest hassle in how you do this today? | Do you plan to decide within this quarter? |
| If overused | Scattered conversation with no conclusion | Sounds like an interrogation and yields shallow information |
No single person founded it. It is a conversation skill that counseling, interviewing, training, and sales have each refined. The split between open and closed questions, based on the range of possible answers, has long been used in interviewing, survey methods, and coaching practice, and sales training teaches it as a fundamental alongside the funnel approach: ask broadly first, then narrow down.
Consider a hypothetical case. Company A, which sells office solutions, analyzed 30 recordings of first meetings by its 22 salespeople. Each meeting averaged 11 questions, 9 of them closed, and the customer spoke for only 28% of the time.
- A training manager listened to one recording together with the sales team. When it reached "Is the budget set? Does your team lead sign off?", one team member said, "This sounds like an interrogation."
- In a half-day exercise, participants rewrote 5 closed questions they often use as open ones. "Do you plan to adopt it?" became "What prompted you to consider adopting it?"
- In a role-play with groups of three, the observer tallied question types with tally marks in a table. Four of the 7 groups never asked a single probing question that took an answer deeper.
- The manager banned 'why' questions. When one associate changed "Why are you looking to replace your current vendor?" to "What happened that made you start looking at switching?", the role-playing customer's answers became three times longer.
- For four weeks after the training, team leads listened to one recording a week and left one-line feedback, checking only whether the rep asked two or more probing questions in a row.
- Two months later, a review of 30 recordings showed that open and probing questions had risen from 18% to 46%, and customer talk time had grown from 28% to 52%.