Identifying Audience Needs – Asking the Right Questions
As Associate Consultants at ZS Associates, it is essential for you to understand your client’s needs before you recommend a solution that you can offer. It would be reasonable to say that unless you have a good understanding of your client’s pain areas (be it performance, productivity, effectiveness or the like), you may not be able to customize your solution correctly. Usually, you would engage in a dialogue with important stakeholders in the client organization for this purpose. This dialoguing is not a general conversation but a deliberate one that is supported by your thorough preparation and basic awareness about the client’s business problems.
Research in the Behavioural Skills arena in Sales and Consulting tells us that probing or asking questions was found to be a differentiating behaviour between individuals who were successful and those who were not in really grasping their client needs.
When we ask specific and pertinent questions to our clients, the objective is not only to have an engaging dialogue but also to understand the specific difficulties or problem areas that the client organization is grappling with. Questions, by their very design, have a powerful impact. They invite and encourage the other person to think and respond and help channelize the discussion,
As an Associate Consultant, it is therefore, incumbent upon us to establish a ‘connection’ or ‘linkage’ with our clients that is similar to tuning of forks that resonate with each other.
The simple framework below allows us to investigate and/or identify and even develop latent needs of our clients so that they can share crucial information that will play a vital role in the design and construct of the consulting solution that you are responsible to build at ZS Associates.
The C.I.C.I framework includes the following different types of questions:
- Context Questions- What is the situation?
- Issues Questions- What are the core issues we are trying to address?
- Consequence Questions- What are the consequences if the issues persist.
- Incentive Questions- How would it help if your recommendation/solutions is able to address the issue.
Each type of these questions helps us understand the client/audience situation and needs better. In an engagement, we would recommend that you use the questions preferably sequentially. Once you are in grip of the business case, you can adopt a flexible and an intelligent approach to toggle (or go back and forth) the use of these questions – to your advantage in achieving a better acceptance of your business case recommendations.
We are taking the liberty to stretch your imagination a bit to think of a few questions that fit into each of the above categories, in respect to your context and we will build on it further in the next workshop. So, do come to the workshop with a few questions in your notes.
See you soon for another round of engaging and charged up learning.