Did you listen to Do You Deal in Trust? How to Unlock it for Your Business W/ Jay Sofer? If you haven’t do check it out as it was the first time Dave took what he learned from the Time article and tried to apply it.

The article from 2013 of all things that was shared is called This Post Will Make You A More Effective Communicator In 90 Seconds that you really should give a read. Go. We will wait. So if you were to interview Elon Musk would you be like Charlie Rose or Kevin Rose?

Kevin: What led you into entrepreneurship? Was it something that you always knew that you wanted to be, an entrepreneur on your own? Or did you stumble into it?
Charlie: What are you doing in terms of planetary exploration?
Kevin: Where do you come up with your best ideas? Are you on vacation, or do you wake up in the middle of the night and draw things down?
Charlie: How did you go about the design?
Kevin: When did you decide to get into computers and technology? Did you start coding? Or was it a lot of…?
Charlie: What do you think?

Most of us would likely conduct the interview like Kevin Rose. Matt and Dave both discuss during the episode the challenge that it is to really nail a question and keep an interview to a conversation. It. Is. Tough. So again, how did Dave do?

When Can Asking Better Questions Help?

• Job Interviews (either side)
• Talking with Prospect
• Talking with Coworkers
• Sales and Customer Service
• Account Managers talking with clients

If nothing else, when you are asking questions just stop at the (?) question mark. Don’t keep going, don’t give options. End at the ? and let someone answer you. Don’t give options or multiple questions and parts.

Full Transcript

Matt Siltala: [00:00:00 ] Welcome to another exciting episode of the business of digital podcast, featuring your host, Matt  and Dave roar. Hey guys, excited to have you join us on another one of these business of digital podcast episodes. And today we are just going to jump right into it, Dave, how’s it going, man?

Dave Rohrer: [00:00:20 ] It’s going, it’s a crazy end of the week for us.

Not when you hear this, but you know, for us, it is

Matt Siltala: [00:00:27 ] that’s right. Exactly. So. What we’re going to talk about today, guys is we’re going to talk about how to ask questions and how it can impact your business. And, um, we just got done doing a interview with a friend of ours and, and it may or may not. I don’t know when the,

Dave Rohrer: [00:00:49 ] this is a couple of weeks after.

So if you did not hear our interview with Jay on unlocking trust, then you should go look us into it

Matt Siltala: [00:00:59 ] so people [00:01:00 ] can critique us and you can tell us how good we did or did not do on this. But, uh, this is an interesting one. And, and I guess I’m just going to turn it over to you and share what you want about the article that, uh, you mentioned, uh, Or that you, that you’ve put here that nobody else can see, and you can talk about it and just jump into that with this.

Dave Rohrer: [00:01:19 ] And this is actually, I believe I might be wrong because I didn’t write it in notes when I found it, um, will Reynolds fault. Oh yeah. For the better, I believe it was him and I might be mistaken. I’d have to look at LinkedIn to be sure, but he posted this link and I thought it was interesting as I read it.

It’s the title of it is it’s a seven, almost seven year old post on time. This post will make you a more effective communicator in 90 seconds. Well,

Matt Siltala: [00:01:49 ] he’s really good at having that evergreen time.

Dave Rohrer: [00:01:51 ] I know. Yeah. It’s like, Holy cow. Talk about an old, um, post that’s actually really interesting. Yeah. And [00:02:00 ] as I read it, I thought about every time we interview someone, How are we doing?

Yeah. How did I do? And it’s usually I actually fall into this trap and what it is, what the trap is. Um, it’s summarized it quite well towards the end is a, there it is. Usually people have a hard time ending sentences. We are uncomfortable with terseness. So we ramble off and trail off until the other person jumps in.

What do you think? We say, do you think X, Y, Z. Basically when you interview, do you give an open ended question or do you somehow make it a multiple choice problem?

Matt Siltala: [00:02:41 ] Yeah, I think this

Dave Rohrer: [00:02:43 ] is we’re trying to lead maybe. And sometimes you lead too much.

Matt Siltala: [00:02:47 ] Yeah. So you and I, and I do it where I try to like where I try to be at work.

Like it’s a conversation. And so maybe I could do a little bit anyway. I just, it’s interesting. Cause it gets me [00:03:00 ] evaluating like how I do this too

Dave Rohrer: [00:03:02 ] well. And it’s for job interviews, whether you’re being interviewed or the interview person, you like the interviewee, like either side of it, this is something you could use when you’re talking to a prospect and you ask a question.

Instead of going. So what are your problems, you know, with, do you have technical issues? Do you have this? Don’t suggest that like when you start suggesting things, then it becomes a multiple choice instead of saying, what problems are you having with your digital marketing? What problems are you having?

Matt Siltala: [00:03:40 ] Yeah, I’m just like looking, Oh, go ahead.

Dave Rohrer: [00:03:43 ] No, it’s yeah. It’s, it’s just. As an SEO person who’s, you know, or if I know someone who’s contacted me about SEO, I go, Oh, so what are you having problems with your technical SEO? Are you looking for LinkedIn? No, I need to not do that. What do you need [00:04:00 ] help with? Or where are your pain points?

Like what? I need to rephrase the question and I need not to give them options, but it’s tough.

Matt Siltala: [00:04:12 ] Yeah.

Dave Rohrer: [00:04:14 ] Well, yeah. If you think about it, like asking the kids or asking anyone like that type of stuff and what the article talks about, if you don’t want to go and read it, I’ll summarize a couple of parts of it, but yeah, it’s comparing, um, two interviews with Elon Musk who was in the news seven years ago, shock to some people I’m sure.

But it was two interviews, one by a Kevin Rose, formerly of dig, which is funny. Cause we do talk about dig and Charlie Rose, who, if you don’t know who Charlie Rose is, I’m sorry. Um, especially for a person that interviewed host.

Matt Siltala: [00:04:51 ] Yeah.

Dave Rohrer: [00:04:52 ] But it compared how one asks questions versus the other. And this is again, seven years ago.

So Charlie would ask, [00:05:00 ] what do you think? How did it, how did you go about the design? What are you doing in terms of planetary exploration? Very simple questions that don’t lead. Don’t give down the options. Very open-ended Kevin Rose would ask questions. Like when did you decide to get into computers and technology?

Did you start coding or was it a lot of question? Question, question, like.dot, dot. What led you into entrepreneurship? Was it something that you always knew that you wanted to be an entrepreneur on your own? Or did you stumble into it? Like that’s how many questions are you asking me? Um, the other one from Kevin.

Where did you come up with your best ideas? Are you on vacation or do you wake up in the middle of the night and draw things down? So again, multiple questions and if nothing else, when you start asking and talking to people, like stop at the question, Mark. [00:06:00 ] But I think for me and probably for you, when we do the podcast, we do try to make it so conversational.

And so the reason why we’re doing it right now is because we just interviewed Jay and I tried to change up how I ask questions. I think I did. Okay. But I think I still failed compared to where we want to be.

Matt Siltala: [00:06:23 ] Well, It

Dave Rohrer: [00:06:25 ] was the first try where I actually was consciously thinking about how I phrase things, but so much of a time that we podcast it’s you and I, and it’s conversational.

And even when we interview people, we try to make it more conversational. But then when I do have to switch for me, and even for you, when we do switch on that, we want to ask a specific question. I think it’s hard. Yeah,

Matt Siltala: [00:06:52 ] it is because even I’m going through this and checking out this, uh, this article and we’ll, we’ll have it for you guys.

You guys can click on it [00:07:00 ] and look at it and see what we’re talking about, but it just, it has me, you know, like even we all do this, how it says, what are you doing for the holidays? Like, I remember, you know, our conversations all the time. I’m like, what are you doing this weekend? You know? Are you staying in town?

Are you doing something? Do you have work to do blah, blah, blah. So it’s interesting to, to evaluate like myself as well. And because again, like you said, like I’m, whether it be you and I, or whether it be, even if we hav