The ability to ask the right questions is an art and can be mastered. Let's talk about open questions: what they should be, how to compose them correctly and how to move from closed to open questions in the communication process. The article is useful for project managers, sales specialists, and those who want to receive informative answers to their questions.
Let's imagine that you are fishing. What determines the success of this event? The quantity and quality of fish you caught. The ability to ask questions is similar to fishing skills: small fish that you catch with a fishing rod are short and uninformative answers, large fish are detailed and understandable answers to your questions. The more big fish you caught (detailed answers you received), the more effective your further work with the customer/client/colleague will be.
What are open questions?
Open questions are questions that do not require a short answer “yes” or “no”, but require a detailed answer. Open-ended questions are also called value-based questions because they provide useful information to either the person asking (you) or both participants. Let’s imagine the situation again, you ask a question to the person you work with: “Do you see prospects for our further cooperation” - this is a closed question (it can be answered “yes” or “no”). If the answer is yes, then most likely your interlocutor will not voluntarily develop the topic, and you will not understand what exactly the prospects are. But if you frame the question differently: “This is not our first project together, what other prospects for work do you see?” In this case, you will give your interlocutor food for thought. Stanford University lecturer and author of books about creative thinking Tina Seelig noted that "Every question is the framework on which the answers are built... And when you change the question, the range of answers you can get changes noticeably."
Open questions accomplish the following practical tasks:
start a conversation with the customer/client;
understand what is behind the statements and beliefs of the customer/client;
direct communication in the right direction;
get a pause to think about actions;
create a comfortable environment for communication;
strengthen partnerships.
How to ask open questions?
An open-ended question is asked using question words, which are usually placed at the beginning of the sentence, and then the essence of the question follows. The purpose of an open question is to get the most detailed and complete answer on a given topic. Before meeting with potential client or a well-known customer, it's worth making a list of questions you plan to ask.
Examples of open questions that will help you understand the needs of the customer/client:
What are you interested in...?
What is important to you when choosing/buying/creating etc...?
What requirements do you have for this...?
How would you like...?
How would you choose one for yourself...?
When you're in last time have you encountered this...?
Examples of questions that will help you understand the main qualities, characteristics and requirements for a product/service:
By what criteria do you select...?
What characteristics do you think… should have?
What wishes...?
And before that, what did you use...?
What did you like, what did you not like...?
Why did you decide to change...?
What advantages have you noticed...?
Examples of questions that will help you understand the expectations of the customer/client:
What results do you expect...?
What do you want to get as a result...?
What's the hardest part about achieving these results...?
Examples of questions that will help determine the degree of “warmth” of the customer/client:
When will you be able to check out our offer?
When will you be ready to make a decision?
What budget are you setting?
Examples of questions that will help you work through objections:
What fears or doubts do you have...?
What opportunities do you see in front of you?
What problems do you expect to encounter?
If we started working on this together, what would be the main results you would like to see?
Why do you think your choice was right?
Any question can be turned into an open one. If you find yourself that there is no detailed information you don’t receive it, and the interlocutor answers in monosyllables. Then always add a continuation. For example, if to the question “Are you satisfied with our solution?” you received a monosyllabic “Yes,” then you can always continue: “What exactly?”, “What was especially successful?” and the like.
Open questions to identify needs
One of the indicators professional level A project manager or salesperson is the ability to identify needs in as much detail as possible. Do not forget that the basis of successful cooperation is not the product itself and its characteristics, but the benefit that the customer receives.
What can you find out from the customer/client using open-ended questions?
The problem that the customer/client wants to solve. Your task is to understand what interests him.
The criteria that he presents in a product or service. Your task is to find out what is important to the customer and build a presentation of the product or service based on these criteria.
The principle of the criteria presented. This will allow you to find out the degree of freedom you have in the proposed options.
The results that are expected from you. Your task is to determine as accurately as possible what the customer expects from using the product or service.
Experience in using the product or service. This knowledge will help you understand the customer’s needs even more deeply, as well as find out their level of awareness about the product/service.
Budget. This is usually the most feared issue, but knowing your budget can save time and offer more specific solutions. It’s worth making a note here that customers tend to underestimate the budget by about 30%.
Fears and concerns. As a rule, fears begin to emerge at the stage of working with objections, but professionals can pull them out at the stage of clarifying needs.
Funnel of questions
We've written so much about open questions, so it's only logical that we briefly talk about the other two main types of questions. In a company with open questions, there are also closed and alternative ones.
Closed questions are questions that can only be answered with two answers: “yes” or “no.” The purpose of a closed question is to obtain consent, confirmation of agreements, and clarify the information received.
Alternative questions are questions that can be answered in the form of the customer/client choosing one of the options, which we indicate in the question itself. The purpose of the alternative question is to understand the sphere of interests of the customer/client, to direct the customer/client’s thinking to the choice of alternatives.
We talked about other types of questions to lead to another concept - the question funnel. This is a technique for analyzing the needs of the customer/client, which is a sequence of questions that you ask according to the structure “from general to specific”: open questions - alternative - closed. First, you find out the needs, then offer options, and finally, sum up the conversation.
Example:
What opportunities do you see in front of you? - open question.
Are you planning to enter the foreign market or stay in the domestic market? - alternative question.
Then we also make a version on English language? - closed question.
What are the consequences of failing to ask questions?
If you don’t ask open questions during the work: “Why?”, “What exactly?”, then you risk playing “Guessing Game” with the customer. You may not understand: what exactly does he want, you will do the work at your own discretion, he will not accept it - you will redo it, and again it will turn out wrong. And it’s not clear what exactly he doesn’t like. Firstly, it is almost impossible to guess the needs, secondly, everyone wastes time, and thirdly, the result is usually bad. To avoid playing such a guessing game, ask questions.
Shall we secure it?
There are questions before you - choose from them those that you consider open.
What are your main priorities?
Is speed important to you?
What do you think about the current situation?
How will you evaluate the success of our cooperation?
Will we meet on Monday or Thursday?
Maybe you need Additional Information?
Is morning or evening delivery convenient for you?
What are you risking if things don't work out in your favor?
When will you be ready to present your previous work?
Who is your potential client?
Why is it important to be able to ask, and how to ask questions? open type change the selling text and business.
The simplest and effective method obtaining information is a question. Want to explore your customers' needs? Feel free to ask them everything, but in the right way.
There are marketers who choose closed questions to study the target audience - those in which you need to choose an answer:
Translation:
What's your least favorite thing about service?
- annoying and too frequent mailings;
- difficulties of interaction;
- lack of information about other services of this kind;
- lack of staff;
- other.
This method doesn't always work. By formulating your answers, you can assume that you know your customers' feelings and anticipate their reactions. In reality, you are expressing a personal opinion that differs from the actual desires of the audience. Questions of this type will not be answered useful information and will not change your business. But under the right circumstances they can still be quite useful.
For example, if you are interested in how users perceive a certain part of your service, asking questions like these will focus your research on your area of interest.
Why ask open-ended questions to clients?
- Open questions do not force the user to choose the answer we need. With their help, the easiest way is to find out the most accurate opinion of the target audience, rather than get confused and make assumptions.
- Open questions are a goldmine for . Use your customers' words to connect with them. Hundreds of first-hand examples from users - the best possible source.
Dealing with open questions requires diligence. The answers will be a jumble, and it will take time and concentration to sort them out. In order not to fall victim to an emergency, you will have to master an easy method of analyzing responses, as marketers from the Groove project did. They raised their monthly income from $30,000 to $100,000.
Basic open-ended questions
1. Tell us about your experience with X
X is the area you are going to work on. For example, technical support.
Open-ended questions allow you to get the most accurate information from a direct source (the user of your service or service) in his language. If you have already prepared answers and offered them to the user, he will not think about his true needs, driven into the framework of your assumptions and formulations.
2. What is the most common problem you have with X?
Laura Reder created the Social Brilliant resource, which helps small business owners get used to the new world of SMM. She could assume that her potential audience is people who do not understand the topic, and develop the resource based on her assumptions and experience.
But Laura decided to dig deeper. She asked questions to understand what language the user was speaking in an attempt to describe their problem. To do this, she chose open-ended questions. Below on the page is an excerpt of text from its landing page:
Translation:
“When you realized you needed social media, you didn’t think that mastering it would be like an uphill climb. And you certainly never imagined that week after week you would receive a weak response.
„I would like to get more clients with the help social networks, but I don’t want to spend my whole life on this!”
3. What about X disappointed you the most?
Let's try to break it big problems users into small ones. This will help you understand why the client needs the product or service. Three points will help clarify the situation:
- Time. How much does it take?
- Money. How much do users spend?
- Flaws. What demotivates users the most now?
Don't speculate. Give your audience a voice.
By the way, you won't need reviews of your competitors' products if you learn to ask the right open-ended questions.
P.S. Try the first three questions on the list and come back to the next post for more questions.
Hello! In this article we will talk about analyzing the target audience.
For a business to be successful, it is important not only to create a good product. It is much more important to make sure that those who want to buy it know about it. And this is where the problems begin. The first step to getting noticed is to research your target audience. I will tell you what a target audience is, how to determine it, what mistakes you can make when analyzing the target audience, and what programs you can use to collect target audience.
What is the target audience
A group of people who may be interested in a product or service.
Your target audience will be only those who can buy your product. Not those who visit the site, but those who are interested in the product.
A correctly selected target audience makes it possible to:
- Improve the product based on customer needs.
- Launch the correct one.
- Create in-demand content.
Determining the target audience is the first task when creating a “competent” product. First - “For whom?” and only then - “What?” Another sequence will lead to the fact that you release a cool product, but no one will need it.
Gathering a target audience can be compared to building the foundation of a house. Imagine you want to build good house, which will last for decades. And instead of digging the ground for the foundation, they immediately began to build. Even if you do everything right, by the best standards, the house will still fall apart. The same goes for the target audience. If you refuse to select your target audience or define it incorrectly, your product will not be bought. The money won't come in, in a year it will run out and you will be left on the sidelines.
If you have the right product at least three times, without correct selection it will not sell to the audience. Either no one will know about it, or not those who need it will find out.
How to determine the target audience: step-by-step instructions.
Now let's talk specifically about how to define your target audience. Before launching the product, you need to carry out preliminary work. It consists of 7 steps.
Step 1. Brainstorm.
At this stage, we put forward various hypotheses about who our client might be. in general - work with the promotion and confirmation or refutation of one’s own assumptions. If you have a good idea of your product, then you have a few ideas about who you can sell it to.
Gather the entire team working on the product and let everyone come up with their own idea. All options are written down, discussed, and, if everyone agrees, included in the list of hypotheses.
Step 2. Competitor analysis.
An excellent source for audience analysis. See groups on social networks, websites and advertising examples. It will be good if you understand who their audience is, what leverage you can use and how to take these people for yourself and make them your clients.
There are three points that need to be discussed in advance:
- You don't know why these people came to their competitors.
- You don't know how these people came to compete.
- You don't know if these people are buying.
It's easy to make mistakes when mindlessly copying from competitors. You don't know the whole inner kitchen. Let's say you entered the VKontakte community of your direct competitor. You see that people read, like, and repost some posts. And we decided that we needed to do exactly the same.
People may read and be active, but not buy. There was such an example in 2018 with the marketing agency MadCats. The cats chose the wrong audience and created the wrong materials. As a result, they practically went bankrupt. If people looked at their target audience and copied them, they would also miss.
That is why, when analyzing competitors, rely on previous conclusions to determine how correct your hypotheses are (where you were right and where you were far from reality).
Step 3.
See what queries are searching for your product. For this there is Wordstat Yandex and Google Analytic. Just enter the main keyword:
Then watch them search with him:
How many people are searching, in what regions:
Step 4. Conducting an interview.
Interviews and surveys are the easiest way to talk to your target audience. You must understand:
- What is your product associated with?
- What triggers does it hit?
- Can he solve the client's problem?
- How much the client is willing to pay for it.
Step 5. C audience segmentation.
Now you need to divide the audience into smaller groups in order to formulate proposals for them. The smaller the group, the more specific the proposal will be. This will give an increase several times. And the more accurately you select a proposal to suit the portrait of the target audience, the higher the result will be.
First, divide by basic characteristics - gender, age, income level. Then you can begin to compile a more complete portrait: interests, hobbies, content viewed on the Internet. All this is done in order to find those “pains” of the client that can be solved.
Conduct segmentation with one goal in mind: obtain the maximum amount of information about the client. It doesn't matter whether you think it's important or not.
Step 6. Create unique offer for each audience segment.
This is the penultimate step in working with the target audience. You found your target audience, understood it and divided it into groups. Now your task is to select for each of the segments. This is how your product differs from competitors and how it will solve a problem for each specific group.
Step 7. Create a promotion strategy.
Once you understand who your target audience is, what leverage you have, and what you can do to tell them about your product, you need to develop a promotion strategy. This is a set of activities that you will do in order to get people to buy from you.
Something like: we have a target audience of gamers 16-24 years old, a product for narrow niche. They play one game, spend about 6-8 hours a day on it, improve their skills, cherish their dreams.
This is how they work with the audience before launching a product. And most of your actions will follow the chain: have an idea -> check -> did it work? -> next. Once you launch the product, you will have more data to analyze. Your chain of actions will look like this:
Step 1. Collecting data from those who bought.
You already had clients, and you need to understand who these people are. Where they work, what they are interested in, what worries them, and what problems they solve with your product. Everything is the same as in the previous case. The more detailed you answer these questions, the more complete the picture becomes. More leverage appears.
Step 2. Weeding out segments that turned out to be erroneous.
Once you've collected the data, you need to weed out any categories that don't apply to you. In any case, there will be false hypotheses about the audience.
You yourself must choose the criteria for the target audience that will be the main ones. In the beginning, it is recommended to focus on purchases.
Step 3. Adjusting the strategy taking into account new data.
You have collected data and weeded out those who will not buy from you. Now you need to adjust your strategy to take into account the remaining and added groups. Analyze the content that received the greatest response and targeted actions. See what exactly attracted people, you can even ask them directly. Then you add categories that would be of interest to the new target audience and remove those that were interesting to those you added by mistake.
Adjusting your content strategy is an almost endless process. You can always improve something, put forward another hypothesis and test it. All marketing is a never-ending process of improvement. own product and ways to talk about it.
How to segment your target audience
Dividing the audience into groups according to certain characteristics - difficult task. And the point is not even to correctly separate one from the other. It is necessary to select in advance a breakdown according to characteristics that will be relevant for a particular product. Most often segmented by:
- Gender and age. The most popular method gives a little insight into which audience is better at buying a product.
- Geolocations. What city or even region is the person from? Relevant for real business, decides less to promote products online.
- Financial situation. This is not only the level but also the work itself. A breakdown by salary makes it possible to understand how much buyers must earn to afford a specific product, and the company and position provides a statistical sample of the niches in which they can sell.
- Interests and hobbies. What do people do in free time. Well suited for customization because hobbies directly speak to a person’s interests - whether he can be interested in a product or not.
- Features of behavior. This segmentation gives an understanding of what content a person consumes - what groups he sits in, what sites he visits, what he reads about.
Segmentation of the target audience - drawing up a portrait of your potential buyer. The more features you cover, the more detailed the research will be. You will have more leverage over your target audience, because you understand perfectly who your clients are, where they come from, how much they earn and how much they are willing to pay, what they are interested in and what content they consume.
The University of Internet Professions Netology conducted a small study on its blog on Habré: “on average, segmentation increases the open rate by 14.69%, and the click rate by 60%.” 52% of marketers say it is necessary to segment their database because individual offers generate 18 times more profit than general offers.
The main method of segmentation is surveys and mini-interviews. You should first come up with a few hypotheses about who your target audience might be. Select the focus groups you will interview. Prepare a list of questions and ask them to the client.
Try not to ask open-ended questions. Instead of “How much are you willing to pay for this product?”, it is better to ask “Are you willing to pay 1,000 rubles for this product?” Such a sample allows you to understand whether your product, in the eyes of the client, is worth the money you are asking for it.
Here is an example of user audience segmentation debit cards and cash management services:
To determine how the target audience interacts with content and which segment is most profitable to advertise on, you can calculate a compliance index.
Compliance index- rating of the target audience in relation to the rating of the base audience. That is, how much more often the target audience is interested in the product compared to other people. The formula is: target audience/audience*100%. If the rating is less than 100%, then the target audience is not interested in the content. If it is more than 100%, then the target audience is actively reading the content.
Let's look at it with an example. We want to run advertising on Youtube. Our target audience is men 30+, married, interested in sports, with an income of 30 to 60 thousand rubles. What kind of advertising and what product is not important yet. We run advertising on one channel. Of the 100,000 people who viewed it, 1,000 clicked on the link. The total number of audiences who clicked is 1%. But if we launch the same video only to our target audience, then 2% of the target audience will click on it. So, 2/1*100% = 200%.
But if we had put forward the hypothesis that our target audience were women, and promoted a male video for them, then the opposite situation would have happened. About 0.5% of the click is on advertising, and then our rating would be 50%, which means that the female target audience of the product is not interested in such content.
Main mistakes when choosing a target audience
Let's talk about the main mistakes when drawing up a portrait of the target audience. I chose typical moments that were not covered above.
Mistake #1. The portrait of the target audience does not take into account the entire chain before the purchase.
Let's take the simplest example: children's toys. We know very well that parents buy them. But for some reason, not everyone includes parents in the portrait of a potential target audience.
Or here’s another example: a person chooses a laptop. If he is inexperienced, he will either start Googling and looking for information, which is unlikely (there are too many manuals to choose from), or he will ask for advice from a more experienced person. The second option is more likely. But for some reason, advertising and content are targeted either only at beginners who do not understand laptops, or at professionals who care about hardware characteristics and price/quality ratio. There is no combined content even on the pages of top stores. There are characteristics, but there is no conditional “Can handle any game at maximum speed.” It wouldn't hurt.
Mistake #2. Reassessing your target audience.
This is a common mistake of those who do business for a VIP audience - marketing agencies, products for businessmen, luxury housing, and so on. The point is this:
Instead of taking a sober look at their target audience, marketers idealize them.
A trivial example: we want to open a restaurant in St. Petersburg. We will try to stand out and turn an ordinary cafe into something for the middle class. Not the best low prices, good service, excellent food from the chef, interior from Europe, designer with a price tag of hundreds of thousands of rubles. And so on. Who will be our target audience?
If you thought that these are wealthy people with a salary of more than 100 thousand rubles, with expensive cars, who are fond of some kind of equestrian sport, reading classic literature, members of English clubs and so on, then you are mistaken. In fact, the target audience is different: people over 30 years old, with an average income in St. Petersburg of 50+ thousand rubles, who have their own transport, personal or expensive rental housing, who are interested in sports and healthy food (not vegetarians).
Mistake #3. Don't break your audience into segments.
If you do something popular, then you may have a wide target audience. And that's okay. The more accessible a product is, the more buyers it will have. But if you don't segment them, your advertising will be ineffective.
Your audience is tea lovers. There can be different groups in the target audience:
- students 18-25 years old, children of rich parents who want to stand out, and they don’t want to eat shortbread;
- women 25+ who are passionate about healthy food;
- businessmen 30+ who switched to good products;
- office workers 25+ who want to give a gift to their boss.
What if you divide the audience by color and type of tea? And each audience segment will have its own advertising!
You don’t need to think that audience segmentation is possible only with a product for the masses. Even highly specialized products like courses on promoting social networks can be different: businessmen who want to promote their product on their own; and who are developing a new niche; and other people who would like to build a personal brand or collect as many likes as possible.
These mistakes are common among novice businessmen who picked up marketing basics from famous gurus and now think they know everything. Don't do the above and you'll have a much better chance of selling your product.
Features of determining the target audience for a specific product
I will tell you about one project in the launch of which I took part. What we had: a product for gamers - the ability to draw maps and practice tactics for multiplayer games. Additional products: educational videos, analysis of games of professional teams, distance learning in cyber schools.
The initial hypothesis was this: our target audience is interested in computer games. Mostly guys. Age - from 14 to 26 years.
To test this hypothesis, gaming communities were analyzed. Direct competitors (Western service for creating tactics) and its clients were analyzed. Advertising was launched to the audience of a competitor’s group and analytical services for games.
As it turned out in reality: schoolchildren aged 14 to 16 years old could not pay a monthly subscription. They just didn't see the point. There were less than 5% of clients in this age category. Most of the subscriptions were from guys aged 17-22 who were either in college or had graduated from it. Another category of people appeared: men 28+ who wanted to learn how to play with their old friends. It was a surprise to everyone, but about 20% of the guys were of this age.
We divided the audience into 3 segments. First: guys, 17-21 years old, who wanted to become. The poorest audience, who only bought a subscription to the service. But there was a lot of it, about 30% of all users who visited our service. They actively participated in the actions. Advertising for them: “become a professional athlete” (videos on Youtube, on channels that teach how to play correctly).
In an amicable way, we could exclude this category, because it brought in much less money than the remaining two. But the mission of the project was precisely to help such guys.
Second segment: audience 17-24 who wanted to learn how to play better. Here everything was much more interesting. These guys periodically purchased paid consultations and analysis of tactics from professionals. They brought about 50% of the service’s profit.
For this group, an additional new system payment - you could pay for your subscription with things from the games. This increased profits by 20%.
Third segment(guys 28+) brought in terms of one person much more money. Advertising channels were the same as in the previous case: Yotube in an entertainment format and public pages. In contact with - The best way communicating with such an audience.
To work with this group, it was hypothesized that gaming magazines might also be suitable. They really had an effect, but they worked worse than the usual channels on Youtube.
Our own channel on Youtube, on which free content was periodically posted, had a good effect in attracting all three segments of the target audience. These were small analyzes, tips on games and a whole block of materials on how to become better without regard to what you play.
Conclusions: The initial hypothesis for this project did not prove to be true. But thanks to timely analysis and changes in focus groups and the approach to analyzing the target audience, the project reached stable income. Now it is gradually developing, attracting new partners to work together to promote e-sports.
How to find target audience on social networks
Social networks provide an excellent opportunity to work with your target audience. Their creators did almost all the work for us. There is a category of interests to see what a person thinks about himself. There are groups that more fully reflect what a person is interested in and what kind of content he wants. There is also a wall to see what a person wants to leave for himself and his friends who follow him. And many other, at first glance, inconspicuous things, from which a portrait of the buyer and his interests can then be seen.
In order to find your target audience on social networks, you need:
- Manually analyze the target audience.
- Buy a parser and select it automatically.
The first option is more reliable. You can analyze the page yourself, find triggers that you can cling to, and find the place where you will upload content. But this can be done when your product is niche and you can track down a potential niche manually.
Let's take for example one that makes unique products. His name is Andrey Zakharyan. When he launches the next course, he looks at who from his community ( regular customers, who have been with him from the very beginning), this course will suit you. And if there are a lot of such people, he does it. If it helps them, the product enters the market after some time.
But this is only possible in cases where you have an almost unique product, but not for widespread use. You can manually analyze 200-300 people. This will take several weeks (and getting to know them closely). If you have a wide audience, you will have to use parsers for social networks, for example, TargetHanter.
As you can see, parsers have many tools for analyzing the target audience. You send a link to a community, a person, a block of interests, a video, analyze surveys, products, friends, and so on. Parsers help make a wide selection for advertising. This is exactly what they are needed for. You are unlikely to be able to manually analyze everyone who is subscribed to public pages about construction on VKontakte. But it’s easy to do it programmatically.
This is the main function of parsers. But such programs also allow you to understand what content is relevant to the target audience and make it as interesting as possible. The algorithm is no different from the standard one. Brainstorming -> analysis -> segmentation -> advertising. Only instead of Wordstat you will have to use other programs.
Gathering a target audience is the foundation for promoting a product. Without a clearly collected target audience, you will not be able to understand who to sell your product or service to.
Public speaking is a battle between the speaker and the audience in a game of Question and Answer. The speaker always wants to win. Answer all questions and brilliantly overcome difficult situations that the listeners have prepared.
We talk about techniques that will teach you how to respond to awkward questions listeners.
Vaccination against tricky questions
The action force is equal to the reaction force. Tell your child “no need to come” instead of “come quickly to me”, the positive effect will be immediate. The situation is similar with the audience.
Begin the questions phase with the phrase: “Now time for your questions. Ask the most tricky ones. Love them". You have turned everyone who wants to ask complex issue into your ally. Such words discourage the desire to enter into confrontation with you.
What to do with a question you don't want to answer
There is a prejudice that the speaker is obliged to answer every question asked of him. It is not true. The speaker may not give an answer for two reasons: he does not know the answer or does not want to answer.
Directly stating that you don’t want to answer is not the right decision.
Instead of “Leave me alone with your stupid questions,” say a simple thing: “Right now I’m not ready to answer, there’s not enough information” or “It’s not in my rules to answer with unverified facts.” Then promise the author of the question to prepare and take his contact information so you can give an answer later. This action will indicate that your audience and your business are important to you.
What to do with a listener who disagrees with your opinion
If the listener doubts the reliability of your words, listen to him anyway. Radislav Gandapas suggests using student techniques with such students. Begin your answer with the phrase: “To understand your question, you need to tell me about this...”. Then continue to say what you need to say.
Often such listeners act as “intellectual terrorists.” Instead of your answer, they want attention and a piece of the speaker's glory. It is enough to draw the audience’s attention to their horizons and erudition so that they no longer ask awkward questions.
When Arnold Schwarzenegger was running for governor of California, at a press conference a journalist asked: “Is it true that you acted in porn films when you were young?” In such a situation, any answer would be a losing one. Arnold found perfect solution: “This is old news. Next question."
It's worth learning the art of casual ignoring from Arnie.
What to do when the audience doesn't ask anything
The speaker says: “Now is the time for questions. Ask,” and the answer is silence. After half a minute of silence, the lecturer pessimistically adds: “Well, since there are no takers...”. Doesn't sound like an amazing finale to a performance, does it?
There are several ways to help your audience.
Look around the audience. If you notice a slight movement of one of them, catch his eye and offer to start with a friendly smile. Most often, listeners are afraid to ask the first question.
Prompt the audience with, “So. First question…". Smile and be friendly.
Start yourself: “I am often asked...”. After this, listeners will gain courage and start asking.
What to do if a question throws you off balance
The listener asked such a pointed question that you were completely unprepared for it.
There is no point in hiding your feelings. It will be comical. The audience will immediately feel that you are being disingenuous. Instead, honestly admit that you are confused. But not with the words: “I’m confused.” Shift the emphasis to the questioner: “You made me embarrassed,” “And you know how to drive lecturers into a corner.” Don't be afraid of this wording, you are simply stating a fact and becoming closer to the audience.
To win the Question and Answer game, the speaker does not need to attack or defend. Instead, enjoy your peace of mind. Remember that it is better not to imitate endurance, but to preserve it.
