Right Questions vs. Right Answers

I’ve noted before my love of the Harvard Business Review. I used to read church leadership stuff. Then I realized most of it was re-digested info from HBR. Two or three years later. Now I just read the HBR and do the business-to-church adaptation myself.

This past week, there have been several great articles that have really gotten me thinking.

The first is an article titled, "The End of SolutionSales," by Brent Adamson, Matthew Dixon, and Nicholas Toman. It’s a pretty long and involved article, and has several interesting insights. What really jump at me was the part where they talk about how the idea that sales people are providing a solution the customer needs to find is no longer working. People have access to tons of information online, and they come armed to the sales/purchasing process.

A great illustration they used told of a top sales person who came to a presentation with the info the client requested, said he wasn’t going to present it, that he was sure they could read it over later. Instead, he used his time to explain what he thought they should have been looking for—the questions and qualities that should have been priorities.

So the long and short of my reflection is this…what is, instead of trying to share the gospel with people by telling them we have the answers, we approached it as an opportunity to help teach them how to think ABOUT the decision they face—about how they will understand God and how they will integrate their faith and beliefs into all of there lives. This is, I think, a very subtle shift for some, but for many, I think this is a radical reframing of the entire thing that could offer immense success in a world where people can Wikipedia even Christian theology and Google searches offer up an overwhelming plate of answers, all claiming to be the right ones.