“That’s exactly why open-ended questions work so well because they get the listener to open up and that creates a dialogue which creates a better connection.” I explained. How do you think I will do that?” “Well,” he paused, “By asking me open-ended questions.”Īfter five minutes I asked him, “Did you feel connected?” “Absolutely, I did all the talking and your questions got me to open up more than I thought I would!” he said in surprise. “Next, I will do a five minute role play in which I am the advisor and you are the prospect. I gave him a list of each and he wrote them down. “Jake, underneath the Monologue heading I want you to write “closed-ended” questions and underneath the Dialogue heading I want you to write “open-ended” questions, one question for each line.” I said. If most of my responses are words like, “yes, no, I don’t know” and so on, are we in a dialogue or are you in a monologue?” He paused and excitedly said, “So, in order to connect I need to get you to open up by using opened-ended questions? Let’s go over those!”Īt that moment I knew it was time to create a simple exercise to increase his questions selling skill sets so I had him draw a vertical line on a piece of paper and label the left side Monologue and the right side Dialogue. “Most of the questions you were asking were closed-ended questions which typically illicit a yes or no response. In a dramatic or literary presentation, the verbal parts of the script or text the verbalizations of the actors or characters. Part of speech: noun Definition: A conversation or other form of discourse between two or more individuals. “Jake, it’s not that your questions were wrong but instead it was that you were using the wrong types of questions.” I replied. Dialogue Part of speech: verb Definition: To discuss or negotiate so that all parties can reach an understanding. I guess they weren’t the right ones” he said with shame in his voice. “Do you think I was connected?” I cautiously asked. After five minutes of me grunting replies such as “yes, no, I guess, I don’t know and maybe” I knew Jake didn’t fully understand what he was doing that was hurting him during the conversation he was in a monologue-only delivery whereas he needed to be in a dialogue with me instead. Knowing that questions are important, Jake did his best to uncover my character’s situation and make a good connection but instead he ended up merely pushing me away. During an individual coaching session we role played the first appointment process. For example, take Jake, a financial advisor client of mine whose boss hired me to help him increase his sales skills. You may be surprised to learn that not all questions you ask necessarily create a connection though. The alternative is a well thought out strategy of asking prospects what they think they “should do” to create success for themselves.

However, telling prospects what they “should do” could be a recipe for disaster. A common theme that I have heard from individuals during coaching sessions is that selling is telling, if you just tell them what they need, they will buy. One of the most important of those is sales as without the ability to sell, you would not have a client base. Our analyses suggest that dialogue-videos naturally elicited more constructive and interactive engagement behaviors from the observers than the monologue-videos, which in turn mediated the observers’ own learning.For almost two decades, I’ve been coaching financial advisors and insurance agents in a wide variety of facets of their business. The 3rd set focused on the role of the tutees in the dialogue-videos in eliciting constructive and interactive engagement from the observing students. The 2nd set focused on the activities and behaviors of the collaboratively observing dyads. The 1st set focused on the content of the videos in terms of the tutors’ and the tutees’ moves. Toward that goal, transcripts of video dialogues and monologues, as well as peer-to-peer conversations of the observing students collected in a prior study, were analyzed using the ICAP (interactive, constructive, active, passive) framework as a lens. However, having the observing students watch collaboratively as dyads provided data to carry out in-depth analyses of their conversations and activities in order to understand why dialogue-videos are superior to monologue-videos. These results replicate similar findings in the literature showing the advantage of dialogue-videos even when observers watched them individually. In monologue, it contains a contribution from the designer alone, so either individual can act only on an individual contribution. In fact, they can learn as well as the tutees in the dialogue-videos. In 2 separate studies, we found that college-age students learned more when they collaboratively watched tutorial dialogue-videos than lecture-style monologue-videos.

Dialogue vs monologue