If You Read One Article About Dumb Questions Read This One
I like obnoxious sayings like “There’s an a-hole in every room and if you don’t know who it is, it’s you” or “There are no dumb questions, only dumb people” - you know, those. They’re fun.
The fact is there are dumb questions, and if your friend or significant other asks one you can have fun with it and rip on the person you are close to for asking it. You’ve almost certainly asked one yourself. I know I have. I’ve asked someone where they’re from or where they went to school five minutes after they told me - I’ve definitely done that. If I do it with a client due to a momentary lapse in focus in the middle of a conversation I’ll beat myself up over it pretty badly. I can’t stand when I realize I just asked a dumb question!
Meanwhile your customers will likely ask dumb questions from time to time. And some of them are indeed really dumb. You don’t want to insult your customers and especially your prospects who you may not have a rapport with yet, so you have to be nice and answer the question in a helpful way while finessing your answer to not make them feel dumb if it’s a very obvious answer. That’s an important people skill.
So here are my two main takeaways for you on Dumb Questions and how to approach them:
Now here’s where it gets a little interesting, and the two main takeaways I want you to get from this post. The first one is for business owners OR social media managers / digital marketers:
1) Some questions from your customers may appear to you as dumb, but if they are asked repeatedly then it could be your information - your website or your social media profiles that are generating these same “dumb” questions.
Your information may be incomplete or written in a confusing way, or maybe the layout of your website is confusing and people can’t find the most basic info. Make sure YOU are not the problem. You would be surprised how one word can make a policy seem confusing and be the reason people are not understanding what seems very simple to you. Go back and scan your wording and look at it as someone who wouldn’t be familiar with the topic (like a potential customer) or even ask someone you know to do it for you so you get an outside set of eyes on it. This goes for your own copy or your client’s.
The second one is specifically for social media managers / digital marketers:
2) Some questions from your social media client’s customers may appear to you as dumb - or (also important) outliers that you just don’t see often. Have a process for keeping track of these so you can answer them.
Here’s an example of #2
Five Guys Burgers and Fries has the best fries in the game. There’s pretty much no debate - hand cut every day and they are REALLY serious about their fries - I’ve seen it first hand since the Five Guys Michigan group is one of my clients. I think twice in the last year I’ve had a customer ask on Facebook why we won’t make their fries “well done”? As a Five Guy fry snob now I find this question pretty annoying personally, but it’s not up to me to be annoyed and I have to make sure I put my Five Guys hat on when I answer as any good digital marketer has to do on behalf of their clients. And of course there is a very good answer for this - it’s that we can’t really get a “well done” fry because of our cooking process. The inside simply cooks out and you get a hollowed out, burnt tasting product.
Now here’s the thing: I’ve written here before about how I spent a day at Five Guys flipping burgers at my own request so I could get a little training and have a first hand experience that would allow me to better speak in a Five Guys voice online, and I learned a lot that day. But while I do engage and post for Five Guys every day I don’t work there and spend all of my workday time as a Five Guys employee, and when this question came in I felt like I kinda knew, but I didn’t quite have the proper answer. I had to ask my contact.
So back to another facet of the dumb question concept… You know how when you’re in class or a seminar you are encouraged to ask questions even if you think it’s a dumb one because there are “no dumb questions” and if you have the question there’s a good chance someone else has the same question? Same concept here. I may think the fries are perfect. Indeed, they have the reputation for being perfect. But if one person thinks they aren’t done enough there will likely be another who agrees. So KEEP TRACK of the answers to the outliers, so you do NOT have to bug your contact to get an answer they’ve had to give you already. Put them in an Evernote note or a Word / Excel document - whatever works for you. No matter the question, there is a good chance it will be asked again!
So there you go. Maybe there are dumb questions, but be smart in how you handle them!!! Do you do these already? Are you going to use these tips? What’s the best dumb question you had and how you handled it? Chime in with a comment!
M10 Social is owned by Doug Cohen in West Bloomfield, MI and provides social media training and digital marketing services from the Frameable Faces Photography studio Doug owns with his wife Ally. He can be reached there at tel:248-790-7317, by mobile at tel:248-346-4121 or via email at mailto:doug@frameablefaces.com.
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