To Demonstrate One’s Expertise, It Is in the Questions You Ask More than the Answers You Give

When Youth is a Disadvantage

Many firms we (The DiJulius Group) work with have young professionals, recent college graduates, in client-facing positions. These roles can be in finance, legal, IT, medical, physical therapy, sales, account executives, and consulting industries, to name a few. The issue with service providers in their mid-twenties is that they can have credibility issues due to their lack of experience and youthfulness.

We get asked to help train these young professionals in two primary areas: service aptitude skills (soft skills) and how they can demonstrate their expertise in their field. Nothing will shake a client’s trust faster than thinking they are dealing with someone totally green and inexperienced. No customer wants to be a newer employee, Ginny Pig.

*Related – The Most Important Customer Service Skills Your Employees Need To Have

Most young professionals make the mistake of immediately starting to share all they know with their potential clients when trying to demonstrate their knowledge and expertise. Unfortunately, this technique does the opposite. It can sound scripted and waste the customers’ time with irrelevant information.

How a Person Demonstrates Their Expertise Quickly

To demonstrate one’s expertise, it is in the questions you ask more than in the answers you give. The questions you ask often reveal:

• Depth of knowledge — Someone with expertise knows where the real complexities lie and frames questions that uncover them.
• Pattern recognition — Experts don’t just ask surface-level questions; they cut to the underlying principles or root causes.
• Perspective — A well-formed question shows you understand context, priorities, and implications.
• Curiosity + humility — Great questions show you’re not trying to prove you know everything, but that you know enough to ask what really matters.

In fact, in consulting, leadership, sales, medicine, law—almost any field—the quality of your questions sets you apart from someone who dispenses answers.

An Expert Question Opens a Door, While a Novice Answer Closes One

The best sales professionals stand out and win their clients’ business when they know their customers’ world better than they know it themselves, teaching them what they don’t know but should. The best reps win that battle not by “discovering” what customers already know they need but by teaching them a new way of thinking. Prompting the buyer to think, “Huh, I never thought of it that way before.” The potential customer learned so much on the discovery call that they would have been willing to pay for the conversation.

“The goal is to take customers on a roller-coaster ride, leading first to a rather dark place before showing them the light at the end of the tunnel. And that light, of course, is your solution,” shares authors Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson in their book The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation. “You want to make the customer feel sick about all the money they’re wasting, or revenue they’re missing, or risk they’re unknowingly exposed to.”

A great professional catches the customer off guard with an unexpected viewpoint—to surprise them, make them curious, and get them wanting to hear more. “If your customer’s first reaction to your insight is enthusiastic agreement, then you haven’t taught them anything. And that’s a dangerous place to be,” the authors share. “Sure, it always feels great when your customer says, ‘I agree!’ Remember, the real value of the interaction isn’t what you sell; it’s the insight you provide as part of the sales interaction itself.”

A great example of educating the buyer on something they may not know should sound like, “We’ve worked with several companies like yours, and we’ve found that these three challenges come up again and again as by far the most troubling. Is that what you see, too, or would you add something else?”

Educate vs Sell

The best brands teach their employees to educate customers rather than sell to them. Sometimes, when it is genuinely in their best interest, that may mean talking a potential buyer out of making as big a purchase as they initially thought. Sounds crazy? Trust me, every time we have done that with a client, they spend more with us in the long run because we just proved our number one priority is what is in their best interest, not just capitalizing on that one sale.

Building Rapport

Like demonstrating your expertise, building rapport must happen at every point of contact throughout the sales cycle. The key skills needed are paying attention, having insatiable curiosity, and incredible listening. The best way to focus on building a relationship with another person is to learn their FORD (Family, Occupation, Recreation, & Dreams). If you try to find out about two of these subjects, you not only have a relationship, but you also own that relationship. FORD represents people’s hot buttons, what they care about the most. FORD is what they are passionate about. It is the topics that make them light up that they talk about in detail. Constantly referring to FORD keeps the focus of the conversation on the other person.

Every time you communicate with a customer, whether over the phone, electronically, or face-to-face, you should collect and utilize customer intelligence. That doesn’t mean you interrogate them; you are not rattling off question after question to tick off the answers to each item of their FORD. However, it’s extremely simple to work on a few questions about these subjects in the natural flow of a conversation. Once you get someone talking, typically, they will offer most of the information on their own. All you have to do is sit back and listen.

The best way to make this part of your daily habits is to create a system for collecting and retrieving people’s FORD. Most of our clients build a FORD tab in the customer relationship management (CRM) software that they can access on their computers and mobile devices.

These tools help us focus on all the customer intelligence we encounter daily. For instance, customer intelligence notepads are ideal for professionals on the run, in meetings, and at networking events. As soon as you walk away from the customer, prospect, neighbor, or person you just met, write down the key things they just told you (for example, leaving for a vacation, an alumnus of Northwestern University has a daughter on a traveling volleyball team).

It Is All About the Follow-up

Immediately after every stage of the sales process, the initial call, the discovery process, the proposal, the sale closing, and the post-sale, great salespeople send a follow-up email, recapping the next steps. Your recap should include valuable resources (articles, case studies, etc.) of the information you shared, as well as a quick mention of FORD you picked up on from the call, i.e., “I hope you enjoy your weekend getaway to Nappa,” or “Can’t wait to hear how your son’s team does in his tournament.”

Here are some examples of expert-level questions across different fields:

Business / Strategy

Instead of: “What are your company’s goals?”
Ask:

• “What trade-offs are you facing between short-term revenue growth and long-term positioning?”
• “Where do you feel you’re leaving the most value on the table — operations, customers, or people?”

Shows you understand businesses succeed by balancing competing priorities, not just setting goals.

Leadership / Coaching

Instead of: “How’s your team doing?”
Ask:

• “What conversations are your people not having that they probably should?”
• “If you left for 3 months, what would fall apart first?”

Reveals blind spots and system weaknesses rather than surface impressions.

Healthcare / Medicine

Instead of: “Where does it hurt?”
Ask:

• “What makes the pain better or worse during your daily routine?”
• “What has this kept you from doing that you care most about?”

Shifts from symptoms to quality of life, which often changes the treatment approach.

Sales / Consulting

Instead of: “What budget do you have?”
Ask:

• “If this problem went unsolved for a year, what would it cost you?”
• “How are you currently measuring success, and what would ‘breakthrough improvement’ look like?”

Focuses on value creation, not just numbers.

👉 Equip your young professionals with the skills to earn trust, build credibility, and win clients.

Book a complimentary advisory call with a DiJulius Group expert today. You’ll learn how to empower your team, consistently create exceptional experiences, and, ultimately, build a culture that keeps top talent and loyal customers coming back.