Our Mission:
To develop confident, customer-facing professionals renowned for their exceptional ability to discern and address the core needs of customers through active listening and insightful questioning.
The Curriculum:
Our philosophy is that learning to ask better questions is straightforward but mastering it is a lifelong journey. It demands skill, refined through deliberate practice and repetition.
There are libraries of books and classes that emphasize the importance of asking better questions and active listening. Many of these offer useful techniques. Yet, few provide the hands-on experience necessary to build true muscle memory. Those that incorporate role-playing often skim the surface, focusing more on an author’s personal anecdotes or a consultant’s PowerPoint slides than on immersive role-playing.
We set out to change this. The Asking Questions Curriculum offers an affordable way for people leaders and talent departments to elevate the skills of their sales, engineering, and customer-facing teams, fostering deeper customer connections.
Our Self-Guided workshops allow a people-leader to impart career-long skills, and refreshers, for less than the cost of a meal-per-person. Each exercise not only sharpens question and active listening skills but also imparts invaluable lessons, ensuring a profound and lasting impact.
The Creator:
Ross Zambanini is the creator of the Asking Questions curriculum.
For nearly twenty years, Ross led blended technical and commercial teams that developed and commercialized hundreds of millions of dollars of new solutions across Aerospace, Automotive, Energy, Life Science, and Industrial markets. In his time at private and public employers, Ross’s group was referred to as “The Talent Factory” due to the attention paid to developing individual contributors and managers.
Ross has held a variety of roles over his career, including account management, sales manager, product line & pricing manager, strategic alliances manager, marketing & commercial excellence director, and global leader of market expansion. Ross formed his passion for developing people whilst a partner at LORD Corporation, a $1-billion+, privately held technology company. He was retained post acquisition of LORD by a publicly traded, Fortune 250 company.
Ross is a former adjunct professor and board member for the Sam & Irene Black School of Business at Penn State. Ross has an MBA from the University of Massachusetts and holds a BS in Marketing, a BS in International Business from Penn State University, and a certification in Language and Society from Universidad San Pablo de Olavide.