You’re young, excited, and ready to provide your value to customers. Your train of thought is traveling at 1000 MPH and you can talk even faster. You know the answer to every question and objection before your customer is finished speaking. You’re also eager to show them you know it.
Do you happen to be from Boston or New York? Yeah, thought so.
This is fine when you’re trading blows with those from the Northeast in the intricate chess battle that is sales. (In fact, they’ll respect you more for it. True story that played out for me this week.)
But, what does this mean when you’re working with a deliberate, thoughtful southerner, a mild-mannered Midwesterner, or even someone from another country whose native language isn’t English? (Or, such as the Irish, are used to a different accent.)
When working with these customers, the express train of thought you have simply doesn’t run parallel to theirs and this creates a massive problem. As the old saying goes, “telling isn’t selling”. No matter how much movies like, The Wolf of Wall Street and Boiler Room* romanticise the fast-talking New York salesman… It’s simply not applicable to working with real customers. They need to believe they’ve found the solution themselves and you need to schedule the situation so their train of thought arrives at the final station before you have to announce their arrival.
Well, how can I slow down without losing the edge that my natural speed provides? Let’s pause on this for a second and consider…
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Wait, that’s it. Pause.** Once your customer is done speaking, count to 3 in your head (don’t worry, you already have the answer, remember?) and then respond. This serves 3 purposes:
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It gives your customer’s train of thought a chance to pull into the station parallel to yours.
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You eliminate the need to use filler words that typically come with responding too quickly such as: uh, um, and got it. These add nothing to the conversation and make you come across as less confident.
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Finally, you show that you have taken the time to listen to their question, internalize it, and care enough to help them find the answer.
If you use pauses effectively, you won’t need to slow down or change the way you naturally talk. In fact, all you will have to do is care. Care about your customer and the unique problems they need to solve for.
If you care for them, they will care for you in return and will be happy to trade for the solution to their problem.
*You know you love your job if you’ve seen this one.
**The inspiration and all the credit for this post goes to my Dad for the feedback (due to his 25+ years of experience in Solutions) he gave me after listing to one of my recorded calls.