I loved watching Emil Lagasse’s show when the Food Network first launched. Yes, “bam” is the catch phrase that most remember him for, but it’s another, “you can always add, but you can never take away” that sticks with me given its relevance to our sellers for creating more successful interactions with their prospects and clients.
Consider these two scenes of a seller starting a conversation with a prospect who asked, “so what do you do?”
Scene 1
- Seller – “well, we typically solve problems A, B, C and D for our clients. We solve A by… and we solve B by….”
Scene 2
- Seller – “well, we typically solve problems A, B, C and D for our clients. Which of those is most relevant for our chat today?”
Even if our prospect is super detail oriented, they’ll tune out our seller shortly after they start pontificating on how they solve problem A in scene 1 because they want to be the hero in their own story, not a bit player in the seller’s story.
We want to coach our sellers to adjust to their client’s communication language (more or less detail, more task focused or more people focused), but no matter how their client prefers to communicate, when our seller errs on the side of brevity, they promote conversation and build more trust.
By coaching our sellers to have an “always add, never take away” mindset, they will be less likely to unintentionally talk themselves out of a sale and they’ll have greater rapport with their prospects too.
Until next time… go lead.
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