How to Always Know What to Say
Ora Shtull and I recently interviewed internationally bestselling author Phil M. Jones, the youngest executive to ever win the British Excellence in Sales and Marketing Award. Here are the highlights from our conversation.
Ora Shtull: Tell us about your most recent book, Exactly What to Say.
Phil M. Jones: I've trained over 2 million sales professionals. And one of the things I realized is that despite product knowledge or skill set or aptitude, the biggest difference between those that do fine and those that do absolutely awesome is some people know exactly what to say. They know the right words at the right time to be able to trigger the right kind of results. I learned that there were certain specific phrases or words that would trigger parts of the subconscious brain. And the subconscious brain is remarkably powerful in the decision-making process.
William Arruda: You say, "Empower immediate positive action." Tell me how language does that.
Jones: If we're looking to use language to empower an action, we're looking to create movement in their belief, their ideal, or their decision-making process, something that they want to move towards or something they want to move away from. And we can do that by understanding that people make decisions from what they think, what they feel, and what they see. So if we can use words to make people think something, feel something, or see something, then chances are we can help them move themselves towards or away from something.
Shtull: Once we connect with someone, what kind of magic words can we use to build trust and camaraderie and sustain the relationship?
Jones:What often happens under our goal to find trust with somebody is we ask a question of them, we receive their answer, and we then proceed to go on to tell them our version of their answer. So we might say, "Hey, where did you go to school?" They say, "Hey, I went to school over here." And you say, "Oh, I had a friend who went to school there." And you go on to tell them all about your friend that went to the same school that they went to, thinking that you're building rapport.
What we should be doing to show trust is to show interest. And what that would mean is having the ability to ask three, four, five, six, seven more questions. So if we ask somebody about their schooling and they told us, we might then say, "Well, what was that like there? Who else did you meet? And what were your reasons for studying there? And how have you found that degree serves you in the workplace? And where is it taking you?"
So if you want magic words that can help win you more trust, many of these are difficult to spell. They're words like, "Yeah." "Mmm-hmm." Those noises say go on, go on, go on. That's where we win trust. We show people we have a genuine interest in them by deciding in that moment that they're the most important part of the conversation, not us.
Arruda:Can you talk about some important business situations and the right magic words to make things work to our advantage?
Jones:When you're looking to introduce a good idea to somebody, you're normally getting pushed off before you even get a window of opportunity for them to listen to you. So we need a rejection-free opening formula that can allow us to get our idea in front of somebody, firing up their motivation of curiosity. So if I want to suggest something to say to your boss, I might start by saying, "Hey, I'm not sure if it's for us." Or, "I'm not sure if it's for you." Firstly, their curiosity is fired by making it decide, "Well, what is it?" I've got to find out what "it" is. A little voice also says, "Well, I'll be the judge of that," which creates the motivation to say, "Well, we're going to take this conversation further." I don't make them drink, but I make them thirsty.
Shtull: What about saying no? A lot of our clients are in situations where they want to say no to their boss.
Jones:It's the person who's asking the questions that's always in control of the conversation. What is the question that can put us back in control of the conversation and perhaps allow our boss to be able to see it from a different angle? Quite often, you're probably not looking to say no. You're probably looking to say, "I'm not going to do that unless there is something more in this for me or something else that you're going to give." That's what we're really saying. We're not saying it's a flat-out no. We're saying it's a conditional yes, yet we haven't identified what the conditions are.
The conditional clause is, "If I can, will you?" So they say, "Look, I really want you to be able to take on this extra responsibility in the department." "Well, if I can do that for you, are you in a position to be able to give me that $20,000 raise we've been talking about?"
Now who's in the position of saying no?
Arruda:Let's say your boss says something like, "Well, I would love to give you that raise, but as you know, there's a moratorium on raises right now." How do you move forward?
Jones:What I would push back for is, "Well, what other alternatives do we have in order to be able to achieve the same results?" What I've done is I've moved this to "us versus the problem." If you don't know what you want ahead of a conversation, you shouldn't really be going into it. If you're asking questions, you can never be wrong.
Unfortunately, what happens more and more in today's modern age is that we avoid conversation in favor of distance communication, allowing people to make their mind up in their own time. What this leads towards is people trying to use manipulative language to force people down a pre-determined outcome that they've chosen for them with little consideration as to what could be in it for the other person. So I would rather stay in the line where we both care about achieving the same thing – an outcome in which everybody wins.
William Arruda is the cofounder of CareerBlast and creator of the complete LinkedIn quiz that helps you evaluate your LinkedIn profile and networking strategy.
How to Always Know What to Say
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamarruda/2018/08/05/how-to-know-exactly-what-to-say/