Just Stop Talking

The fact that sales people tend to talk too much is nothing new, but Blair has observed in recent client work just how profound of an effect this pervasive problem has on sales outcomes.

Links

“How and When to Talk About Your Firm”

“Replacing Presentations With Conversations”

Transcript

David C. Baker: Blair today, in the irony-- I can't even get it out, in the irony of ironies, [chuckles] you are going to talk about how we shouldn't be talking. This is going to go great. I can't wait.

Blair Enns: Insert awkward pause, listen to me not talking.

David: Oh, that was a cheap joke, come on. [laughs]

Blair: I know you just thought of that on the fly because it wasn't good enough to have been pondered, so just stop talking is the topic here and I'm going to get you to talk about not talking.

David: Okay, good luck. I'm zen-like peaceful.

Blair: I can end this early, this is not much of a threat. [laughter] You've got other things you could be doing. There's a problem and it's not like you haven't been aware of this for years but it keeps popping up and becoming unignorable. As soon as you told me what you wanted to talk about, I said, "Oh yes, this is great, let's do it." This is good.

David: You're aware of a problem that exists and it's like, "Oh yes, I'm used to seeing this problem," and you live with it to a certain extent. I had this experience recently where there's a part of my house that's just a mess because of me. I just saw it through fresh eyes one day and I realized, "Oh my God, it's not a mess, it's a disaster." I've been living with it. I haven't been able to see it. I knew it was there but I have not appreciated the size of this disaster that I have created. Now I don't think I've created this problem but the problem is that salespeople talk too much.

I've been aware of that forever but just recently over the last few weeks in the work that I'm doing, I'm just seeing it is really pervasive and I don't think we understand what a profound effect it has on our sales outcomes, the fact that we talk too much. I just wanted to double down on, I wanted to write through the problem, so I've written through it and now we'll talk about it. I wanted to write through it so I could just be clear on where is it that I see this showing up, how does it feel to the client? What are the implications in your sales results in your business?

Then offer some structured guidance on, it's a problem we all know we have or many of us do, so clearly knowledge of the problem isn't enough to solve it. What do we do about it? I've got some guidance on that.

Blair: Was there something that prompted you to think about this more recently or is it just finally the pressure built and you thought, "Let's talk about this"?

David: No, I just, for the nature of some of the work I'm doing these days, I find myself observing a lot more sales conversations than I do typically. The pattern's always been there and I realize it is so pervasive, even what I would consider to be good salespeople or better salespeople still talk too much in the sale.

Blair: The first thing I thought of when you sent me this topic was the sales calls that I'm getting, I don't know, it seems like once a week now I get one that's obviously not a human. It's a recording with pauses built in that are designed to anticipate when I'm going to say something, anticipate what my question is, and then try to answer it, and so on. I fell for one of those yesterday and it was a pretty good deal and then when I realized it was a recording, then I was just furious at it. Of course, it made no difference but I'm cussing at it and everything, teaching it new words.

It got me to realize, why does this frustrate me deep in my soul? It's because I know they're not listening. It makes me feel like less of a human because you don't think I'm going to know when a real person is listening? Translating that into sales, we know what it means like we're talking too much but more specifically how does this show up?

David: Yes, so how does it show up? Why are we doing this? The first point is, I have a collection of points under this banner, is we tend to show up in a sales conversation with a list of things that we feel we must communicate. We have information we must impart to the client, and so I'll just run through some of it like we have a value proposition or this statement about how we help. It might be positioning language or some sort of value proposition. We have all of the different things that we might do for the client, our service offerings.

We often feel like we need to communicate to them the clients that we have worked with before to credentialize ourselves. We might want to reference the client that we're working with now which is a lot like them again to credentialize. We have projects or past relationships or even outcomes that we're really proud of and we can't wait to communicate those things. We have projects that we're not only proud of, but we think are very directly relevant to the prospect we're talking to, and we want to communicate those things. We have a proprietary process, whether it really is proprietary or not.

We have some sort of codified methodology on how we bring our expertise to bear, and we can't wait to talk about this. We tend to enter the sale with all of these different points that we feel like it is our job and we can't wait to communicate them to the client.

Blair: The way we know that this isn't listening is because the list of things like you gave a representative sample here, the list doesn't change much. It's going to be the same with most any sales call, which tells us we're not listening, right? Then if you happen to be training somebody that just joined, you might pause the recording and say, "Now here's where I probably would have talked about this client that we did," rather than pausing the recording and saying, "Here's a question you might have inserted at that point," right? Just teaching people to talk more or teaching them how to listen more.

All this list of what, six, seven things, that's a lot of stuff to get in there. That's going to take up most of our sales call.

David: Yes. Your sales calls are going to have to be at least an hour long because you have a lot you want to say, but then ask yourself, is your client sitting there, is that what they're looking for? You have a website. Have they been to your website? Have they got a lot of these questions answered already? Anyway, that's the first collection of things. The first issue is we have a list of things we want to communicate.

Blair: Right. Then also, you're putting pressure on yourself in some unique ways in almost every situation too.

David: Yes. It's the second category of issues here is that you've put pressure on yourself to do various things. One of them, I see this often, I talk about it often, is when we are in salesperson mode when we're stepping into that role, whether it's what we do full-time or we're doing it part-time as a way to win new business, we feel this pressure to be brilliant. We want to show off our brilliance, our expertise. How do we show that off? We intuitively think we show it off through statements and it's somewhat counterintuitive. For the most part, this is a generalization, we do a better job of that by asking questions.

We do feel like we've got to be brilliant so we feel that pressure to communicate how smart we are by saying things. We feel pressure to match the client's need to our supply. The client's talking, we're trying really hard to actually listen, but they state a need and we have a solution for that need. I've talked about this before. We quit listening. It's really hard for a salesperson in that moment who's got a finite number of things that they might sell to not immediately match their supply to the client's need. We try to resist getting too distracted in our own minds.

What's really hard to resist is speaking that out loud. What does it sound like? The client is saying, "Oh, and I also have a problem in this area with the website." The response is, "Oh, we do that. We've done that for somebody before." We match need to supply. Then similar to that, we match our experience to their need. We say, "We've done that," or, "We can do that," or, "You need X." We feel pressure to be brilliant. We feel pressure to, in the moment, often while the client is still speaking, we cut them off to match their need to our supply or their need to our experience.

That's just a category of things, of pressures that we put on ourselves. We shouldn't be taking any of these pressures on because none of these things is the right thing to do.

Blair: In this space, often the salesperson, the new business person, is the principal. You can picture the principal jumping to that conclusion. We do that too. Then in the back of our mind as well, like, "Oh, and payroll is next Thursday too." All these pressures that we're feeling, right? This is all under the category of how does this show up when we're listening to a sales conversation? Why does it sound like somebody is talking too much? The other part of this here that you point out is that money is a part of it. Not many of us are all that comfortable talking about money.

Money is in this equation, and because we're uncomfortable, we just blather on or what?

David: Yes. It's a recurring theme. A lot of the discussions we have in this podcast is this idea that there's something about when the conversation turns to money, the dynamics change, the pressure builds. We find it stressful. In simple terms, I've talked about this before. This is an idea from Oren Klaff, who wrote a really good book called Pitch Anything. He has this phrase, "I am the prize." We use that phrase too. We build on it. We say, "I am the expert. I am the prize." There's a generalization that only one of you, the buyer or the seller can see themselves as the prize to be won in the relationship.

As salespeople, our default is to think that the client is the prize because they have the money. When we are an appropriately positioned specialist, an expert of some kind, our reality is probably closer to this truth. That is that we have more alternative sources of money than the client has alternative sources of expertise. If that isn't the case, then we probably have a positioning problem. If it is the case, if that's the reality, then we should see ourselves as the prize to be won. That should dissipate some of the stress from the money conversations.

Blair: Yes. Even if it isn't the specific words you're using, they're going to pick up something in your voice and your panic versus your confidence that we can talk about money if you want, right? It is what it is, though.

David: Yes. There's that demeanor. You don't have to say much. The client can glean from the way you show up, your body language, the look on your face, how tightly you're holding yourself. They can glean how much or how little you value your own contribution to this relationship. You can overplay this idea of, "I am the prize," and that's not what I'm advocating. If you don't recognize that you have some value and the client would be If they hired you, then you're going to imbue the conversation with unnecessary stress.

Blair: Yes. I think people listening have a sense of what we're talking about. What does this feel like to the client? Flip to the other side of the conversation, listening to all of this extra talking, how does it feel like to the client?

David: Yes, I wish I could go back 10 years and watch recordings of myself in a sales conversation where I'm convinced I spoke too much. I may still speak too much now in a sales conversation, but it feels to me like I don't. How does it feel to the client? If I could go back and watch a recording from 10 years ago and enough time has gone by that I could put myself in the client's shoes, I would probably feel like your constant talking at me, proving, convincing tells me you're not very good at this or you're not very busy. You seem to lack some confidence in your own abilities.

That's the first thing that shines through. We talk about another healthy generalization that we make it win without pitching is this idea that there are only two positions you can occupy in your relationship with your clients. That is one is a vendor and the other is the expert. If you're talking too much, you're busy trying to communicate things, you do it in part because you think that's how you have to prove your expertise. That's really the behavior of a vendor. It is not the behavior of the expert. The expert recognizes and values their own expertise.

They show up with this confidence where they're not working too hard to make sure that you understand it. They assume you know it. Then as the conversation goes on, if it turns out the client doesn't recognize the seller's expertise, they're going to have questions and you're going to have opportunities to address that when you're answering their specific questions. You should be showing up with this expert mindset, "I am the expert. I am the prize." That should release you of this sense of pressure to keep talking. How does it feel to the client? Feels like you're a vendor.

Blair: The sale is the sample. That's something that you say a lot. It applies here maybe, I'm not sure. Is talking a lot going to show up later if in the client relationship it gets translated to, "I'm not listening and customizing my solution for you. I'm forcing this on you. I know best. I don't need your input"? Is it fair to say that it would show up that way too?

David: Yes, it absolutely does. A couple of episodes ago, we talked about this idea of there's this salesperson you and this expert you. They both show up differently in the sale. Salesperson you is not a very good advertisement for expert you. You really want to try to let go of all the salesperson baggage and show up as expert you. When you're talking all the time, that is salesperson you. You think you're modeling expertise, but that is salesperson you trying to impersonate expert you. How about just expert you shows up? That's good enough.

Blair: It's less energy. Yes. Just to quit being two people. We know what it looks like from our standpoint as salespeople, and we know what it feels like to the client. The results though are two you've listed here. One is poor closing ratios, which makes perfect sense to me. The other is prospects going dark, and that what I don't understand.

David: What are the implications? What are the results? You have poor sales numbers. You have poor closing ratios. Maybe your average price is lower than it should be. The non-obvious one is you have this pipeline full of prospects that aren't moving. You might even be at the proposal stage. You have all these proposals out and you're not hearing back. That's what I mean prospects go dark.

Blair: Is it because they don't feel like they're being listened to? They're just not interested and they don't think you're interested in them as people? Is it psychological or something else?

David: Your vendor-like behavior has imbued their decision with a large amount of doubt. They are uncertain. They are conflicted. They want to hire expert you, but all they're seeing so far is salesperson you. They're not convinced that you are the right person or yours is the right organization. They're not saying no and they're not saying yes. They're just not making decisions. They're steeped in their buyer's remorse. It's not so much about what you said, although the issue is you're talking too much, it's how you have been showing up in the sale.

All of the subtle things, including you talking too much, have got you positioned as the needy vendor and you're building the buyer's remorse, which sets in even before a client buys.

Blair: This is why you don't have to be an extrovert to be an effective salesperson. Introverts can be better listeners just by definition, right?

David: I think that's a great point, underappreciated. I don't think I've thought about this a lot, but my intuition, based on what you said, is I actually think you're right. I think in certain domains of where you're selling expertise, you're going to deliver that expertise and first you're selling it. I suspect introverts can become better salespeople than extroverts quite easily because the extrovert is already talking too much. Then you put them into a sales situation, they're talking way too much. The introvert isn't talking enough. In a sales situation, they're probably talking exactly enough.

Blair: I need to do some study on that. That'd be interesting.

David: Yes, it would be.

Blair: I'm listening to this episode and I'm convinced I want to talk less. How do I do it?

David: All right, I have 10 pieces of advice, 10 suggestions. I'd like you to consider each of these suggestions as a possible experiment. You can pick one or you can pick a group of them and stick them all together. First one is, I have a sticky note. I'm standing in my studio, I'm looking at the camera. I don't see you because you and I don't look at each other when we're recording this, but I'm looking at a sticky note with the letters S-T-F-U, which means shut up. Right. It's a reminder to myself when I'm in training mode, Blair, you talk too much.

Number one, sticky note with those four letters or whatever letters are appropriate to you to tell yourself to shut up. Shannon Lee, our managing director has business cards that she hands out and on the back of the business card, it says, "Stop talking."

Blair: I've seen that. Yes, that's great. [chuckles]

David: Yes. Just a little note to yourself before you go into the call, sticky note, stop talking. That's number one. Number two, if you're using Zoom or a web meeting and you're using one of these note-taker AIs like Fathom or Otter, and there are lots of other ones. Most of these will report to you on your talk time. You should aim to keep your talk time in a sales conversation below 40%. In fact, there's a widely understood metric across the broad spectrum of sales that in general, a salesperson should be speaking 30% of the time in a sales call.

Shoot for a baseline, establish a baseline first. Just look at the most recent conversation or track the next one and see what you get and see if you can't get that number below 40.

Blair: Maybe you could say, let's just drop 20% for everybody.

David: Yes, take 20% off everything.

Blair: Drop it, whatever, yes. I use Fathom, I've never looked that up. That would be fascinating.

David: I use it and there's a big number glaring at me in meetings, in conversations that shows what percentage of the time that I am speaking. Somebody once said, I don't remember who, I wish I could attribute this properly, but if you feel after a conversation-- this isn't about sales specifically, but if you feel after a conversation or a meeting that you got to speak "a fair amount of time", you're comfortable with the amount of time you got to speak, then you almost certainly were speaking too much."

Blair: When I talk more than normal, it's because there's somebody in the conversation who's really boring and I just cannot bring myself to listen to it anymore. I'd rather hear myself than them. Normally that's not the case.

[laughter]

David: [laughter] People, I can validate that this is in fact true.

Blair: Sticky note, measure how long you're speaking, aim for 40%. Three is let go of it all.

David: Yes, go in with nothing you have to communicate. That list I read off at the beginning, which is value proposition, experience with clients, et cetera. Just strike that from your repertoire and tell yourself, "I am not allowed to talk about any of these things unless the client asks me specifically." You go in with this blank slate and you tell yourself, "There's no single piece of information that I am looking to communicate in this sales conversation," and this is going to be a hard one to try on. Maybe in your next sales conversation with a prospect that you think isn't a very good fit, one that you're willing to make mistakes on.

Blair: Can I just rant here from like, I've been a pretty good boy for months on end here.

David: That's why we do this for the last seven years so that you can have an occasional rant, so you've been holding back, have at it.

Blair: This doesn't just upset me, make me angry, it just pisses me off. I'm going to illustrate this first. The difference between when I'm on a sales call with somebody that just found me doesn't know I'm an author, doesn't listen to the podcast, doesn't read all the two million words on the website. Contrast that with somebody that I've had a connection with for years. It's a very different kind of conversation.

I really hate the first kind because if you as an agency do a good job of articulating who you are and your ideal client and perspectives on what you believe and the process and your clients and you are in regular conversations with your prospects, a sales call can be exactly what you're wanting here. If you just fail to do your fucking job by not putting marketing stuff out there all the time, this is the first time the prospect has ever had a chance to learn anything about you. What do you think it's going to look like?

It's going to look exactly like you just blabbing on and on because of all these things that you didn't have the discipline to put in over the years, you should have been marketing your firm. It really me pisses off.

David: Wow, how do you really feel? [laughs]

Blair: I'm trying to hold back. It's just not working.

David: That's a great insight. Let me rephrase in my own words what I think I heard you say, which is salespeople talk too much because they're trying to do the job that their marketing should have done for a long period of time beforehand.

Blair: Yes. That was a lot more succinct and kind, but that's exactly the point. I had never really thought about it that way until reading through your notes and it's like, "Of course." Because that should be part of the things we need to ask people to do. We'll quit leaving everything to that one little conversation where you're going to be desperate, right?

David: Yes. It reminds me of something I first read that you wrote many years ago, this idea that marketing is not about getting new clients specifically I mean it is, but you say marketing is really about control. What you mean by that is driving a steady stream of inbound opportunities to you so you get to pick and choose. You're driving those opportunities to you because you're putting your expertise out there, you're letting them make these judgments of you. You are letting them make an assessment of your knowledge level, your skill, your ability to help.

Then by the time they reach out to you, they already see you as an expert. In our world, we call that the flip. We've talked about this in the episode we did called The Four Conversations. I think it's a great insight. Salespeople talk too much because the marketing job hasn't been done and they try to do it in a conversation quite quickly.

Blair: Okay. Sorry.

David: [laughs] Can we resume?

Blair: I got off on that because in point three was you said, let go of it all. You don't have to communicate anything. I thought, "If you've not done any marketing, you've got something to communicate." Your fourth one is, I love this about questions and not statements. I also love the fact that it uses a framework phrase.

David: It's have a framework. Going into your sales conversations, you should have a framework for this conversation. The framework should be not about the statements that you make, but about the questions you ask and you use your talk time to ask questions. Then when the client has questions of you, you answer the questions. You don't pull out a deck, you don't go into presentation mode. Your framework is about questions, not statements.

Blair: Fifth, learn to use pauses like what you tried to do at the beginning of this episode. [chuckles]

David: I thought I did very well at that. Learn to get comfortable with pauses. Seek to increase their length and their frequency, and this is hard at first, but it gets easier very quickly, becomes very powerful. Just leave pauses in the conversation.

Blair: Dig deeper is the sixth suggestion. In other words, follow a trail. See where it's going. Ask a second question.

David: Get the client to elaborate, to stretch out their answers. You ask a question, they give you an answer. "That's interesting. Say more about that." They keep talking. You want them to continue going. They might make a statement. "Our website isn't very good," and you mirror back, "Your website isn't very good?" A lot of people have learned this from Chris Voss and his book, Never Split the Difference. Just mirror back what they said with a question mark and watch as the client keeps talking. Use that technique to keep digging.

Blair: Your seventh suggestion is give yourself some homework. Give yourself something to do so that you're not as likely to talk.

David: I tried this today. I wrote this down in preparation for this podcast as I was coming up with trying to answer my own question. What are the things that you can do? I tried this today. It's really powerful. Here's the quiz. Can you name the emotion the client is feeling? You're listening and you have some homework, and the homework is, you're listening to the words, but what is the emotional state of the client? What are they feeling? Are they nervous? Are they afraid? Are they emboldened?

Whatever the state is, whether it's an emotion or some sort of other similar state, play the game of being quiet and trying to put a label on the emotion. Because if you can understand the client emotionally, you'll have this deeper connection. It will also force you to not speak so much.

Blair: Eighth, the idea is instead of making statements, go to a meeting with a framework of questions, and then once you've finished asking those questions in your framework, ask them if there's anything else they need to know. Will they usually ask something? They usually will, right?

David: Yes. This back to this idea of going in with the framework of questions, and then when you're done asking your questions, ask the client, "What do you need to know about us?" If you've done a great job of marketing, then there won't be a lot of questions, but there might be a lot of questions. They might not know anything about you, but answer the questions as they arise. Don't go into presentation mode. Don't pull out a 30-minute deck on this. Ask the questions and then answer them.

Blair: Ninth is rely on somebody other than yourself to give you some perspective on this. Would that be somebody else in your office, usually?

David: I know you're a big fan of this idea, generally speaking across a lot of different domains. Just have somebody audit you. Have somebody follow you around. Auditing your sales calls these days is really easy because most of them are on Zoom. Most of us are recording most of our calls. I recorded a call, so we do this fairly routinely, but I had a call with a friend of mine who is an author who wanted to walk through his keynote speech, and so I just shut up and listened and I was taking notes.

Fathom is recording and it's recording the transcript and I'm highlighting key parts, positive and negative, and then afterwards, I went through the transcript. Everywhere I've highlighted, I went in and added comments, and then I sent them the annotated transcript. "Here's where you could have paused." "I didn't understand what you said this." Try doing something similar with your sales calls. Record it, hand that recording to somebody else, and say, "Hey, I'm trying to get better at not talking too much. Becoming an active listener.

Can you watch this recording and annotate in the transcript where you think I should have paused where I talked too much? Whatever critical feedback you can give me around my pacing and this idea that I'm trying to talk less." I think these tools that we have now, Fathom, Otter et cetera, even in Zoom, they really allow for this.

Blair: Especially if you give that assignment, make that request of somebody, a friend of yours or a colleague where you always feel heard when you talk to them. There's this woman that you've talked about multiple times. She would be the one that you would hand it to just because they obviously have that skill. That would be interesting. The last one.

David: The last one is a question. "Can you gamify this? If the goal is to not talk so much during sales conversations and you're using these techniques and you're having somebody audit you, is there a way to gamify this?" It's an intriguing question. I'm not sure that I would do it, but--

Blair: You mean like take a drink after you talk too much this time?

David: [laughs] That's actually a pretty good idea. [laughter] Let's see when I do that. Let's have a drinking game podcast episode. We are totally doing this. Okay.

Blair: I'm thinking like taking a drink, would that make you talk more or less? It'd probably make you talk more. Maybe you couldn't take a drink unless you quit talking.

David: Oh, my God. We're doing this. We're totally doing this. However you want to gamify it, alcohol does not need to be involved. Let me make that clear. Of course, you're free to include it. Gamify it.

Blair: This is oddly enough our Just Stop Talking episode went pretty long. That is some irony.

David: Yes. One of the longer ones in quite a while. I know. Irony of ironies. Thank you, Blair.

Blair: Thanks, David.