3 Critical Communication Tactics To Master Verbal Kung Fu

[Chris]

3 Critical Communication Tactics To Master Verbal Kung Fu
By Larry Prevost, Dale Carnegie Training Instructor

Recently, my little nephew loaned me his copy of "The Karate Kid" with Jaden Smith as the bullied kid named Dre and Jackie Chan as the handyman who becomes his mentor and teacher.

Naturally, there were some differences between the original "Karate Kid" and this new version. However, they did try to keep the basis of the story intact, and one of the things they mapped over was the lesson embodied in what became a popular 1980s catchphrase, "wax on, wax off."

In the new version, Jackie Chan's character, Mr. Han, makes his young student take off, put on, and hang up his jacket numerous times throughout the day--with attitude. In fact, Dre spends the first part of his training hanging up his jacket all day, rain or shine, for several days until he's had enough.

He shouts: "I got it. OK? I put my jacket on a thousand times. I took it off a thousand times. OK? This is stupid. I'm done. They can beat me up if they want to."

That's when Mr. Han reveals why he has his young charge performing this seemingly mundane activity by unleashing a barrage of intricate strikes, all of which the boy blocks by performing the same motions he's been practicing for days.

After performing these combat drills with him, Mr. Han states: "Kung fu lives in everything we do. It lives in how we put on a jacket and how we take off a jacket. It lives in how we treat people. Everything is kung fu."

When I saw this, I thought to myself, "This has a direct application in sales."

One of the challenges we face in sales is how we communicate to our prospects and clients. I've been reviewing some of the questions that have come in for the Manta sales expert, and many of them concern what to say when opening a call on the phone, how to introduce yourself, or what to say when you drop in to see a prospect unannounced.

Every day, new sales people--and sometimes even seasoned veterans--look for some type of verbal magic that's going to give them the edge in dealing with their prospects. They look for magic words to get past the gatekeeper, special phrases to identify the decision maker, or some verbal kung fu that's going to make the prospect buy what they are selling.

When they leave the office, this same person stops at the dry cleaners and grumbles at the counter person as they pick up their clothes, mumbles something to the cashier while paying for their groceries and gives their spouse the evil eye when they walk in the door.

Then, the next morning when they get into the office, it's all "smiles and dials" as they ask themselves, "Where's that Manta article about the five power phrases guaranteed to get me in the door?"

Sales success depends heavily on communication. Communication is not something that we practice only at the office or in front of a prospect. Communication is in everything we do every moment of every day. It involves our significant others, our bosses, and even the guy who does our dry cleaning.

Because no two people are exactly the same, there is no cookbook that can give you all of the answers for communicating appropriately with everybody. There are, however, some basic principles and tactics that you can employ to assist you in communicating your ideas and winning people to your way of thinking.

From my time on the phone, out in the field, over the web, and in the classroom, here are three communication tactics I've observed that can give you an edge when talking to your prospects, clients and even the dry cleaning guy.

1. Establish Rapport With Closed-Ended Questions

I was on a conference call with about 30 other sales executives across the country. We were listening to the sales manager as he dissected a recorded sales call. During the course of the recording, he asked the prospect a string of closed-ended (or yes or no) questions to which the prospect answered "yes" multiple times. After the recording, he asked the group what they noticed about the recorded call. Someone shouted out, "You got 'yes' momentum."

Now, I really don't care what you call it. But when you strategically use closed-ended questions to elicit "yes" responses, you are effectively guiding your prospect through a planned landscape, providing them with a series of stepping stones to bring them to a logical and emotional outcome.

When asked a simple yes or no question, the person being asked will perform a mental comparison and respond accordingly, assuming they understand the question.

For example, when someone asks me, "Is this Larry Prevost," I will perform in my head a comparison between the words I hear, "Larry Prevost," and the sounds in my head that I associate with my name before responding. If they sound similar, then I respond in the affirmative. If they don't sound similar, then I respond either by ignoring the question or with "no."

Generally, this comparison is what most people learn to do very early in life, and the behavior pattern eventually reaches a point where it runs automatically. They aren't even aware of the pattern unless they stop to ponder the question, "How exactly do I know that [insert your name here] is my name?"

If you ask enough strategic closed-ended questions and get affirmative responses, you can effectively match the environment in the prospect's head, pace their internal mental state and achieve a certain level of rapport with them.

That's why when opening a sales call, we recommend starting off by verifying the person's name, title and place of business.

Hello, Bob?

Yes.

I understand that you are the VP of sales at Acme Demolition. Is that correct?

Yes.

Bob, my name is Larry Prevost. I was speaking with your receptionist and he said that your team is looking for a way to effectively market on the web. Is that correct?

Uh, yes it is.

Naturally, when asking these types of questions, you should always have a general idea of the answers your prospect will provide.

Whenever you need to achieve rapport with your prospect or you find that you need to lead your prospect to a particular view, use a series of strategic, closed-ended questions to elicit a string of "yes" responses. You will achieve rapport faster.


2. Begin With a Story as Evidence

In my communications classes, one of the patterns we review deals with effectively addressing opinions. Opinions can be quite a handful to address, especially if they are only based on personal beliefs and don't require a shred of physical evidence. In most instances, once a person's beliefs are set, they will selectively highlight the facts that support their beliefs and conveniently ignore or explain away everything else.

When communicating with your prospect or clients, and they let fly with certain beliefs--like your price is too high or you guys won't be around in two years--remember that everyone is entitled to their opinion.

The question is, how do you talk with a person who believes that their opinion is the foundation for all reality and everything else is irrelevant?

Start by recognizing that this is their opinion and it's based on their observations and perspective. It's not right or wrong. It's their opinion.

Now, you can't tell a person that they are wrong... Well, you can, but that won't get you very far. They will double their defenses, dig in their heels and become more stubborn.

If you want to keep the channels of communication open, don't tell your prospect that they are wrong. Instead, recognize that they are where they are based on their information and perceptions, you are where you are based on your information and perceptions, and use a story as evidence to bridge the gap.

If you just state your opinion after they state theirs, their attention will be focused on how to tell you that you are wrong and they are right, listening only for the points in your argument that they can use against you. Leading off with a story, however, captures and refocuses their attention. It's a big cushion that floats your thoughts and perceptions over to their side without being confrontational or demanding that they concede their position.

Prospect: I saw some of the SEO stuff on the web. It's all hype. We have people internally that can do that stuff in their spare time.

Sales rep: I can appreciate that. Two days ago, I was talking with Bob, the marketing director over at Acme Gaming Enterprises. He told me that for the three years since starting their company, they made great progress on generating traffic to their website. They had hired Tim to plan and review all changes on the site, research keywords, and monitor their position in the search engine results pages. Tim was also doing a lot of the web design, running offline direct mail campaigns and email campaigns in addition to handling their SEO activities. I mean, they really kept Tim hopping. But web traffic was growing and life was good.

Then, as Bob describes it, traffic just tanked. Dropped like a stone. Tim spent days going over his notes trying to figure out what he had changed that had caused his traffic to drop off a cliff. Bob said he consulted regularly with Tim to try to figure out the traffic drop because they were losing revenue through the web channel. Then Bob came across something on his Twitter feed stating that Google had changed its algorithm.

Almost overnight, the rules had changed.

Tim is good, he kept track of a lot of things, but the Google algorithm changes sneaked by while Tim was busy running email campaigns and making website changes.

This showed Bob that he needed more than a part-time individual to keep on top of all of his web marketing activity.

Therefore my recommendation to him, and to you, is to hire a dedicated team that can stay on top of changes in the web world, so you can keep your team focused on what's important to the growth of your business.

Using a story can be a little lengthy. However, when you are faced with sales objections, or even verbal debates at home, using stories as evidence to challenge beliefs can be a very effective tool.

3. Take The 'Nots' Out of Your Verbal Communication

When I start a class, I tell the participants that we will focus primarily on the positive stuff, the stuff they want to accomplish, and we'll refrain from focusing on the negative stuff or what they don't want.

Invariably, I get a few people in the program who can tell me exactly what they don't want in great detail. But when asked what they do want, they are at a complete loss.

When I studied Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), one of the topics that came up was the concept of "not." As my instructor stated: "'Not' is a verbal construct that has no physical representation...unless you are talking about the type of knot at the end of a rope."

Think of it this way: When someone says, "I want a glass of water," we can actually envision in our mind a glass filled with water. But when someone says, "I don't want a glass of water," what do we envision in our minds?

1. An empty glass?
2. A dry lakebed?
3. The Mojave Desert?

Chances are when someone says, "I don't want a glass of water," what pops in your mind is a picture of... a glass of water, which is necessary in order for you to understand the statement.

This provides us with two challenges:

1. In order to understand what your clients or prospects want, both of you have to focus your attention on what they tell you they don't want. As stated above, in order to understand the statement, "I don't want a glass of water," we have to first think about "a glass of water."
2. It doesn't identify what your prospect or client does want in place of whatever it is that they don't want. With nothing new to grab and hold their attention, there is only one thing that they will gravitate toward, the thing that they don't want.

Here's an example: I had a participant come into one of our programs stating that he didn't want to be so self conscious when speaking in front of an audience, such as a group of decision makers. For a sales rep, this is a highly desirable quality to have. However, stating it this way didn't help him achieve his real outcome.

First, in order to understand what he wanted, both of us had to focus on the quality that was causing him the most distress, which was feeling self-conscious in front of an audience. Every time we reviewed his goals and outcomes, our conversation involved the very quality that he didn't want, focusing his attention back on feeling self conscious in front of an audience and reinforcing exactly what he didn't want.

We were constantly reminding him of his challenge and reinforcing the problem, not building a solution to his challenge.

Second, the statement didn't identify what he did want in place of this feeling of self-conscious. He had nothing else to focus his attention on. With nothing else to focus his attention on, he always came back to the quality that he was familiar with, that feeling of being self conscious in front of an audience.

It wasn't until after a couple of sessions that I sat down with him and said: "OK. You don't want to feel self conscious in front of an audience. I can appreciate that. Help me understand what you DO want to feel when addressing an audience?"

His entire demeanor changed, and he started getting excited when we identified several feelings that he could have when speaking in front of an audience. When presented with the new possibilities, he was excited and more than eager to move forward in the program.

Now think about your prospect. They have problems and challenges. You have to help them identify those problems and focus your attention on them initially because that is what your prospect is thinking about.

But you are also a problem solver and a solution provider. At some point, you have to direct the conversation away from what they don't want and help them identify what they do want. Once you can help them identify what they do want, you'll find that moving them to the next stage in your sales cycle will be a lot easier.


Remember: Communication Is In Everything We Do

These are three communication tactics that you can use when dealing with your prospects and clients. However, remember that communication is at the core of everything we do, especially as sales people. It's not something that we can do on a part-time basis or only practice at the office. Communication is not some magic phrase we can whip out to deal with a gatekeeper or some "silver bullets" that we can use to zap the decision maker and close the sale. Communication happens all around us every day. Take every opportunity to practice your communication skills.

I remember a statement from Zig Ziglar, who said that the sales process is a transference of emotion. We transfer that emotion by what we say, how we say it, how we look and what we do. That's how we communicate, and we must practice it every day with every opportunity that comes our way.

Or to paraphrase Jackie Chan's Mr. Han:

"Communication lives in everything we do. It lives in how we drop off our jacket at the dry cleaner and how we pick up our food from the grocer. It lives in how we treat people. Everything is communication."

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About the Author: Larry Prevost is an instructor and manages online reputation programs for Dale Carnegie Training of Ohio and Indiana.