Feel at Ease on the Phone by Building Natural Conversations

This one will change your stilted speech into friend-building conversations.

Ari Galper tells this amusing story:

"I was sitting at my desk last week when my phone rang. I picked it up and said, "This is Ari with Unlock The Game." The woman on the other end of the phone said, "Hi, my name is Julie Jackson, I'm with XYZ company and we are a…and we offer…". As she continued to speak, I stopped her in mid-sentence and said, "Hi, Julie." There was dead silence on the phone.

I could sense her struggling to react to my spontaneous overture at making personal, genuine contact. She was so locked into her presentation or script that she had no idea how to respond to me. The idea of just conversing with me in her most natural way was a completely foreign concept.

(She eventually took a deep breath and we transitioned into a very pleasant conversation about the possibility of us being a "fit".) What has happened to us? Can't we just strike up a conversation with people we don't know and build a relationship that way?"

Isn't it odd that we know how to naturally, conversationally and spontaneously speak with our friends and family, but when it comes to talking business, some switch seems to trip in our heads, causing us to become stiff and robotic? Why the Breakdown? It happens because when we're talking to someone we’d like to do business with, we want something from them and they sense this hidden agenda of ours. Their reaction to this immediately destroys the trust building process of communication.

We go into our personal relationships simply wanting to know the other person, but we go into sales situations with agendas and assumptions. Maybe we believe that we must control the process, the conversation, in order to make a sale -- so we don't consider the option of building trust with our prospective client through natural and honest conversation. Since our goal is to sell our service, when we call someone, often we're trying to get information, we want to talk to the decision maker, we'd love to schedule an appointment, and finally, we want to make a sale. In other words, we want something before the other person even says "Hello". In order to be successful, it's time to throw out our selling mindset and language and tap into our natural language.

Here’s How:

Don’t use a goal-oriented agenda; use a trust-building agenda Learn to enjoy the process of building a new relationship

Build a dialogue;
As crazy as this sounds, avoid centering the conversation around you and your products or services.

Enter the conversation without assumptions
Don't be overconfident -- be humble

Oozing overconfidence when you make first contact with someone you’d like to do business with will only serve to set off 'sales alarms'. Being humble does not mean that you're weak. Instead, it helps the person you're speaking with to understand that you're human; it helps to begin the trust-building process. Visualize the person you're speaking with as a potential friend rather than a potential client. Your conversation will then be more natural with them. Tapping into your own natural language abilities triggers those same abilities in the person you're conversing with. As you abandon your 'business language' they will abandon theirs and you'll begin to communicate naturally. Simply stated, just be yourself.

Natural language is the crucial secret to changing the outdated buyer-seller role and creating a trust-based relationship based on open, natural conversation. If you'd like to tap into your natural language and feel at ease talking on the phone to potential clients, drop by and say Hi to Ari at Unlock the Game. He's got some free tips there to get you started.

More Articles…

Are You Risking The Relationship for the Sale -- And Then Losing the Sale Anyway?

How to Overcome Client Resistance Without Selling Harder

Ditch the Burden of Making the Sale

7 Ways to Sell and Retain Your Integrity -- Yes It's Possible!