Language is such a beautiful thing. For example if you’re looking to release a product, let’s say an amazing container, you might say to somebody, “Well, how much would you pay for that?” And they’ll say, “Wow, I don’t know, $100!” and you go ahead and you produce it and you go to them and say “Well, it’s ready, that’ll be $100 a piece.” And they suddenly say, “Well, I’m not buying it for $100, so what’s a better question to ask?
A better question to ask is what would be the maximum amount of money that you would pay for this container. They might give you $80, and when you build it and go back to them and say “Well, this’ll be $80” how many people would actually buy it? So the language can actually craft that sentence even better. You could say “Let me ask you a question: what would be the maximum amount of money you’d be willing to pay for this comfortably?” They might answer back $70. And sure enough, when you go back to them and say this is $70, a whole lot more of them are going to say yes, that’s exactly what I want.
So what does it do? “How much would you pay for this” gets you answer somewhere around the bottom of where you want to be. “What would be the most you’d pay for it”, you get another answer that’s closer. “What would be the most that you would pay comfortably” gets you close to actually what they would do in action. So, think about the language you use when you’re talking to your customers, when you’re going for the close. See if there’s some slight changes that you could do that would give you dramatically better results, and the only way you can do that is to record yourself when you’re actually in conversation with a client and later on look at the points in that conversation where you could have crafted your question in a much better way. You see when you’re in sales, and you’re talking about the product and what you’re doing. You’re thinking about the customer, you’re not really thinking about the words you’re using. If you record it and later on transcribe it, you may realize, “Isn’t that interesting. That is a really amazing phrase and I should use that more often.” Or, “I went to ask them for a close, but I heard in my voice broke up a little bit as I asked for the number, asked for the amount of money that I want. So, one of the ways to get better is to record yourself when you’re in a live sales situation. Let the other person know “Hey, I’ll be recording this conversation primarily so I can get better at what I do.” And people that are spectacular at what they do, what they’re looking to do is always improve what they’re doing and the way to improve what you’re doing is to record what’s happening now in a clinical way so you can actually look at it as a scientist and go “Huh! This needs improvement. And I have just the solution that it needs.”
