Stop Talking Yourself Out of Sales!

Is it a really an awkward silence or is it a pregnant pause? Have you closed the sale but then you keep talking and wind up losing the deal?

Not every silence needs to be filled. If you tend to get verbal diarrhea on the phone, this episode is for you!

Also in this installment: time kills all deals. Are you lollygagging? Does your definition of "immediately" actually mean: "I'll get to it when I get to it and it's whatever" ? This attitude will cost you business. 

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Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

Sara Causey discusses two sales truths: the importance of distinguishing between an awkward silence and a pregnant pause, and the adage "time kills all deals." She recounts a story about a salesperson with verbal diarrhea who nearly lost his job due to his inability to handle silence. The manager's solution was to use the mute button, which saved his career. Sara also shares a personal experience of hiring a freelancer who claimed to be immediately available but disappeared for 48 hours, leading her to reconsider the job description. She emphasizes the need for salespeople to find a balance between urgency and responsiveness to avoid losing potential deals.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Sales truths, awkward silence, pregnant pause, verbal diarrhea, performance improvement plan, mute button, time kills deals, urgency, ghosting, prospect communication, sales strategy, Shark Tank, immediate availability, sales techniques, client interaction.

Welcome to the Causey Consulting Podcast. You can find us online anytime at CauseyConsultingLLC.com And now here's your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In today's episode, I want to talk about two sales truths that might seem contradictory at first, but this is a situation where two things that seem to be antithetical can both be true simultaneously. Number one, some of you think that anytime a person stops to take a breath, they stop for a pause, it's automatically an awkward silence, and then you want to fill that awkward silence by continuing to sell, trying to make awkward conversation. This can happen to introverts as well, but I have tended to see it more so from people who are highly extroverted. They don't want the silence. They think that silence is automatically a bad thing, and they must keep talking. You've probably seen this type of thing on Shark Tank, where the sharks are taking notes, and the person is just continuing to motor mouth. They're not even allowing the sharks to think about what's going on, and sometimes the sharks will say you need to quit selling, or you'll have one shark that's out, four others that are still in, and the entrepreneur is still trying to pitch to the one guy or the one gal that bowed out, and they're like, "Why are you even still talking to them? There's four of us here that you should be talking to instead of that guy. You want to ask yourself, "Is this an awkward silence or is this a pregnant pause? If you interrupt the pregnant pause, you do way, way more harm than good. I've talked before about a guy that I used to know who had verbal diarrhea, and it damn near cost him his job. He had come to the company with great references, he was highly recommended, but he couldn't close a paper bag, and everybody was wondering, how did this guy get such a glowing recommendation to come here when he seems to be really inept? He was so inept, as a matter of fact, that he was put on a performance improvement plan, the PIP, which the vast majority of the time people don't come back from, that the company puts you on a pip, because to use a phrase popularized by Mark Zuckerberg, they want you to self-select out the door. The company wants to have a justification for letting you go, so that they're off the hook as far as paying your unemployment, and their hope is that you will simply go out and use that time to find another job, and then you will leave and resign on your own. Finally, this man's manager sat down with him, which, that's a whole other ball of wax, that's a whole other interesting story. His manager should have been observing him way before then, but the manager was the type that liked to go out for golf games and liquid lunches and other extracurricular activities in the middle of the day, and he wasn't around as much as he should have been, but he finally, after this guy gets put on a pip by the owners of the company, he sits down with him, and it takes him basically no time at all to figure out what the problem is. One of the things that led to the PIP, I will never forget this either. He was on the phone with this guy, and this was way pre-pandemic, before the popularity of things like DocuSign, where you can send somebody an electronic document, they sign it online, and boom, everything's done. You had to send the PDF, they had to print it out, sign it, fax it, or scan it back, whatever. And this guy was going to do that. He was so interested that he was like, "I'm sitting at my computer right now, send it over via email. My printer is right here. I'll print it, sign it, and then either scan it and email it back or fax it back to you. But I'll do it right now. So, instead of being quiet and allowing the man to do that, he decides that he wants to keep jabber drawing because he can't stand the silence, so he decides to make idiotic conversation with this man while the man is trying to get everything printed out and signed, and he's like, well, this was on a Friday, and he's like, well, I don't know what you're going to be doing this weekend, but I am not looking forward to my weekend, because my wife got us tickets to the ballet. It's something that she wants to do. I don't really get it. I never really have. It's going to be a total waste of a Saturday night. I don't want to do it, and I'm probably just going to sleep the whole time, because it is so boring. All right, dig this dude on. The other end of the phone is like, hmm, well, my daughter is in that ballet, she has worked her hind end off basically her whole life to become a ballerina, she is one now, and she's going to be starring in that ballet, and it was like, oh God, so he was offended, and he said, you know what, let me take a little bit more time to think about all of this. It's Friday. I'd rather have the weekend. I'm not even sure that my fax machine is working right now. I'll take a look at this paperwork, and then I'll get back with you. Click. He had the sale, but because he decided to jabber jaw about, frankly, a totally irrelevant topic, it doesn't matter to that prospect what he was going to do that weekend, and then he made a stupid remark that should have just been kept to himself. You never know what the person on the other end of that phone is thinking, you don't know what their hobbies are, you don't know who they're related to, you don't know, and making that errant comment can absolutely cost you the deal. So, this guy gets put on the pip. The manager, who was basically a manager in theory and not really in practice, finally sits down with him and is able to diagnose the problem immediately, and he tells the guy, "You don't know how to shut up. This is the problem. That's why you're not closing deals. It's not because you get on the phone and you have call reluctance or you don't have a good pitch. You actually do. It's all the other stuff that's costing you. And he told the guy, say what you need to say about the products and services, and then shut up. Dude, could not do it, so finally he gets on a call as the manager is sitting there, and the manager walks over. This guy is trying to have verbal diarrhea while the prospect is thinking. Manager hits the mute button. That changed the game, and he tells the guy, if you physically are not able to stop yourself from talking while the prospect is thinking. Learn how to use the mute button, and then you can just talk into the void. Nobody will hear you. Nobody will know what you've said. You're giving them the time and space to think it over, to let you know if they have an objection, to let you know if they have a question, to let you know if they're willing to sign right now, and you're not spoiling the deal with irrelevant conversation or opinions that don't matter to anything. Use the mute button, because if you don't, you're going to be fired. That I'm telling you changed the trajectory for that man, he's still in that same industry today, and the last that I heard, he owns his own company, and it's doing well. That would never have happened if he hadn't figured out that he did not need to fill every silence, and in fact, if he was unable to help himself from filling the silence, he could strategically hit the mute button that saved his career. So, point number one: understand the difference between an awkward silence and a pregnant pause. Even though this might seem contradictory, the second truth that I want to provide is time kills all deals. You may have heard this before in real estate or other sales-related professions, but it's true across the board. Time kills all deals. Now, that does not mean that you need to talk over the top of someone or act like a bulldozer, or every five minutes poke somebody in the ribs. Are you ready yet? Do you have any more questions? Are you ready? Have you signed? What do you want? What can I do? You have to walk a fine line, so that you're not pestering somebody, but you also are moving with the appropriate sense of urgency to the job or to the proposal. And I'll give you an example that happened to me just recently. I was hiring for a position, just 1099 freelance. I don't hire direct employees, so this was a 1099 freelance thing, and there was a guy who popped up, and he told me that he was available immediately. Now, for me, especially coming from the staffing world that I was in for years, I, in particular, worked a lot on temporary and contract positions whenever I was working outside the home for other people, and the sense of urgency was high. There were times that a client might call me at noon and say, we need somebody here tomorrow at 8am and we're going to give you a head start, but if you can't find anybody who commits to be here at 8am tomorrow morning, let's say in the next couple of hours, we're going to start calling your competitors. I mean, it was very much like the heat is on, the race is on, so for me, and then also on top of that, being a recovering type. A personality. When somebody says immediately or urgently, I assume that they mean right damn now. That's just how I'm wired. I've been able to calm some of that down, being a creative now and leaning more into the type B part of my personality. But suffice it to say, if somebody tells me I'm immediately available or I'm ready right now. I assume that they mean right now, not three hours from now, or three days, or three weeks from now. I assume that they mean right now, but there are people who, in their mind, when they say that they are immediately available, they don't mean right now. Their definition of immediately or urgently is different from my definition of those words, so I was looking for somebody to do a freelance task. I was trying to hire for it, and there was a man who popped up, and I was interested, and he said, "I am immediately available. So I was sitting there, and we were talking via messaging, and then he just vanished. He said, I'm going to be ready to do this. I want you to send everything that you need to send, and and then I'll let you know. I'll confirm that I've received it, and I'll get started. Crickets, tumbleweeds, nothing. And I'm like, what happened to immediately available? A full 24 hours had passed, and he had just vanished on me, and I thought, you know, maybe I don't want to fill this position after all. Maybe I need to to take a look at it through a different lens. It may be that I thought I needed a, b, and c, when really I need d, e, and f instead. It may be that changing the parameters and hiring somebody for a slightly different task is going to actually be more helpful. And so, in that period of time, I decided against not only hiring him because he vanished for no apparent reason, but also I decided to tweak the job description a bit, because I realized I thought I needed x, but I really need y. Time kills all deals. If he had truly been sitting there at the computer, ready to go, I would have hired him, because I was ready to go, and I didn't realize that I needed y instead of x. He could have had that contract, and he could have had that money in his pocket, but you know what? He vanished. He said he was available immediately, and then vanished, and in fact it was over 24 hours, because in the wind up he didn't pop back up again for two whole days. I'm sorry, but to me, when you're using words and phrases like right now, immediately, urgently, let's do this, and then you ghost for 48 hours, that's not immediate, and you are giving your prospect or your potential client the opportunity to go cold on the deal, because here's what happens. The more time that goes by, the more the person says, I don't really need this. I was interested. There was a spark. Something had been cultivated, but now the spark has grown cold. The flame has burned out, and I've decided I don't actually need this or want this after all. So, if you are in sales, part of the challenge is understanding that you don't need to talk over the top of people, you don't need to do the arm twisting, and you don't need to assume that every time that they take a breath on the phone it means that you need to talk over the top of them. Remember the guy from, like, Micro Machines and fed the FedEx commercials and stuff, where he'd be like from back in the 80s, he could just rattle stuff off at the speed of light. You don't need to do that, but at the same time, you don't want to vanish either. You have to really find that right balance, because if you say I'm ready to go immediately, and then you ghost your prospect for 48 hours. They're probably not going to be interested by the time that you get back. You're giving them the opportunity to talk to other people, to make other arrangements, and to work with somebody who actually is right there, ready to go - right place, right time, right speed, all of these things matter. So, if you're struggling in your sales desk, that these reasons could very well have something to do with why I always say I don't give you advice, I don't tell you what to do or what not to do. I opine for your entertainment only. If we were two friends sitting around having a pint at the pub. I would say, you know, if you're struggling, it might be worth it to look at, are you overselling? Are you talking over the top of people? Are you not allowing them to think? Are you making irrelevant conversation that could potentially offend them, like the guy dissing the ballet, and then the man saying, oh well. My daughter's a ballerina, and she's worked really damn hard to get here. Are you ghosting? Are you using words and phrases like immediately, urgently, right now, but then in your mind immediately means two or three days from now, while in the client or prospect's mind right now means right now, in the next five minutes, not in the next five hours, in the next five days, or the next five weeks. Tempo matters. In the meantime, stay safe, stay sane, and I will see you in the next episode.

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