4 Phrases Salespeople Use That Kill Their Credibility

This is the full funnel freedom podcast, supporting sales leaders, and managers to improve their sales funnels from people to prospects. I'm Hamish Knox. In this show, you'll learn how you can improve your results. Lead a great team and hit more targets with. The funnel freedom. Welcome to the full funnel freedom podcast.
I'm your host Hamish Knox. In this episode, I will share ideas and insights around how our salespeople unintentionally kill their credibility with clients and prospects. There are four common phrases that salespeople use regularly that actually ended up killing their credibility with their prospects.

The first one is. Now we are all wired to help that's we're social creatures. But when we say no problem to our prospect is specially when they've blown a commitment. So if we're scheduled to talk at 10:00 AM and the prospect shows up at 10 after 10, or doesn't show up at all. And when our salesperson reconnects with them, they make some excuse and the sales person says no problem.

What that tells their prospect is I can pay lip service to this salesperson with no consequences. So, what we want to do in that case is hold that prospect accountable by saying something like these things happen, how do we get that information? In the case that the prospect didn't bring the information that they said they were going to bring.

So these things happen acknowledgement, and then circle back on the commitment that the prospect. The next phrase is, is it as in, is it okay if I ask you, which comes across to our prospects as begging and when our salesperson comes across as begging, well, they're now in an unequal position with their prospect and their prospect is going to feel the right to say and do things that are not necessarily in our sales.

Person's best in. By begging our prospect for permission, our salespeople are being very eyes centered instead of prospect focused. Instead, what we want our salespeople to say is, are you, as in, are you okay if I ask, which is prospect centered and also puts the pressure on the prospect, our prospect should always be under pressure, but they should never feel under pressure, not allows our sales person to control the sales conversation.

The next word is, can, could essentially synonyms. These are also begging words. Our sales person might say, can I get the budget for your project? Or could we speak with other members of the committee? All of those completely kill our sales. Person's credibility with their prospect because it tells the prospect that they are superior to our salesperson.

So instead we want to coach our salespeople to replace those, the Canon, the code with. As in, how do we get the entire committee in the room? The answer may be, it's not going to happen. However, by using the word, how our salesperson prompts our prospect to think for a second, as opposed to having an automatic reflexive, no response.

When they say, can we get the entire committee? The last one that really damages our sales person's credibility is the word just entrepreneur.com had a great article, which will be in the show notes around the use of the word just, and why leaders should stop using it. The reason is that the word just when it's not used in relation to time, as in, I just did something.

Completely diminishes the importance or the difficulty of an activity. So when our sales person calls up and says to a prospect, I'm just following up on the proposal we sent last week, they are completely minimizing their importance in the eyes of the prospect. Now I appreciate that all of this might sound like semantics, and I'm certainly not encouraging you to become the word police for your sales.

However people remember how we made them feel more so than what we said. And if we are saying things, our salespeople are saying things, or we're saying things to our salespeople that are making them feel a certain way, especially if it is minimizing our sales person's importance in the eyes of the prospect.

That's. Now there's a phrase. I have a sport background that is a bit of a cliche and that phrase is we play how we practice. So the best time for us to identify how our salespeople are using these words or phrases is during the. Role-play is a really great opportunity for us as leaders to identify these little vocal ticks or quirks that our salespeople have that may be unintentionally damaging their ability to create rapport with a prospect and take an opportunity from hi.

Nice to meet you too. Looking forward to working with. We have several clients who have been working with us for years who still use the same vocal, tics and phrases, because it's part of our pattern of behavior. One of our clients will still to this day, use the word honestly, or the phrase. Let me be honest with you in a role-play.

And it's gotten to the point now where as soon as they use it, they stop and they look at me or one of my facilitators and they say, I just did it again. And we say, yeah, because when we say honestly, or let me be honest with you, the implication to our prospect is everything that we've said previous to this has been a complete.

So we, we definitely want to be cognizant of our words and our phrases and how they may be unintentionally creating mental or emotional friction with our prospects. Another great way aside from role play, to understand how our salespeople are interacting with their prospects and what words and phrases they're using is to record the calls that they're on.

And there's plenty of services out there. Uh, certainly you can record your discovery calls. On whatever video communications platform you're using, there's a service out called gong that will do analysis on connect and sell. They will use their recording on connect and sell. The calls are recorded in real time.

So leaders can either go back and listen to them in the moment, or they can listen to them after the fact which I've done with my sales. And it's when we start to discover these little vocal ticks or quirks, that we can start to support our salespeople in differentiating on how they sell, not what they sell.

Sales is a slight head game. So it means that we don't have to be dramatically different than our competition. We just have to be slightly. And if we are slightly different in using words and phrases or not using words and phrases that diminish our credibility with our prospects, then our salespeople are much better equipped to go out and sell more effectively.

So the four words and phrases, again, that our salespeople use that unintentionally diminish their credibility with a prospect are no problem. Is it as in, is it okay if I could or can? And we talked to the entire. And the word just as in, I'm just following up. There's one thing that our salespeople do that diminishes credibility.

Now there's certainly lots of things that they can do that would diminish credibility. Um, discounting all of the ones that are unprofessional because our salespeople are professionals, but even professionals can get excited. So let's say that one of our salespeople is sitting in front of a prospect and the prospect says we're going to order 500 units.

And our salesperson's typical order is 300 units, or the prospect says our budget for this program is one and a half million dollars. And to date our sales person's highest sale has been half a million dollars. They can start to get excited. And their physiology is going to change and they may start jiggling a little bit, or they may start smiling wider.

Some of you have seen this in sales, people who have visited with you when you've given them information and they, all of a sudden, they start to get this big smile on their face. That completely kills our sales person's credibility. The minute that our prospect starts to hear our sales person mentally count the commission that they're going to get, they have lost all credibility.

Now they still may get the order. They'll probably have to work a lot harder for it. If they do not get the order, they're going to get some sort of fluffing nonsense about, well, you know, the timing wasn't right. Or we have an existing relationship or something like that. But what happened was our salesperson got excited in front of the prospect.

They started mentally calculating their commission, which means they weren't staying present with the prospect. The prospect got that sense and it eliminated our salesperson in our organization from further consideration. So when we're coaching our salespeople, especially our newer salespeople or our salespeople who are getting involved in opportunities that are larger than what they've done before.

We've got to coach them to act like they've been there before and to be calm under pressure. If we go back to any sort of professional lawyer medical specialist, when they encounter a problem that they've never seen before, They don't all of a sudden start saying things like, oh, I've never seen this before.

And all this is going to be such a challenge or, oh boy, oh boy. Oh boy. I can't wait to have all the billable hours for this project. They stay calm and collected under the pressure and they start following their process and sticking to their process because if our salespeople are attached to the process of qualifying.

Instead of the outcome of closing a sale, they're much more likely to keep their credibility with their prospect. And while they still may not earn the business this time, they are better positioned to have future discussions with their prospect instead of their prospect, thinking of them as another slimy salesperson who just sees them as a potential source of a commission.

This has been the full funnel freedom. I've been Hamish knocks. I sharing with you ideas and insights on words and phrases and a behavior that our salespeople unintentionally do that kill their credibility with prospects. Please like and share rate and review. Follow us on Instagram at Sandler in Y Y C a.

You can find us on LinkedIn and Facebook at Sandler in Calgary. Until we connect with you on the next episode, go create full funnel freedom. Thank you for listening to full funnel freedom with Amish knocks. If you want to increase your sales with. Go-to full funnel, freedom.com.