7 Words Your Salespeople Can Use to Reduce Friction with Prospects

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 full funnel freedom. Welcome to the full funnel freedom podcast.

I'm your host Hamish. In this episode, I will share ideas and insights around seven words to coach your salespeople to use that will make them more effective when they are selling. In a previous episode, I talked about the seven words that we can use. When we are leading to reduce friction in our conversations so we can encourage and coaching, motivate our salespeople to create full funnel of freedom.

For us, there are seven different words that apply for our salespeople that can support them in reducing the friction with their prospects from hi. Nice to meet you to looking forward, to working with you and with their clients and expanding existing relationships. The first word. Help human beings are wired to help each other.

And in fact, help me are the two most powerful words in human communities. When a plane or a ship is in distress, they might say SOS, or they might say Mayday, which is French for Xia made help me. So saying things like help me understand, or I'm looking for a little bit of help, or can you help me understand why you are looking to move to the competition or switch from the competition are really powerful ways of allowing our salespeople to gather more information.

Now I'm going to contradict myself because as much as help is a great word for our salespeople to say, when they are asking for information from a prospect or a client, it's a really terrible word to use when they are introducing themselves to a prospect or at a network. All of us are wired to help.

However, when someone says to one of your salespeople, well, what do you do? And they say, well, we help people who, in that context, the word help is actually heard as a negative by our prospect. And it doesn't actually matter what our sales person says. It matters what our prospect here. So when they hear the word help, it's like a parent saying to a trial, do you need help?

Little one. And prospecting is typically a low trust act. Theoretically, we are sales people build trust very quickly. However, in that initial 10 to 30 seconds of getting to know each other, There is not very much trust created between our sales person and our prospect, because as we've talked about on several episodes, people just don't trust salespeople in general.

So when we say we help people who it's unlikely to create a conversation with a prospect, because no one wants to say yes, I need help to a salesperson because they've been trained that the sales person is going to say you then great. Get out your way. And I'm going to throw it back at you when it's empty.

So coach your salespeople, when they are doing their introductions to use words like support, we support people who, some of our clients use the word assist, great hits the same mountaintop. And it reduces the mental friction to a prospect saying to one of our salespeople. Yeah. You know what? I'd actually like to have a conversation about that.

I need that kind of support the next word to integrate. Your salespeople to use more often as the word, what, as in what prompted, what prompted is a much gentler, less aggressive version of the word. Why, if you've ever had small children around, they can ask why a lot and why can seem really, really aggressive and, and depending on the tonality and it's , it can come off as kind of rude.

We really do want to understand why. So if our mountaintop is understanding why, well, we can use a phrase, like what prompted is a way of getting to that mountain top quicker and easier for our sales person. So they can start to understand their sales person's motivations a bit more. The next word is select as opposed to using the word.

So Hamish, when are you going to make a decision on a new house back off pushy salesperson? Hey Hamish, how are you going to go about selecting a new house? Oh, well I select things all the time. I'd be happy to tell you how I select things. So again, mental and emotional friction can be unintentionally created by our salespeople with words that they use on an everyday basis.

As I mentioned in a previous episode, I'm not the language police. If one of your salespeople or more of your salespeople are using phrases, like when are you going to make a decision or how do you make a decision? And they're consistently repeatably closing opportunities and keeping your funnel full then awesome.

Keep doing it. However, if they're maybe not being as successful as you believe they could be, or they want to be these little subtle adjustments can make. A world of difference in creating rapport, building trust with our prospects and with our clients, by not building a bunch of mental and emotional friction and having to drive through a bunch of scripts and head trash that our prospects and clients have about sales.

The next word is pretend. All of us are big kids. We're all big kids. We love to play. Pretend one of our clients who sells almost exclusively to very technical buyers uses the phrase. Wish if you had a wish, what would the solution to this problem look like without fail? Even the most technical buyer has an idea because all of us have wishes and hopes and dreams.

So when we say per tend, what we can do is take the pressure off of our sales person and our prospect, because we're just playing pretend. So when a prospect says, Hey, can you send me a proposal? And we say, well, let's pretend that I bring back a proposal and you love it. What happens now? It's a version of what David Sandler talked about, bringing the future to the present, which is one of his rules.

So whenever a prospect makes a request, our salesperson can say, well, let's pretend, and we can define the future without our salesperson, having to waste a bunch of time and energy on something that may not go forward, but pretending, wishing genie in a bottle. Whatever takes the pressure off of our sales person and their prospect, and allows us to be big kids, reduces friction to getting our opportunities across the finish.

The next word is money. And this is a switch out of the word budget. Budget is a giant, scary, emotional word for really all of us, but especially for a prospect or a client when they are asked by a salesperson. Because again, they've been taught by salespeople that if I share my budget with a salesperson magically, they're stuck.

Is whatever budget I give them. And we're going to talk in a future episode about how professionals ask for what they need while amateurs take all they can get and what that means in the context of our salespeople and actually getting our price for our services or our products, but encourage your salespeople to, instead of asking for budget, ask what sort of money is available for this.

There was a consultant that I knew many years ago and they were working. They told a story about how they were working with the government of Canada, one of the agencies of the government of Canada. And this was already a current client. They were talking about going into the second year of their relationship.

And they said to their contact, you know, what's the budget for the project next year. And of course, government officials said, well, we can't tell you that because government rules, it's not fair, et cetera, et cetera. And they said, Hey, totally understand that. How much money do you have set aside 150,000.

Well, the mountaintop was find out what the budget is. We just asked it in a different way, and we got the information that we wanted. So coach your salespeople to remove the word budget from the vocabulary. Very similar to removing the word decision. And they're likely to have less friction in their conversations with their prospects about their prospect's budget.

And then the last word for this podcast today is the word. Now I am a firstborn. Uh, so I have, uh, siblings. And one of the things that we hear, especially if you grew up with a sibling or siblings, is you better play fair with your sibling. You better play fair with the other children. And so that word has really stuck with us and it pops up.

And so when we put the word fair out on the table with our prospects, even saying something. I want to make sure that this is fair for both of them. Our prospects parents pop up in their head and they say, you better play fair with Hamish. Haymitch seems like a nice boy. You better play fair with him. And we are reducing the friction in having a conversation with our prospects as equals, as opposed to they're on high we're down below, and we're begging for business or begging for their time, which neither of which work out very well for us in the long run.

So. Coaching your salespeople to use the word fair with their prospects, allows them to level the playing field and be treated much more like a trusted advisor as opposed to a supplicant or a vendor. So to review the words that we talked about today are first of all, help. Second of all support. Third is.

Four as select five is pretend six is money and seven is fair. By integrating those words into their interactions with clients and prospects, our salespeople are going to have much less friction in taking opportunities from hi. Nice to meet you to look forward to working with you or expanding existing client relationships.

This has been the full funnel freedom podcast. I've been your host Hamish Knox. Thanks for listening. Please share rate. Until we connect 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 ease, go to full funnel, freedom.com.