INTERESTING PEOPLE CAN KILL YOUR OPPORTUNITY!

We have all done it, walked away from a sales call saying to ourselves “He or she was so interesting”

Isn’t it amazing how many interesting people we meet everyday? We can meet them standing in line at the bank, in a grocery store, or they may be the decision maker at an account we have been trying to open. These are people who love to talk about “STUFF”, and can make a story about doing the dishes into an exciting experience that takes longer to tell then it took to do!

Usually when we meet these decision makers, we are so happy that we got the opportunity to meet them that we sometimes find it difficult to interrupt their “story” to get down to business.

What should we do?

-          Don’t become a BOBBLE HEAD listener - A bobble head listener is someone who will stand there nodding their and not add to the story or participate in the conversation in any way. Unfortunately we have all been caught as bobble heads.

NEVER TAKE A PASSIVE LISTENING ROLE. If you don’t know anything about the topic ASK a question. Simply by asking a question you can now start to take back control of the conversation. What you have done is broken up the train of thought which will give you the opening to direct the conversation back to business.

-          Don’t become enablers – If you enter the conversation as an interested party, you enable the speaker to keep speaking. I have seen this hundreds of times. A decision maker starts talking about a subject and it happens to be a subject the rep is interested in, before you know it they are just having a great time talking and 30 minutes later the decision maker says well I need to go. Off they go and we are standing there with no sale, no idea what happened and no opportunity.  We can participate in a conversation in many ways without becoming entrapped in the conversation. Interject an idea that will make the other person ask you a question. You have just taken over the conversation and can guide it back to business. This idea can be a question to the other person, “Have you ever…” or it can be a statement, “Once I…..” as long as it creates enough of a break to allow you to start talking yourself it worked.

-          Don’t be the INTERESTING PERSON TELLING THE STORY – Unless the story is leading to business or about business. Don’t be the one keeping us from doing business. Sometimes we get so excited about what we have done we want the world to know. It may be a trip, a kid’s football game or washing dishes. We are so excited that we meet the decision maker and take control of the conversation, in all the wrong ways. If you are this excited about something you have done, and passion is always a good thing so you should have these experiences, what you need to do is script a 30 second elevator speech about them. Just like the 30 second elevator speech about yourself that you have for an introduction, think of the high points of what you did and make a short story about it that you will use.

There is a fine line between interest and boredom, between listening and fixation, between talking and a filibuster, make sure you don’t cross the line and you can easily take control and keep control of the conversation and be able to always get back to business even when you are with an INTERSETING PERSON!

Lorin