Too much passion can damage your credibility
A common theme among most presentation books and blogs is the importance of having and displaying passion for your topic. We’re told that passion excites and engages audiences and furnishes you with the fire to be strong and credible. And they’re mostly right: when you’re trying to instill a vision, motivate your listeners or inspire them to act on their beliefs, your passion may be the crucial ingredient that makes the difference.
But everything good comes with a cost, and too much passion can damage your credibility and effectiveness, especially for certain types of business presentations, for example when you’re trying to get a proposal approved internally, or selling a complex business solution to a key customer.
Sometimes you have to adapt your style to fit the audience
There’s a lot to be said for “being yourself” in a presentation or a sales meeting; people can usually spot when someone is not being genuine and will raise their guard accordingly. But taken too far,
Persuasion is not about getting people to see things your way; it’s about getting them to see your point in their way.
Make the prospect think before saying yes and it will strengthen your position.
In Part 1 of this article, we saw that closed questions can be very useful at the opening stages of the call because they are easy to answer. That quality is ironically what makes them least useful during the closing stages of the call.
Again, this seems to challenge long-standing sales lore. As salespeople, we’re told to ask for the close and to lock in agreements when the time is ripe. A typical example of a closed question would be:
“Do you see the value in speeding up the process?”
The idea is that if the customer says yes, (and you’re sure she will based on the conversation to that point), store you don’t let them off the hook—you continue the positive momentum by asking a series of questions calculated to elicit yeses until you finally ask for the proverbial signature on the dotted line.
What’s wrong with this approach?
The wrong type of question at the wrong time can cost you sales.
Whenever I ask salespeople in my classes which type of questions are most effective, open-ended or closed, the overwhelming majority select open. The reasons given are that open questions are best at getting the customer talking and for finding out unexpected information. After all, if you’re in a solution sale, it’s critical to find out as much as possible about the customer’s business and current situation in order to uncover pain points. They do like closed questions, however, when they are trying to gain agreement towards the end of the call.
In this article and the next, I will point out why these beliefs are actually incorrect when applied to complex sales, and may actually hinder your sales effectiveness.
