Hey, welcome back, everybody. It's nice to have taken a couple of weeks break, gotten away from things for a little bit. I needed to vacation. I feel reenergized and back to offer another Fast Tip Friday moment from Growth Dynamics.
Look, today my topic is that as much as we've been told in business development to have all the answers for whatever question a prospect or suspect may ask, I'm here to tell you that there's almost nothing that can be more of an impediment to your business development success and trying to have all the answers. I want to be really clear about this, it's not your job to take the pressure of convincing someone to buy your products or services. Your job is to help facilitate a business conversation, for them to have the right interaction with you to believe you understand their business, you understand their issues, and you understand how they would like to have them addressed or alleviated. So, get out of the pressure packed conversations of having to be the answer person for everything that you're asked about.
What's important to remember when you try to avoid being in that situation? First and foremost, I want you to think about business development as a game of tennis. And all you need to know about tennis, to make the right analogy here. is to understand that the ball is on the other person's side of the net, when you get the point. It doesn't matter how you hit it back to them. It just matters that you return the ball into the inbounds area of the tennis court, and they have to deal with it. Now they may hit it back to you and all you've got to do is remember again, I just have to get it back.
So, make your business development conversations a tennis match, with your objective to be just hit it back and perhaps you'll get an unforced error that will lead to you doing the right business with those people.
The other thing that you've wanted to do is stay focused on punctuation marks. There's so many people in business development that feel the need to respond to everything that a prospect says, including statements. So if a sentence ends in a period or an exclamation point, silence is your best tactic. Don't try to join the conversation, pile on, show off your expertise and brilliance, demonstrate or express all kinds of enthusiasm and genius. Silence is really a good tactic. And if you want to move it past silence, I recommend that you use this very powerful business development word. It's so complicated, I hope you're all ready to write things down. So when someone makes a statement, "your prices are really high". "The competition has more more variables", "we've talked to other people", it doesn't matter what their statement is. The simple and most effective response to keep you in control, or at least not under their control, is to hit them with this tried and true killer business development play. Just look them right in the eye and in a sincere non-emotional tone, say "and", and put the pressure back where it belongs. That's returning the ball to the other side of the net, getting the pressure off of you to make the kill shot and letting them deal with the fact that they've got to do more to keep this business development conversation alive.
So, give yourself a break. Get out of the pressure, just have a business conversation, but also, exit the belief that you have to convince everyone that you're the best, the brightest, the fastest, the cleanest, the neatest, the newest or whatever asks, you think you need to be a simple and can be a really effective way to get you out of that Bullseye and back in control the process.
Thanks for listening, good selling, go on out there. Get out of the third quarter into a strong fourth quarter and have a great end of the year. Take care.
