Business Networking - Grand Opening
by Courtney Vogt
“So, what do you do?”
According to Michel Neray, communications expert, the key to turning more prospects into sales customers lies in what business professionals reply when asked that question, and how they say it.
Neray has developed a unique communication technique, which can be found in his chapter, Everything Starts With a Conversation, in the book “Sales Gurus Speak Out.” He spoke about it at a recent Business Marketing Association presentation.
At the presentation, Neray stressed the risks of simply rattling off the information found on your business card and the need to differentiate yourself from competitors. So where do you start? He advised business professionals that increasing sales is all about building relationships through clear, concise communication. Answering the question, “What do you do?’ is the first step to better messages.
“It’s not about closing, it’s about being so crystal clear about who you are and what you do and the real value that you offer to people that they will naturally be attracted to you,” he said.
He explained that one of the problems many business people face when trying to sell their product or service is that most still rely on the communication rules they are taught early on—such as highlighting the company’s features and benefits, or its mission and vision. Many business people believe that only open-ended questions are acceptable. In his approach, Neray works to dispel this “old style” of communicating.
“We’re walking around with a bunch of rules and guidelines floating around in our heads about how we should be speaking and we’ve forgotten that when someone asks us what we do, all we really need to do is connect with the person in front of us.”
One of the ways people respond to “the question” is what Neray calls “the drunken cowboy,” where a businessperson resembles, what else, a drunken cowboy throwing punches in a barroom brawl. “They’re throwing things out. They’re hoping that something is going to connect with somebody and they’re going to say ‘that’s interesting.’”
Neray encourages people to find exactly what interests a potential client by getting inside of his or her head. “Unfortunately, a lot of us are taught the superficial stuff. We’re only responding to what we hear. But we can tap into the conversation that the other person is having with himself/herself about how it relates to them. We like talking about ourselves. They want to talk about themselves, too.”
Piquing a potential client’s interest is all about asking questions and waiting for a response that allows you to say, “that’s what I do,” he said. He also added that planning your next move according to a prospect’s response, verbal and nonverbal, is the key to having a valuable conversation with them. To be effective with this technique, Neray stressed the importance of being as specific as possible and avoiding things like elevator speeches, which are essentially summaries of what you do.
“Jab with specifics,” Neray said. “The more you summarize, the more generalized you get. The more generalized you get, the more boring you get. Summaries and generalizations are inherently uninteresting. What interests people most are specifics that they can wrap their heads around.”
According to Neray, people are so used to hearing sales pitches that begin with ‘hi, my name is…’ that they often zone out right then and there. His approach teaches business people how to get people to listen, if nothing else, by throwing them off guard. Doing that isn’t quite as complicated as it may sometimes seem. “We need to lighten up, let ourselves come out and have a conversation,” he said.
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