How to Be a "Smooth Talker" in Sales (WITHOUT being slick or sleazy)

So you want to become a smooth talker in sales. I've been hearing more and more comments on my videos saying, hey, Adam, I want to learn to speak like you. I want to learn how to communicate like you. And can you please do a video teaching us how to be a smooth talker? And in this video, I'm going to be teaching you exactly that. But I do want to get one thing out of the way. This is not about learning to be a sleazeball or some slick salesperson. It's truly about how to communicate clearly, to distill your message and speak in a way that other people hear exactly what you mean. Because in sales, I have found that there's this disconnect. There's what you are thinking, okay, so you got your little speech bubbles. Then there's what you say. These are the words coming out. And then there's what people hear. And at any step of the way, whether it's a disconnect between what you think and what you say and what you say and what people hear. So our mission to help you become a smooth talker is to make this a seamless transition. Fair enough. Let's get started. First, want to say welcome or welcome back. My name is Adam Bensman, the roof strategist. And everything I do here on my channel and in my programs, there are links in the video description and podcast description, should you be interested, is designed to help you and your team smash your income goal and give every customer an amazing experience. So by you becoming a smooth talker, not only will you earn more sales, you're going to create even better customer experiences. So let's get started, shall we? Now, first things first. When it comes to becoming a smooth talker, how do you get there? And the answer is quite simple. It's practice. Now, don't worry, I'm not going to leave you hanging with just saying, hey, guys, here's how you do it. You just practice. That doesn't give you enough. But I want to break down what kind of practice, where to practice, and what type of practice is so important to help you become a smooth talker in sales. First, I want you to think of it like this. Imagine that you sell, let's say, 100 roofs in a year, which would be a really great year. And you might get the same objection 30 times, which means you had 30 opportunities in a high stakes situation, meaning your income literally depends on it. You have 30 chances in the real world to figure it out and ace it. Are you going to be a pro? It's going to take some time. But if instead you practiced role play, which, by the way, I do provide a role play training with instructions in my roofing sales success formula for owners and managers to use with your team. When you practice role play, you are able to get the number of repetitions, 30, 40, 50, in just a couple of hours. Which means you, by doing role play, can literally get five years of experience in about a month of regular role play. This is the fastest way for you to level up in your game. And again, becoming a smooth talker takes practice. I've had an opportunity to do hundreds of videos, train thousands of people, speak on stages, run private training events. I mess up. I still mess up. And in fact, if you're watching this video with subtitles, I hope that you see me mess up and see how I can quickly recover. Because every single video I do is one take. If you haven't noticed, I don't do edits. I don't chop this together. And this has helped me practice to deliver a strong message in a concise time window with. Without having to splice up this sentence, this sentence, and this sentence, which, by the way, you've seen on YouTube and it's choppy and distracting. That's not real practice. So role play is the best way for you to practice. But now what we want to talk about is where to learn from other people so you can role play even better. Now what I want you to do is study people who you believe to be are smooth talkers. This can be celebrities, it can be musicians, it can be artists, it can be sales trainers. Heck, it could be here on this YouTube channel. But for you, I want you to find the people that you admire the most, that you look up to and study how they speak and what they say. And speaking of which, let's break down those key elements. Right now. What you want to study are the following. Whoopsies. Let's get rid of this. What you want to study is the following. First is their sentence length. This is a big deal. A lot of people word vomit. Or they'll talk way too fast. They'll get too much information out and they don't break it up. And what it sounds like on the receiving end is people are so excited, you can't tell when one sentence stopped and the other one picks up. And then all of a sudden, you're sitting on the other end, you're going, adam, I am drowning here. You need. I'm getting uncomfortable hearing you talk so fast. We got to slow it down so that sentence length, which again has those pauses and breaks. I next want you to study the word choices, okay. How people choose to communicate. Studies have shown, by the way, that sticking to a third to fifth grade reading level. And by the way, there's a way to test this using a free program called the Hemingway app. I believe that's with two M's. Hemingway app. You can write in Hemingway app and it will show you the writing level, which by the way is your same speaking cadence. And three, third to fifth grade is the ideal education level to speak to when you start using big words. It doesn't land right even on really intelligent people. Now, there's a company called Agora Financial. They're a multi billion dollar a year organization. And what they do is they sell financial advice. They have some of the best teams and highly qualified people with the biggest budgets to split test their marketing and sales campaigns. And what they found is that anything above an 8th grade reading level dropped conversion by a whopping 50%. Yeah, pretty crazy, isn't it? So I want you to look back at all of our presidential campaigns. Single message, very simple, very easy to understand. So when we examine our word choices, I want you to stick with, with a three to fifth grade, so third to fifth grade reading level, all right? And what that means is simple words, short sentences, and making sure it's easy for people to hear and understand. Next, what we want to do is study the tonality and cadence. Okay? Tonality is the influx of my voice when I get excited and talk about something or I get really calm and serious. Or maybe using dramatic pauses to get you to lean into the camera. And the cadence is the speaking speed. When to speed up, when to slow down. All these subtleties make a really big difference on how that message lands. So this is what you're going to do to study everybody's sentence length, word choices and tonality and cadence. So now you can mirror this behavior in your role play. Now, one more thing for you that I want you to practice is using subtitles. This is really powerful. In fact, there's a gentleman who just commented on one of my videos. He says, adam, I want to learn to speak more clearly. You've been inspiring to me. So what I do is I watch your videos with subtitles on and later on can even speak like you mute the video and read those subtitles and it gets that direct practice under your belt. So using subtitles on those videos will really help break this down. And one more little pro tip for you is this what I have practiced is closing my eyes and imagining, like a typewriter so someone typing the transcript when I hear people speak in the real world. When I saw Ed Milette at Roofcon, I loved how he spoke and presented himself on stage. So I spent a few moments closing my eyes, hearing his word choices and visualizing them on my eyelids. And I basically created my own subtitles, and I got to learn about his sentence length and word choices, observe his tonality and cadence, and it was really inspiring to me because I think he's an incredibly strong speaker, and if you don't have an opportunity to hear him speak, you can listen to his podcast, the Ed Mylett Show. Love it. I was actually listening to it this morning, and part of that inspired today's video. Between that and the YouTube comments. Okay, so now we got the breakdown in place, but I want to go one layer deeper to help you become a smooth talker really quickly, and that's to jump ship on scripts. As you hopefully see by now, I am not a big fan of scripts. Scripts are robotic. They are. They just simply don't work. Because in roofing sales, there's all these different scenarios. Seven, by the way, on the storm side, four on the retail side of why we're presenting to that homeowner based on what situation they're in. So there's no word for word script. Like, say this word, this word, this word, this word, this word, and you're going to get the sale. It just. It simply doesn't exist. In addition to that, the way you might speak and the way I might speak are going to be different. So what I teach instead are formulas. Now, why do I teach formulas now? Think of it like this. Think of it. If I had a cooking challenge And I had 10 chefs, and I say, each chef gets five ingredients. You get steak, potato, butter, salt, and pepper. Your mystery box challenge begins. Go into the kitchen, grab those ingredients, make me a beautiful dish, and then what happens is all the chefs, they race into the kitchen, and one will grab a filet or a T bone or a ribeye, and everyone can cook it differently. We can go reverse seared, grilled, sous vide steak, all these different combinations. And then the potato side, we got baked potato twice, baked steak, fries, hash browns. All of these can be assembled together. And then what happens is that chef plates the dish and says, what I made for you is. And then what happens? They communicate with confidence, with passion, describing the dish they created the. Because the formula that they followed was essentially an understanding of how those ingredients assemble, which allows them to bring their flair, their culture, their personality and their style and again, their confidence. So I teach formulas to everybody. That's what's in my roofing sales success formula. What thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of people are being trained on. So whether you sell in the south, the north, in the east or the west, no matter if you're native to the US or an immigrant, you can become an incredible salesperson in a smooth talker by just following the formulas and knowing what dominoes to knock down in order in order to get the sale. And those formulas that I teach, you've probably heard me talk about slat formula at the door, the ARO formula for objection handling and the car park formula for closing. By the way, all those are included in the roofing sales success formula with packages available for an individual sales rep or or an owner with a team backed by a 30 day money back guarantee and an investment that you're literally going to earn back on your very next sale, oftentimes before the credit card bill even shows up. So if you are interested, there's a link in that description below and I'd be happy to chat with you. You can give our office a buzz here at this number listed on the screen. 303-222-7133. Now let's wrap up how to become a Smooth talker. Quick summary so we see it all in one place. First, what I want you to do is practice role play. If you don't have a team that's doing this in a structured setting, find a friend. Use your significant other. Not in that way. Keep that one for yourself. You can do role play practicing with those you love to get those repetitions in. Next, I want you to study or observe people who inspire you. And the third thing I want you to do is always have those subtitles turned on so you can learn. And remember, as you study those folks who inspire you, pay attention to their sentence length, their word choice, their cadence and tonality. And the key takeaway is this. You want to speak at a third to fifth grade comprehension level. Fair enough. Hey, thanks for joining me in this video. If you'd like to continue your journey with me, YouTube thinks you're really going to love this video. And if you haven't yet done it, you can click right here to get a free copy of my pitch Like a Pro Roofing Sales training video library sent right to your inbox and I will see you on the next one.