Brian LaManna adapts FBI negotiator Chris Voss's tactics from Never Split the Difference for sales discovery. The four core techniques are patience (silence for 2+ seconds), mirroring (repeating the prospect's last words), summarizing (paraphrasing to confirm), and labeling (acknowledging emotions with neutral phrasing like "It seems like").
Chapters
The FBI runs better discovery than most sales teams. Just instead of life or death, it's about next quarter's quota. Chris Voss, if unfamiliar, was the lead crisis negotiator for the FBI for 24 years. In 2007, he retired after 150+ hostage cases. In 2016, he wrote the book Never Split the Difference, and he detailed out all of his techniques. Now, the best part selfishly were these techniques work just as well in sales conversations as they do on terrorists, just with a tad less pressure on the line. So here were some of my takeaways. Number 1 is patience. Don't be afraid of the silence. Aim to wait 2+ seconds from when they stop talking to when you begin talking. They will often continue on if you don't interject them. Number 2 is mirroring. Mirroring builds trust. You use the last 3 words or 1 to 2 most critical in what they just shared. It's an easy way to dig deeper without having to even ask a new question. So here's an example. A prospect might say, yeah, we just have no decided budget for a huge project like this at this point in the year. How I would respond might be, no decided budget? Number 3, repeat and summarize. Take in everything you just heard from them. Now paraphrase it back and say it even more concisely. Number 4 is labeling. This is a way of validating someone's emotion By acknowledging it, you'll use a term like it seems like to make it feel neutral. So an example of this might be a prospect will share, hey, we are really just tight on budgets with the current macro environment. Me, this is what I'll share. It seems like you all are being extremely thoughtful and intelligent with where you are choosing to invest. Patience, mirroring, repeating, and labeling, they work during your entire sales cycles too, but they're especially powerful in discovery and negotiation. I'd love to hear in the comments below, do you use any of these already today, even if you didn't know the exact strategy behind them?
