Magic Phrases and Sentence Stems

Business brain episode 447 for Wednesday, May 10, 2023. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Business Brain, the show where we take different things in life and we put them through the Business Brain to see what kind of perspective we can get, see what lessons we can learn. Sponsors for this episode include Headspace, where you can go to headspace.com brain60 and try headspace free for 60 days. And a new one for us, found.com brain, which is business banking that tracks your expenses and actually helps you to find write offs and even carve out some savings so that you know how much to pay in taxes. It's a cool kind of all in one thing for entrepreneurs. We'll talk more in depth about each of those shortly here. But for now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And here in Lafayette, California, I am Shannon Jean. How are you, man?

I'm good. I'm good. Yeah. It's been an interesting week, as always, especially with trying to navigate through whatever this weird economic scenario that we're heading into that we're probably gonna be in for the next year to two years at least. I don't know. I don't know. No one knows.

I don't think. Yeah.

No. Well, there is no historical precedent to look at for where we are here. That's the, that's kind of the problem, right, Is you can't say that. Well, here's what happens when you have a rocking economy and then a. And then a pandemic lockdown with more government assistance than we've ever seen, and then, you know, you come out of this in an economy that's not so rocking, but people have more cash than they've ever had and lower credit card debt. It's like, what is.

It's weird.

It's weird. We don't. Yeah, we can't. We can't predict.

So it's interesting, I think that. Yeah, it's that volatility and uncertainty that is just, you know, like I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. You know, I follow a problem every.

Yeah.

Yes.

No one knows. No one knows if there even is another shoe. That's the thing, right?

Yeah. And. And I think inflation is still just rocketing along, you know? Yeah. You may hear indicators or whatever, but if you go to the grocery store or you go out for din, it's like, holy smokes, man. I don't know.

But the pricing, the price of eggs, which was, you know, a bellwether. Right. I just happened to notice the other day we were at this store with my son. And he's like, the eggs are only A$79 a dozen. I was like, oh, wait, what? This is Trader Joe's. Like, we should be overpaying here. What's going on? Yeah, so. So it's like I don't even know anymore. I don't even know. Price of oil is going up, which is usually a good thing for the economy. Like, I don't know, it's like crazy.

Anyway, it is interesting. We'll have to see how it comes. I think something is going to happen, but I don't know whether it's going to be in the fall or early next year. As, as. And I think, I think the commercial real estate space is going to be the driver ever at this time. Because so much A good example is, you know, a large building in San Francisco that, well, had been. Yeah. For sale, I know, $160 million and this kind of thing. And I think it just closed last week at 60 million. Yeah. And.

Yeah, but San Francisco is not indicative of the whole country. Like, correct. In that it's, it's sort of an, a characterization of the. Yes, it's, it's overstated and in both directions. Like when the economy was rocking, it was overstated in the other direction. Right. So.

But those are kind of indicators.

Oh, it's an indicator. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I would say, wow, if a, if this commercial and, and the, the problem is that building is empty.

Right.

It's not. Yeah, yeah. Nobody's, nobody's coming back to these commercial. Many of these.

Not yet, but I think, I think you'll see, you know, give it 10 years and people will start to kind of. San Francisco will redefine itself, of course, as it always has.

Yeah, most things do.

Most things do.

But it is, yeah, it's fascinating. And I wonder, I mean, if we, if, if, if we have any listeners out there, which I'm sure we do, in the commercial real estate space, you know, what are you seeing? Is it, are the occupancy, you know, what are the rates of. What are the numbers looking like to really get a sense? I would love to get some feedback and you know, email us at feedbackusinessbrain show because it'd be, I think it'd be great to dive into this more, not only because I want to buy another commercial building somewhere and I want to get educated along the way, but I'm just curious to see what's going on in different parts of the country because like I said, I'm out here in near San Francisco. And I get all this blowback from this crazy.

Yeah, you have a crazy thing there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That city was overstated in both directions. Yep.

Yes. So help educate us and then we'll share it with everybody else and we'll do a show about it. I think that'd be terrific.

I think. So you want to tease up what you brought to me today for us to talk about here?

Yes. I came across, I'm on Twitter a lot following business folks and Jesse Puji came up with this concept that he's sharing called sentence stems. And his context is all about how they work in a sales presentation type thing. But I think it's much broader than that and I'd love to dive into it and talk about how you can use it in your sales organization and other aspects of your business.

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So, yeah, and it's almost, it's. You could also think of it as a template. You know, whenever we've talked about customer service, we've talked about templating and systemizing your responses. So they're not individual. Every time somebody gets a different customer service person, they have a different response. It's the same thing every time your, your salespeople go out. It shouldn't be a unique experience. They should be, you know, using best practices and selling this, you know, selling your product in the way that you want, in the way that you, you guys have found to be successful. It works. Yeah. So let's go over some of these. You know, he starts this conversation in the sales, you know, demo with a stem like the vision for this product or the problem we want to solve for this, you know, this product. Let me rephrase that. The problem this product solves, whether it's a service product, that kind of thing. And then he explains it. What you see here is X. When you're, you're doing your demo, you're telling people what they're looking at. And then he jumps in briefly to hit on how this works, explaining how your product works, how it solves that problem. Again, you can talk a little bit, you know, he's talking about doing some back end sharing of how the technology works or how your systems and process works. And then he jumps into what he calls the most important part of any demo is an example or a story where your product or service was used and how it solved that problem. So it needs to be specific.

I like this because what he's doing is the, is classic storytelling in a sense, by saying, here's what we set out to do, right? Setting you up with painting the picture and then showing that they did it. Right. So you're anticipating the outcome as the listener to this, as the audience for this. You're anticipating the outcome and then they're showing you, yeah, we did it, we did it, we did it. And really that's all we're saying. It's all he's saying in several different ways and from different angles is here's what we set out to do and here's how we did it. Here's another way we did it, here's another way we did it. You know, different ways to convince you that yes, they are what they say they are, they're doing what they say they can do. Like that it's a great way to build trust in general, but also specifically for the product. Yeah, yeah.

And I think that something important to point out too is if you don't have, if you're a new business and you don't have a great story to sell and maybe you don't want to embellish or make something up. What if you use the product yourself? Well, you know this eat your own dog food type thing. What if you're using the product to solve a problem in your own business and you can use that story so you can get creative on how you present this stuff. If you don't have, you know, a ton of back end stuff and that could, that could help your credibility as well.

Yeah.

He then jumps into talking about the, the what makes the product or service unique and different. You want them to be able to remember, you know, as you're leaving a meeting, you get off a call, and then they have to go describe what they just talked to you about. So you want to make sure that they. They can remember what it is that that was different. And then he's saying, you know, one of the things that most people forget is, is. Is to talk about why it's so important, why the technology matters, why the process matters, why your technicians are the best, why your service is the quickest, whatever it is, and what that impact is going to have on your customer. They're going to save money. They're going to have faster response time, less downtime, whatever it is. I think that's great. And then, yeah, kind of wraps it. He wraps it up with talking about, here's what's next for the product to service. We're going to add this. We're adding new employees to even do better. We're building this feature into the product. It's a nice way to systemize the way you're speaking about your product and service.

Yeah, I would be careful of that last one. And again, you're going to tailor. Fit all of these to your business product service. If you are selling something that is. That does not evolve once the customer has it. Like if you're selling software, like a software or a service, telling them what's coming next is great. If you're selling them something that they're going to buy it and then the next customer is going to get the. What's next. Well, you don't want to do that because then you just told them to wait. Right. So be careful.

Yeah. Don't oversell it.

Yeah, don't oversell the future. Yeah, but, but showing them, oh, you know, here's. And here's what we're doing with the company, you know, and even saying, oh, and we've recently added more techs and we're able to do this or that, like just showing them that you're some demonstration that the company is not stagnant, that the company is evolving. That's good. But you don't want to be careful not to communicate. So you should wait and do business with us later. You know, don't do that.

Don't buy this model year. Wait for next year. Right.

Wait for next year. Unless that's what you want them to do, in which case this is a great way to do it.

So. Yeah, yeah. So it's good. And I think, as I said in the beginning of the show, this concept can be molded into different aspects of your organization, especially customer service. I love this template idea. Sentence stems. If you know, if you're doing your customer service via the phone, you know, some of this stuff is scripted to where they're using certain phrases, but you're giving your customer service reps, obviously, some room to maneuver. So it's not just all, well, this is our policy, which is a nightmare.

No, and, and sort of making it your business culture to find these magic phrases, the things, the stems that he's calling them, right? The, the. The ideas, the things you say that lead a customer down a certain path or. Or end up certain path with a customer, right. If you're dealing with a problem where somebody is upset about something, if you find the magic phrase that. That ends that, make it a culture, part of your company culture to highlight those and save those and systematize those, because when, you know, when your rep stumbles into one of those, which will happen, right. You know, everybody's gonna veer off the script at times, and when they realize, oh, wow, this just solved the problem, this is one of those magic phrases. I get to go put this magic phrase in the book. Right. You know, and other people can use it. Really focus on your magic phrases. It can make a huge difference. When we were running Computer Nerds, which is a business we had down in Texas, it was pre Geek Squad, right. Going around to people's homes and offices and fixing things. We were obsessed with magic phrases, and it really helped us because it, you know, every person, every one of our nerds was out essentially alone in the field. Right. We rarely worked as a team, but we got together as a team on a regular basis. And sharing those magic phrases really helped bring the company together and give us a singular brand, if you will. And it really helps.

I was going to ask, so how do you share being cognizant of making sure everybody comes back and shares those magic phrases, sentence stems that they had success with and families with, too. Yeah, yeah. Hey, don't ever say this.

Don't say, here's what I did.

Yeah, yeah. How come you didn't get that? You almost need, you know, that data needs to be downloaded in some central repository. You have a meeting or whatever it is.

We stored it in a. In a file on our server. Now this is, you know, back in the early days of the Internet. So it wasn't like we had Google Docs and all in, like, shared notes and things like that, but we did have a shared document on our novel netware server that was full of magic phrases that everybody had access to, and everybody would. Would literally print it out and keep it with them so you could sort of review it. But it was a doc, it was a living document. Even though people had printouts, you know, it was, it was something where we talked about it at meetings. You know, we had a weekly staff meeting where everybody got together for 60 minutes or whatever and we would, you know, and then we'd go out to eat or whatever and, and we would, we would talk about those things pretty regularly. So again, it's just part of the culture.

So, yeah, no, I love it. It's great. And you know, if, if you've had success doing this stuff with your business, let share it here so we can share it with the rest of our listeners. Feedbackusinessbrain Show Feedbackusinessbrain Show I believe is.

What Mr. Shannon Gene said.

Yes.

Thanks for hanging out with us, folks. Thanks for sending in your feedback to feedbackusinessbrain Show. We definitely like to hear from you. And if you if your email is featured in an episode, you are entered to win a MacBook Air here in 2023. Make sure to check out our sponsors, headspace.com brain60 and found.com brain and we'll see you next time. Keep living that charmed life.

Hey, I have one more tip for you today before you go. If you want to learn about the most powerful customer service concept on the planet, the next podcast you listen to should be episode 118 of Business Brain, where we first introduced the concept of two tokens. Two tokens will turn your customer service department upside down and change how you solve problems. It's simple, easy to implement and teach, and it will thrill your customers. So have a listen. Search for the number 118 at BusinessBrain show or click the link in the show notes of this week's episode and cheers to your success.