Christian Polk explains why long sales calls backfire: tired prospects default to "let me think about it." He teaches how to interrupt politely by separating important information from interesting tangents, using phrases like "we'll definitely cover that, but help me understand" to stay in control and push toward a decision.
Chapters
Stop your prospects from yapping on your calls. Okay, now why do we need to stop our prospects from yapping? Just understand, the longer a conversation, a sales conversation goes on for the higher likelihood that that call is going to end in a think about it objection. Why? There's two big reasons. Number one, if you guys have talked about a lot of things and we're just now dropping price at minute 40 minute 50 an hour in, you've talked about so much that their brain has to process it number they're going to run out of energy before you get to the point where they actually need to make a decision. Understand, if you're a salesperson, you're used to being on Zoom for hours and hours upon a time. Most people that you talk to, believe it or not, are not salespeople. So they're not used to just sitting on Zoom for two hours going over their decisions. They're going to run out of steam, they're going to run out of energy. And if they run out of energy, you lose their focus. And if you don't have somebody's focus, you're going to have a hard time being able to persuade them. So we need to cut down our call time by cutting down their yapping. What do I mean by that? You need to get them to focus on important information, not interesting information. The difference between the two is interesting information is information that's adjacent to what they're actually there for their problems and how to solve it. For example, if you're selling somebody sales training and they start talking to you about their marketing, that is interesting, not important information. Important information is just you talking about their current problems and only the problems that you can solve. So you stick on important information, not interesting information. And if you ever do run into somebody who's starting to talk about interesting information, their life story, whatever it is, what you need to do is you need to interrupt the right way in order to get the prospect to stop yapping. For example, they might be, yeah, let me tell you a little bit about my background and my story and this and this and that. And what you're going to do is like, oh, yeah, for sure, we'll definitely cover all that, but help me understand. And then you just go right back at your point. The reason why this is important is because it'll cut your call time down, you'll gain more authority. Because even if you are getting information that you need, when they do yap, if it's not at the back end of your question, you're not gaining the authority that you really need to so interrupt, stop people from yapping, gain the authority, and actually get people to make a decision at the end of the call.
