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A salesperson with a thick accent was told their speech made them hard to understand and hurt their sales numbers. The speaker recommends seeking honest feedback and accent-reduction training to improve effectiveness.
A salesperson with a thick accent was told their speech made them hard to understand and hurt their sales numbers. The speaker recommends seeking honest feedback and accent-reduction training to improve effectiveness.
I had an interesting experience, a sensitive experience this week. I was working with a man for whom English was his second language. Now, his English was fine. The difficulty was his accent. He had a very thick accent, and it was very difficult to understand what he was saying. And so I found myself in an interesting situation. Do I say something or don't I? And I decided I would, and I said to him, The problem is your accent. And he was in sales, and I said that if people can't understand you, then you're not going to be able to sell successfully. And it's well worth working on your accent, particularly not your English, but your accent. Now, I was a bit careful about saying that, but I'm glad I did because someone else in the group spoke up and said Yes, I had exactly the same experience when I first started in business. I realized that I wasn't getting the sales because they couldn't understand what I was saying. So I worked very, very hard on my accent. So if you're a person who has an accent, and most people who have an accent know that they have, then ask some people to give you some really honest feedback. Not what they think you want to hear, but some honest feedback. And if they say yes, it's worth working on your accent, then it could be worth looking up— it's called accent reduction often if you look it up in Google. Find people nearby who can help you because there are people who can work with you to reduce your accent and make your sales a much more successful enterprise.
