Short excerpt from a YouTube video about a sales technique. The speaker contrasts "steamrolling" (blunt, fast questioning) with "verbal pausing": slowing cadence, lowering tone, and inserting short pauses or softened prompts (e.g., "Can I. Can I ask you something?") to increase prospect attention and perceived importance.
A lot of salespeople like, hey, let me ask you a question. And then they ask the question. They just steamroll. What's going on in that prospect's mind is like, basically, you just gave them no choice. But if I lean in, I'm like, can I. Can I ask you something? You always like, yeah, what's going on? And what I just did there is I triggered your brain to be like, wow, it must be something really important. So when I start to ask you, you're hanging on to every word. Can I. Can I ask you something? And I lower my tone, rather let me ask it and then ask it where I'm bulldozing you, where they don't listen to you. I'm slowing down the cadence. That's just a little example of what we call verbal pausing, which breaks the pattern.
