The Top 10 Negotiating Lines and How To Use Them feat. Chris Voss

One guy got back to me at lawn service. Guy said he wanted X number of dollars to do all the landscaping in his house. And he just looked at him, said, how am I supposed to do that? And a landscaper immediately cut the price significantly. And a lot of people learn, how am I supposed to do that? As a great way to get people to bargain against themselves. Christopher Voss is an American businessman, author, and professor. Voss is a former FBI hostage negotiator, the CEO of the Black Swan Group limited and co author of the book Never Split the Difference. Here's Chris Voss. All right, ladies and gentlemen, thank you. Happy to be here. We will just kind of rock and roll into this, and I'll give you some background. We'll get to Q and A, and then I'll throw something at you at the end. So, asked for the top 10 greatest negotiation responses. Number one is now bad time to talk. Now I'm going to dig somewhat into why you want to get people to say no versus saying yes. And there's a million reasons for that also. But I will tell you an initial indicator in my view, because Dan talked before about if somebody says, hey, I want to talk to you about something that's mutually beneficial, that's an indicator, a behavior of a half, hard, annoying, lame, and frustrating. Dan's come to recognize that, and it immediately turns them off. We're actually developing, within my company, we've, we've developed this. We get specific profiles of what do halves say, what's an indicator of a half, and why you should want to walk away as soon as possible nicely. The last impression is lasting impression. But if you got a few minutes to talk is one of those things. So, I mean, how long is a few minutes? When somebody said to you, have you got a few minutes to talk? When was it ever actually less than 5, which is a definition of a few. Right. So it's now a bad time to talk. In place of that. Why is that one of our top 10 lines? There's only. There's only one of two answers. And this is. This is why Howard asked me to do a fill in a blank so you could take notes if you wanted to, to write it down. Because clearly, if you write something down, you're more focused and you're more likely to retain it. It's an accelerator of learning. So there's only two answers you ever get. If it's now a bad time to talk, One of them is hesitation. And they say, why? No, no, it's never a bad time to talk. Go ahead what do you got? When someone responds like that, you've got 1,000% of their focus, which is what you called for in the first place. Their focus, their attention. As Dan said, you got their attention. Now, keeping their attention is a secondary issue, but you've got their attention. Now, what happens when you say, have you got a few minutes to talk? Well, they think, how long is a few minutes? What do you want to talk about? When's my next appointment? That's what goes through people's minds. When you say, have you got a few minutes to talk? What does that mean? You do not have their attention. You just blew the first seven seconds by put clouding their brain with those thoughts. So it was now a bad time to talk. They stop, they clear their head and they go, no, what do you got? Or they say, yeah, it is a bad time to talk, but I can Talk Tuesday at 1. Now you just got an appointment for their focus and their attention, which is what you were after in the first place. That's what we say. That's what we get over and over again. I remember seeing this come up in a thread on LinkedIn once. And somebody on LinkedIn, you know the level of discussion in there of people clinging to their own beliefs. Someone wrote, well, I don't want to say, is now a bad time to talk? Because what do you do if they say yes? And my thought is, do you really want to talk to somebody who says yes to that? If they're willing to say yes, now is a bad time to talk. You want to keep talking, think about how stupid that is. So it's now a bad time to talk. Any of you that from this point forward, don't at least experiment with this, that loss is on you. I'm sorry, I'm blunt. All right, so extending. I never ask anybody if it's a good idea. We consistently ask over and over, is this a ridiculous idea? And this also will begin to get us some underpinnings of why no works. One of the reasons why no as an answer works is what we found from our own experiences. No matter how fatigued somebody is, somebody can say no and clear their mind. Every one of you listening to me right now, we all have the same problem. We suffer from decision fatigue. No matter who you are, you have capacity. So x number of decisions in a given day, you start running out of gas at some point in time. It's between the decisions that you've made. The number of clicks, every click is a decision. Your circadian rhythm, what you've had to eat. What a good night's sleep you had the night before. Doesn't matter. You've all got so much gas in a tank. We see over and over and over again. And people on my staff are, especially my assistants, are told, never ask Chris a how or what question after 1 o' clock in the afternoon. Because if you say, what do you want to do? What do you want me to do? How do you want me to handle this? After one, my reaction, because I'm fatigued is going to be, I don't know, stop bothering me, go away, don't bother me again. Which there's a couple of you don't want. Do not want to trigger that sort of response from somebody because then my last interaction with you was you annoyed me. And the last impression is a lasting impression. So it also begins to put you on a slippery slope, if you're working for me, of a downward spiral where I don't think you're that smart because all you did was annoy me. Now, all they, they've all been taught, and I explicitly say this, never ask me a question ever after one o' clock in the afternoon where I can't say no, because if you say, do you want me to do this? I'll say, no, do this, this, this and this. And I will in fact ask, answer. The question that they want to ask was, how do you want me to do it? But something about saying no triggers my ability to think through steps. First time I ran across us, Jack welch, book signing LA. I'm standing in line at 200 people. They're doing everything they can to minimize the amount of time that you spend with a book signer for a whole variety of reasons, not the least of which I'm at a book signing a couple years ago. There are 300 people in line. The people orchestrating the book signing walk up to me and they go like, from the moment somebody walks up to you to the moment they move on, you've got 30 seconds. Otherwise we're going to be here for six hours. We don't have that much time. We got to get everybody through this line. 30 seconds per person. We're going to ask them their name before they walk up to you. We'll write it on a piece of paper. They will hand you a book with their name. It's going to take you 30 seconds for you to look them in the eye. Sign to Bob. Nice seeing you. Good luck, Chris. And they're going to move on. 30 seconds. And doing the same thing with Jack Welch. Because I got to move everybody to the line. Plus, they don't want me pitching Jack Welch. They don't want me asking him over to the house. They don't want me asking him over to dinner because my wife makes a great meatloaf. All that's going to happen. They're going to don't want pictures. So I know I get seven seconds. When I walk up to Jack Welch, I want to pitch him on coming to speak at the negotiation course I'm teaching at usc. I ain't got time to lay this out. And he doesn't have time to listen. And it's late in the day. I walk up to him and I say, is it a ridiculous idea for you to come and speak at the negotiation course I teach at usc? And he looked at me in the eye and he started to squint. And then he looked up into the universe and he got this hideous scowl on his face and he just froze. And my first thought was, has killed Jack Welch. He got so mad because he looks furious that he had a stroke and he died and he's getting ready to fall over. So when he initially doesn't die, I'm relieved. But now he looks furious. I mean, furious. I think he's going to start screaming scaredy scurry. Get this guy out of here. I don't know what he's going to do. He finally unfreezes. He looks at me and he says, this is my personal assistant's name. This is special Twitter account we have set up to communicate with her. I will call her and tell her who you are. I think we're going to be in Los Angeles in the fall. If we are, we'll come in and speak at your class. Reach out to my assistant. I'll let her know what's going on. Decision fatigue. He said no. And he thought through all the next steps and he laid them out for me. Now, is it a ridiculous idea? And are you against the next two going back and forth with Robert Herjavec over him sending some people to one of our courses? I had lunch with Herjavec. Generous dude, sweetheart of a guy, completely generous. He paid for lunch. It's my favorite kind of lunch. On top of that, I was at a steak restaurant, so it was even better. He paid 90 minutes and he paid. Great guy. I look at him and I say, we got one of our in person sessions coming up in New York. Can I give you a ticket? He looks back at me and says, how many can we buy? One more indicator of A generous, decent human being. We're going back and forth on the tickets. My son who runs my company, he doesn't care that Robert Herjavec, he's mad because we're going to sell out and he wants to sell the ticket and he's hoping Herjavec doesn't take it so he can sell it. He's on the east coast, we're on the west coast in la. Herjavec's offices in la. I was living just up the street at the time. My son calls me at 4:30 in the afternoon, 7:30 in New York. He says, you get Herjvik on the phone and get a commitment for the tickets before the business day starts tomorrow or I'm selling these ticket and we're going to sell out because we're on the verge of selling out now and you're holding up the whole circus. And I can't wait to start of the business day tomorrow because the business day starts three hours later in la and by the time we get up in la, New York's going to lunch. We're going to be out of luck. So I get needed a decision from herjavec now at 5:03 in the afternoon I sent him a two line email. Is it a ridiculous idea for you to commit to three tickets for our course now? Second line. Are you against paying for them before the business day starts tomorrow? That's a 503 email. Again, decision fatigue. Five o' clock in the afternoon. When was the last time you tried to close somebody with a hard decision after 3:00 clock in the afternoon? The loan after 5. The email response from herjavec comes back at 5:04. No, we're willing to commit to three tickets right now. No, it's not a problem. My assistant will be within in touch with you within the hour and will pay for the tickets. Tickets are paid for at 5:23. I've got all the emails timestamped, our favorite negotiation one liners and why. All right, number four. Have you given up on what's the context? This is context driven. I see a lot of people trying to manipulate me who've learned this and they'll send me in an opening email. Have you given up on doing business with us? Well, now I have because you just tried to manipulate me with one of my tools. Now I don't mind if you use my tools with me but if you want to use them against me, I smell it really quickly. So any of you that want to try, have you given up on as an opening line, it's going to sound harsh. It's out of context. You deserve to have that door slammed in your face. On the other hand, it is the most effective restarter for people who are ghosting you.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and, and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

It's almost a 1,000% guarantee of a response, in many cases from three to five minutes. The person receiving it, seeing it, I'm not kidding you, when you send that one line text or one line email, sit there and wait because the response may come screaming back at you. It will restart the conversation literally. I know of two or three instances and probably 10,000 when it didn't. One instance when the answer was yes. Now, context, the system is perfectly designed to give you the outcome that you have achieved. If they're ghosting you, they're not responding, you're part of the problem. Which means they've gone dark on you for one of two reasons. Number one, you're not listening to them. It's a larger subset of communication with them with you is doing them no good. The first problem is probably that you're not listening, you're pitching and they get tired of giving you the counterfeit yes or the maybes and they just can't take it from you anymore and they just stop responding because you're not listening to them. Number two, they've lost all influence on your side. Again, communication with you is doing them no good. If communication with you was doing them any good, they would still be communicating. What does that mean? Is your takeaway when you send have you given up on? And they respond five minutes later. If you go back to the same type of communication that you were using that led up to that point, you've just blown your one shot reset. I was coaching an ex girlfriend probably about five or six years ago. She says, hey, this guy, you know, we're pitching him on this investment, he's not returning our text anymore. And I said, perfect, shoot him a text saying, have you given up on making this investment? He's going to get back to you right away. She did. He got back to her right away. She went back into the same pitch that drove him away in the first place. And she never heard from him again. If you send this, you have to rethink how you got into this in the first place, because your communication system is perfectly designed to give you the outcome that you achieved. You cannot go back to communicating with them the way you were communicating before. Chances are you were pitching and you weren't listening. You've got to go into listening and using one of our skills, principally summary, to try to get back on track. There was another point I was going to make on that, but it'll come back to me. All right, we're going into 5 and 6. Actually, Howard has a question. Go ahead.

No, no, you gave me an alternative to that, which. Which is you must have a legitimate reason for.

He's saying, I don't know. Can. Can. Can anybody. Howard says you must have a legitimate reason for. We'll get it. We'll get into that in a minute. But here's the one that I wanted to get into. We're coaching. We're coaching a guy in a negotiation with Coca Cola, selling them a healthcare program. He says, they got to get. We gotta. We have an agreement, but they haven't signed a contract. Gotta get the contract signed by the end of the calendar year, or this is all gonna go down to tubes. And then, guy I'm working with has heard this, so we say, perfect. You send it. You send. Send the email, send a text. Have you given up on getting the contract signed by the end of the calendar year? So we get a response every time. Silence. This guy got back to us and he said, you said, this worked. We don't know what's going on. I said, no, we do know what's going on. The answer is yes. And it's really hard for people to say yes, especially this one. That's why you get silence. So here's, you know, going from certainty uncertainty to certainty going with Dan Sullivan. Before, you didn't know if they've given up. Now you know, whether you like it or not, you have a solid answer. They have given up. You have to recalibrate all of your communication now to try to salvage this. And here's what's going on. I guarantee you that your counterpart has lost all influence on his side of the table. Coca Cola. And the guy will coach and says, yeah, but if he doesn't sign this, it's going to hurt him. And I say, you know what? That's not good enough. Here's what this guy's looking at. He's trying to make a decision whether to get his Hand cut off, which is losing your deal or getting shot in the head, which is what he's faced with. I promise you, this guy's fighting for his life. Here's how you get him out of it. You send him another email saying, like, look, all this business nonsense, I can't take it anymore. Let's go out, let's get a steak and a scotch. You know, we'll have a couple of drinks, we'll have a few laughs. I promise you we won't talk business. He said if you can get him out of the office into a social environment and you don't ask him a single business question, if you get him out of there and get him laughing, he'll tell you what's going on. You won't have to ask. Sends an email, they make an appointment to have dinner together. They have dinner. My buddy is not pressing business at all. A few drinks in, this guy begins to explain to him how he's fighting for his life in Coca Cola. He's worried about losing his job. They've moved him, somebody else has got the contract now. And he offers to tell him who it is and connect. So if you ask that no oriented question and you get a yes, you have to read what you're learning. You might not like the answer, but you're actually smarter, having gone from uncertainty to certainty. All right? Moving down the line, letting out know a little at a time to encourage collaboration. Read the book. You know that How Am I Supposed to do that? Is a story of how the book opens. And a lot of people have picked that up as a way to bargain. Like somebody says, one guy got back to me at lawn service. Guy said he wanted X number of dollars to do all the landscaping in his house. And he just looked at him, said, how am I supposed to do that? And a landscaper immediately cut the price significantly. A lot of people learn, how am I supposed to do that? Is a great way to get people to bargain against themselves. What it really is is a polite way to start indicating to people that the answer is no. Friend of mine, Ned Coletti, was a GM of the Dodgers. Those of you that are baseball fans probably know who Ned is. Great guy. And Ned and I were talking about this one time a few years ago, and Ned said he liked to let out no a little at a time. What does that mean? Nobody should get blindsided with no, people should be given gently indicators that there are problems. If you got problems with what they're proposing, if you can't do it or you won't do it or it's a bad idea to do it. No is an answer, but it's really about your fourth response and letting out no a little at a time. Now, how am I supposed to do that? A how question is principally designed to create implementation. If you don't want to do something because it's unimplementable, you say to somebody, how am I supposed to do that? Like, all right, I'll do it. Give me some implementation based on my constraints. Every now and then somebody says, well, what if they tell me how to do it? Well, you just push them to their limit without making them angry. Because when somebody turns around and gives you implementation as a negotiator, in many cases your job is to find out where the boundaries are. And maybe one time in 10, somebody will turn around and say, this is how you do it. Well, perfect. You've just learned a lot. You've been given implementation that they think is reasonable. Plus you push them as far as you can on that issue, which in many cases is your job as a negotiator. The other thing it is, again, my son Brandon, he said, how am I supposed to do that? Is forced empathy. You don't ask the how question so much as to get an answer. As you get, you ask a question in order to make them think, what Danny Kahneman would call triggering slow thinking. If you look at somebody and say, how am I supposed to do that? And you say it deferentially. You don't say like, how am I supposed to do that? Where your tone of voice says, I think you're stupid, you say it deferentially. You make them stop and look at you and see you as a human being, at least potentially as a collaboration partner who's looking to collaborate but just needs some help. So it's forcing them to empathize with you, which is one of the things that's a good thing to do in your negotiations. So it's forced empathy. Number six, your offer is very generous. I'm afraid it just doesn't work for me. That hits a number of awesome psychological buttons. Positive attributes are reinforced by the recognition of them. If someone's being stingy with you to their. In their brain, they're being generous. That's what empathy is about. What is it to them, not to you? You need more generosity at somebody when they've given you a stingy offer. You start off by saying you've been very generous. It makes them want to be even more generous. And the story they're telling Themselves in their head is that they're being generous anyway. You want to encourage more of it. It has a tendency to turn that dial up by saying, you're being very generous. And to say, I'm afraid it just doesn't work for me, I'm afraid is important part of that. As of that statement, it just doesn't work for me. The beauty of that is that it takes away external criteria. One of the things that I think Bob Cialdini talks about a lot, or he may even speak of because I think we're going to see him tomorrow. Some people say, well, in negotiations, go to external criteria. Go to an external set of criteria that you can both agree on. Well, look, what if the market price is X and you don't have the money, the external criteria is a market price. Does that mean you got to pay the market price if you don't have the budget or the funds? It's a stupid idea. So saying it just doesn't work for me takes away external criteria as a way to take you hostage. We have never had anybody say, I reported back in any response when someone said, that just doesn't work for me. Have somebody fire back, say, yes, it does. You made a lot of money last year. No, it doesn't work for me. I've never had that fired back at anybody. What typically happens, one of the students in Georgetown was doing this in a negotiation in his day job in a business. He and his partner sat down, some people across the table, they came in with a low ball offer and he looked them in the eye and said, you know, you guys offer is very generous. It just doesn't work for us. He said, the people on the other side of the table looked at each other and looked back at him and said, you're right, it is low, and gave him a higher offer. How often does that happen? How often does it have to happen? All right, number seven, you call a black swan group on the phone and you get my son on the phone and you say to him, how are you today? And he's going to say back to you, it sounds like it got a place you want to start. And you were immediately going to get into the conversation. Now, of the number of people that asked you, how are you? How many of them actually wanted to know what is how are you really? How are you? Is a temperature check where someone's trying to get a bead on what mood you're in to find out whether or not they can lay out what they call to talk to you about in the first place, you've just gotten around all of that dancing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and got right to the heart of what they had on their mind anyway, which is what they went through in their head before they dialed the phone and called you. And you just put time back in your day. And in their day now, the only time Brandon's ever gotten any pushback on this, he said one time, one guy did say, okay, I'd love to get into that, but really, how are you? The guy wanted to know he wasn't mad that he tried to get right into it right away. And my son was like, fine. And then they had the social conversation this guy wanted to have, because then it was about serving the person on the other side of the phone. And that guy, who was a minority, wanted to have that how are you? Conversation, which, if it enhances the moments in the interaction, is cool. But at least two out of three times, they really don't care how you are. My back hurts, my legs hurt. I get varicose veins. They don't want to hear that. What they really want to know is, are you in a mindset where they can talk to you? So how are you? Is really a probe on the other side's part to find out if they can talk to you about what's on their agenda. And when you say, sounds like you got a place you want to start, bang, you just hack that and you move forward. All right. Responses to questions number eight and nine. You answer a question at your peril. Everybody knows the question behind a question is much more important. So why is answering a question at your peril? Well, number one, most people usually don't. Are don't have the ability to ask a good question. Like, when I ask a question, I'm pretty good at it because I listen and I actually want an answer. But most people, they ask you a question, and you answer the question, they start talking about something like, good God, I had no idea that's what you were talking about. If I'd have known that before I answered, I'd have given you a completely different answer. What makes you ask again? What makes you ask? What makes you ask? Upward inflection, genuine curiosity, inquisitive. You got to find out what's driving them. I'm in a presentation a couple years ago while I'm still doing security stuff. Insurance company thinking about getting into K and R Insurance. Kidnapping, ransom. There's insurance for it. There's insurance for everything. They say, have you kept your government security clearance And I have intentionally not. And what I think for brilliant reasons. I think the answer to that of no is so startling that people are going to ask me, follow, why not? What's going on? Have you kept your government security clearance? No. Conversation then goes in another direction. We don't get back to this topic in the entire presentation. I never get the opportunity to come up with my brilliant explanation why I don't have the government security clearance. It never comes up and we don't get the contract. To this day, I don't know why they asked. What makes you ask might have changed. It seems like you have a good reason for asking that same thing. You're not being disrespectful by digging into the motivation behind somebody's questions. Finally, number 10. Seems like you have a good reason for not doing that. When people are failing to perform.

And.

You want them to open up, this is what you've got to say. Seems like you have a good reason for not performing. Seems like you have a good reason for not meeting the deadline. They are never going to tell you what the real reason is or what's going on behind their side of the table. If you say, why didn't you do that? Do you know you failed in an agreement? All the accusatory stuff, they're not coming out of their shell to let you know what's going on. Contractor, subcontractor, negotiation, Washington, D.C. subcontractor completely failing to perform. Contractor sits down with the subcontractor, who's been making excuses, blaming it on other people for lack of performance, sits down with them, says, seems like you got a good reason for not performing as per the contract. Guy on the other side of the table kind of shrugged his shoulders, said, no, I don't. And they worked it out and they fixed everything. You don't sit down to find out what's stopping them because you want to hang them. Maybe you do, but you really sit down because you want to get people back on track. And this is a way that gets people back on track. All right, so we get quick couple questions, then I want to tell you about the certainty, the 10 questions for negotiation. Certainty real quick. And then also make you guys.

I have a question. Yes, Chris, I loved your book, first of all, and I tried one of your techniques, and unfortunately I must have screwed it up. So how am I supposed to do that? And the other person said, that's not my problem.

All right, so what did you just learn about that person?

Well, that I can share.

What you learned is when you Got problems. They aren't there to help you.

Yeah.

You know, if somebody just dropped into half instantly in front of your eyes, how does that affect your long term happiness?

Yeah.

I mean, it's a client. Right. And it's just.

Yeah.

Was I.

This close?

Well, you know, they should be. They should be on a short list. You know what the answer you got back from them is if you genuinely come to them with something you're struggling with and you're trying to get collaboration, they're not there for you.

Yeah, no, I agree. I would agree this is a particularly difficult client.

Mm.

Not elf. It's not an elf client. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know what in the and a half, what we found since we've instituted this half elf framework in smoking people out early on, the halfs are not repeat customers. They're not good long term customers, the elves. Every moment a half takes from you, keeps you from a moment with an elf. There's. There's a straight trade there.

Agreed. Thank you.

Welcome. Okay, let me lay this. A certainty uncertainty quiz. I came up on this inspired by, by Dan in one of his recent talks. And you're grateful to be part of Strategic Coach and I threw this together. Send it back to us. Send it back to us. And here's what we'll get now. Now, allow me to be blunt with you. If you score on this, because if, if you get seven and three, seven you're certain. Three you're uncertain of seven things you're certain of on, on this list, which would give you 14 minus 3 and 11. If you score 11 or higher on.

This.

I can't help you. You're kidding yourself and I can't help you. But these are things we really want people to just actually think things through. And if there's stuff here you're not so sure if you can take advantage of what we can give you. So here's what we could give you. We got a class called the N9, which is quick, down and dirty on our nine negotiation skills. And we normally charge them like 115. In order to get you to group coaching, we want to give you a free group coaching session. But you got to have at least some idea of what we're talking about. So we need you to pay for the N9. My son wants to give you the N9 for like $99, which is not a lot of a discount at all. It's a tiny little discount which is like, why are we even giving a discount at all? Because it's not going to matter. But if you email info infoackswanltd, put genius in the subject line. We don't want you to sign up at that rate. $99 per person for each person on your team to go through the N9. Then we'll give you a free hour of group coaching. And we need to know that you have at least some idea what we're talking about. And if you don't do the N9, we can't be sure that you got a grounding enough in the skills for the group coaching to not be a waste of your time and your attention even more valuable. So it's a way for us to make sure that your time and attention does not be wasted in a group coaching call. And we've also got there's a couple of PDFs one of the three types that will respond to your email with we'll send you the PDF e book on the three types and set you up for the group coaching call. You got to have at least some grounding in the skills for that group coaching call to do you any good. But go through the certainty uncertainty quiz and see what you think. And if you're certain of all these things there's a possibility that the reason we can't help you is because you're 10 times smarter than we are anyway and we would be a waste of your time. And I think I'm just about out of time.

So I left you a note.

Left me a note? Yeah.

I think we should have more questions. But what I wanted I thought this was incredible. And when I asked you to do this it's exactly what I was thinking. But so much of this was done in the context of a negotiation. But it occurs to me that so many of these are things that you can use in emails or subject lines on your website and sales letters. But this is the kind of thing and when we talked about the form and make sure that you download the form so that you can use it. He's created it almost like Mad Libs where you can fill out with your own information. I would create variations on the themes to think about using this in personal communications, business communications. But this is not just a negotiation. This is actually a form of influence and getting the next.

Exactly.

Yep. Yeah.

Yeah. We use it across the board. We. We had a fair amount of people pushing back on us in marketing saying we still gotta ask yes questions in marketing till we've done enough marketing on of our own material and split tested the yeses and no questions. And even in the marketing the no Questions. Give it. Give us much higher rates of return. Like, do you want to make more money? Now that's a yes question. You know, stupid. That's constantly out there in the marketing. All our marketing, if you look at it, we don't ask yes questions at all.

Well, this is Genius Network and it's obvious that you just shared a bunch of genius.

Before.

Before we finish up. We still have a couple minutes. Does anybody have a question or a situation that you'd like to get feedback from while Chris is right here?

I do.

Great. Babs.

Hi. So I have two questions. Okay. So first one is simple. You know, the. Have you given up on email line or text? Will you put that in the subject line?

Yep. And send it.

Send it.

Send it naked. Nothing else.

The subject line. And maybe put it inside just the same thing.

If I repeat it, I will put it in the same site. You know what one guy coached one time. He took all the coaching and put it all in. One email says, have you given up on doing business with me? And then his next line was, because I haven't.

Oh, no.

Come on.

Yeah, okay, so that's great. But the other question is about what your offer was, which is a very generous offer.

Oh, look at you.

It is a generous offer. I mean, you know, the group coaching call. But I just wanted to clarify. So you're saying, like, we have a group of people that I think would be really great to go through group coaching call with. First they. Do the negotiation nine course, which I've done and I loved it. And I got a couple other people to do it too. And after, after I did it, I guess they. They jumped on. But yeah, so they. So to me, that's a great way to get them to do negotiation nine so that then they can do the group coaching call and ask questions and stuff like that. So thank you for that. So that's the clarification I need.

And you know what? If you guys do that Also info@BlackSwanLTD subject line. Genius. CC me, Chris @BlackSwanLTD.

Okay.

And I will monitor the follow up to make sure that everything gets where it's supposed to go.

I. I'm pretty sure our program advisor team is already setting up a group thing, you know, so like customized and all that, which is great. I'm pretty sure they're in the process of doing that with somebody. Maya or somebody's working with them to work that out. But there's other people we could do that with. It's a group of people.

I'll do it make everybody as effective as possible. Dan? Yeah, Chris, I wondered, since you've started Black Swan to this point, what's one thing you've learned in your business life that you wish you had had at the beginning of your FBI life? How to smile more. When I was talking, just take. Take a couple of miles an hour off my speed ball, my fastball that I threw at somebody's head in the government, and I would have gotten. It would have been fewer hurt feelings inside different government agencies. I was under house arrest in Columbia once because I didn't smile enough when I said stuff they didn't like.

Wow.

So, you know, I would have been able to go drinking while I was in Colombia instead of having to stay in the embassy the whole time.

All right, well, you did great, man. Let me shake your hand. The fact that I did not interrupt is because this is a genius, and you saw mastery, so good job.

Thanks. Thanks.

Dean Jackson has a question. We can't leave.

We can't leave till I get one question. Yeah, Chris, that's so great. I had a quick question around initial engagements, because I know we use. I use something called the nine word email that we send out often. It's the same sentiment, just asking somebody a question, looking them right in the eye, essentially. You get their full attention that way. But on the morning after, we send an initial email to someone who inquires about a franchise, say, and we send them all the initial information. The thing that we're trying to do is to see are people willing to engage in a dialogue. Is my top priority for the engagement there. The winning question that we've been asking people is we'll email them and say, hey, Chris, thanks for your inquiry. Are you an investor or are you looking for something you can run as an owner operator? Would be a question that we would engage with people. And we've done the same thing on the real estate side. When people come to a real estate website, we'll ask them that same thing. Are you an investor or are you looking for a house to live in? As an example of that kind of split question that we would ask somebody if they're coming in. I work with a podiatrist and. And we offer a book called the Plantar Fasciitis Solution. So then when somebody responds the next morning, we'll ask them a question, a choice question. Seems to always be the ones that we have. Hi, Chris. Does your heel hurt more when you get up first thing in the morning, or does it progressively get worse through the day? So I'd love to hear your take on kind of initial emails like that.

I got no problem with that. Because you're not trying to use yes as a way to lead them down a garden path of a commitment and agreement. You're actually, first of all, they're responding to you and secondly, you're trying to engage in some diagnosis early on which is keeping from wasting people's time. The caution thing there though is as they're going down a path with you, are they pumping you for information? Do they want free consulting as we go?

And typically what we'll find.

Are they pumping you for information or they genuinely want to engage with you? They may be looking for free consulting. Now you might not have a problem with giving free consulting. We don't do it because we steer it towards something.

It's always so the, the path would be a, would be going somewhere. So it would be.

Here's my question to you, the people that respond the next morning. Do you have 100% close rate?

Oh, no, no, it wouldn't be 100% close rate.

Hold on. Before this continues, we're going to have a five minute soft break till the top of the hour. John Raymond's is going to take us home with a discussion about his investments and his thoughts on the future. While you guys are taking a bathroom break or whatever, you guys can continue this. Just realize that, that we're going to come back at the top of the hour.

Okay, so the reason I asked that question is my guess is those that you don't close, the normal human reaction is I did something wrong, I didn't dial in with them, I didn't ask them the right question. Somehow I failed. In point of fact, at least 20% of the people that are interacting with you are simply looking for free consulting. And if that's what they're looking for, we look for those indicators as early as possible and we kick them out because 20% of the people are wasting our time. And I need to focus on the people that are not wasting our time. This gets us into a separate topic than when I was talking about I like your structure. I got, I got no problem with your structure. And the way you get into it, there might be a couple tweaks to try to weed out the free consulting people that I would look for a little earlier.

Okay. Because we're, yeah, I'm just looking to see, you know, that's the first step. I know that 100% of the people that buy are what we call five star prospects, meaning they're willing to engage in the dialogue. They're friendly and cooperative. They know what they want. They're ready to get it now, and they'd like us to help them. And so I'm just progressively trying to get go through those five things, like the staged lighting at the drag races. So rather than what most sales situations do is they start at the bottom and they start saying, here's why you should buy this franchise because it's on sale. If you don't buy before the end of the month, the price is going up. And I know that they have to be all five, so it's much easier and softer to be able to see. Are they willing to engage in a dialogue with seemingly low consequence question that's still related to what it is? You know, like saying, I would tell you.

I would. I would. Still other than the choice questions just across the board, because you're genuine and honest and you want to be as much of an elf to them as you want from them. The problem is the vampires, the parasites ask yes questions and they live on yes questions.

Yeah.

And anytime you ask a yes question, it's not an alternate choice, but it's just for a straight yes. The problem is you're engaging in behavior that the people that are parasites engage in also. And you can't help but trigger a response because you did something that the parasite does.

That defensive thing. Yes, I get it.

And even in trusted relationships, we see this becomes a little bit of an issue when they got no reason not trust you, but you still. You engage in a behavior the parasites did. That's the big problem.

That's great.

Okay. I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful and awesome, click here.

Go ahead. You're over here. Do it now. Come on. Thank you.

Watch them.