Matt Ryder and others discuss how acting techniques shape communication. They explore speech patterns, pauses, and tonality in sales and across different languages, showing why how you speak matters as much as what you say.
Put that coffee down.
Tell me about the pauses you use there. So like something you do all the time is. Especially when you're asking these questions, what if, what if it never happens?
Right.
It's probably, probably do it subconsciously at this point.
Yeah, but so, I mean, I watched, I, I dream in your voice, right. I've watched so much goddamn video and edited so much content of you, and there's times I see that you're like, searching for the next word. And that's natural pauses. And on YouTube, I have to cut those out. Right, because you YouTube won't accept a lull in the battle of even half a second. Yeah, but there's other times that you give that pause, and it's always in those consequence questions there where it's very intentional. Like, I can see there's no way I'm cutting that out. That's not. You, like stalling and taking half a second to remember the word. You know full well what word's going to come out. But you leave that gap. How aware of that are you? And, and how intentional is that and what's the effect of it?
Well, I think, like, there's a couple of, like, really interesting tonality. I don't know, like, I don't know what they'd be called. I guess like things, right? Like stuttering. Intentional stuttering is super powerful. And it's. If you're like, like, like what I really want to know is. And it gives the intent that you're really trying to get the gears right. So what you're about to say is really important.
Okay.
So if you want to have that level of importance, you can just go, well, like, yeah, what I really want to know is. And like, people will just be like, oh, what the fuck is this guy going to say right now? If you overdo it, it sounds like you're just an idiot. Right?
Yeah.
So all these things, it's like acting. Acting is a really interesting parallel to sales because in acting, you're trying to in get the audience to invoke an emotion. In sales, you're trying to get the prospect to evoke an emotion. And the way that you do that is through, like, your tonality. You're pausing, you know, pausing before or after something will be just because of the way that we naturally talk and the way that this really only works in, say, Western society. Like, I couldn't sell someone from China in the same way.
Yeah.
Because their, their, their pauses would be in totally different areas because the language is so different. We're actually incredibly Lucky. Selling in English. English is like. If you had to pick a language to sell, and you'd want English because it's so much more comprehensive than the other language. I think it's more than twice as big as every other language combined.
Okay.
I think that could be complete bullshit. Yeah, don't.
Don't look that up.
Yeah. But it's a very large language, comparatively.
You speak pretty good conversational Spanish, right?
Yeah.
Have you ever sold anything in Spanish?
I have really poorly.
Okay.
It's sort of like. Like I understand Spanish really well.
Yeah.
And after a little bit of. I can get back into conversational Spanish pretty easily. But like, I. I've done it. But it was sort of a last.
Very clunky.
Yeah, very clunky. And sort of. Because the way in which a cell is just. So it doesn't lead itself to Spanish.
Okay. Yeah, that. Well, that's what I'm getting at. Right. So, like, it's. It's hyper specific to English and where the pauses go. And you don't necessarily. Even though, like, Spanish and English aren't too far apart.
No. And we have, like, guys who. Any PQ in Spanish and French and German, all that kind of stuff, but they just have to work on translating how those pauses work, you know, because, like, the verbs and the pronouns are all in different spots.
Yeah.
You know, so.
Yeah.
It just. You'd have to figure that out.
Yeah.
And you'd have to be way more than conversational.
Okay.
You have to be 100% fluent to figure it out. But, like, we have a couple guys in French that are just murderers.
So that those guys that have successfully doing any PQ in French.
Yeah.
French is their first language and English is their second. And they've managed to pull from English to put into French.
So I've coached a Spanish speaker, a French speaker, and a German speaker, all of which did really well. And the first six weeks was us meticulously translating the script.
Okay.
It was like we had to work together. And it's like, okay, what's the intent of this? And it was like, paragraph at a time.
Yeah.
Because you have to have intent, tonality, pausing. Why the pausing is there? So they can work out how to work the pausing into different. It's really complicated, but, like, I probably should have recorded those sessions.
Yeah.
Probably would have saved us atomic cash.
Yeah.
Because if you just translate them word for word, they make no fucking sense.
Yeah.
So few things do, I think. You know, only people who only know one language think that there's ever a straight translation for anything. Yeah, like, and especially like I haven't spoken in ages but my passion got pretty good and it was like it's totally different thing the way you frame conversations. It's all totally different. And I think, yeah, like I remember there was a guy, I think there's a couple of Japanese speakers here, but there was a guy I did selection with who was for Japanese and some of the insults he used to tell us were hilarious. Like, I won't butcher, try to say it in Japanese. But he was like, oh, the literal translation of that is you wear the pants of a pig. Like, I'm not sure I'd be offended by that.
He goes, oh, no, trust me, you would.
If you understood, if you understood the intent, you would be highly offended. Okay, Because I'm not.
Put that coffee down. Coffee is for closers only.
