Sales coach Matt Ryder describes a disastrous call where he stopped a colleague from dropping a prospect. He used to rely on logic traps that forced prospects into contradictions, but now uses a visual map and exploratory questions instead. The shift moved him from coercion to collaboration, and that prospect became a $40M/year CEO.
He got onto the onboarding call. He then tried to pull out during the onboarding call, so the coach texted me. I hopped onto the onboarding call, ambushed this dude, and then for another 25 minutes— and something that I have as an example of, this is how not to do this. Knowing what you know now, you would obviously handle it differently, but in what way? I used to use what's called logic traps. I would ask questions that were designed to trap people in a specific logical loop. It's leveraging people's hatred of being inconsistent.
You're essentially forcing the person into it without them ever sort of relinquishing and taking the step themselves. What you're doing is like, haha, pushing them So that they fall and have to take the step.
Whereas I think the way that I do it now is more— it's using sort of a visual map. This is the landscape that's happening at the moment. Let's kind of explore that and then linking it back to a decision-making process or a paradigm. The whole time they feel like they're kind of in control, but just through a series of tactful questions, it's getting them to think about things in a different way.
