Dan Smith, CAO of Winning By Design, teaches sales professionals that selling is a learnable skill, not innate talent. He breaks down voice control: volume, pitch, speed, tone. The key move is silence. Buyers decide in the quiet while sellers talk.
Chapters
What I'd like to do now though is I wanna make this realistic for you. I think that you need to come up with what is your ideal customer profile, what is the path that you want them to go on. All of those take some time, take some customization. But what I wanna do right now is I wanna teach you some sales skills that you can use in any situation. Would that be valuable to you? Yeah. How many of you have scheduled meetings with investors or potential customers? Okay, there's 2 things that I want to break down. The first one, what goes into effective communication? I wasn't always comfortable standing on stage here. I always used to think that some people were born with sales skills. Some people just naturally were good at it. Other people, they should find another type of career. But what I have found is like every other profession, sales has skills that can be developed, and they have foundation skills and advanced skills that build on top of each other, just like when you're learning math, just like you would think about legal or a law degree or even medicine. The problem with sales is that there is no class in school that teaches you how to do it effectively. So what I'd like to share with you now is some best practices on the fundamentals of good communication. The first phrase that I wanna go through when it comes to communicating is how do you speak so people want to listen to you? If you listen to your call on recording, we know that there's some things that really resonate and there's some things that are really painful to listen to. But if I listen to myself trying to pitch, trying to do a call, and I hear that I'm not very confident, and I tell somebody, hey, you know what, you don't sound confident on the phone. That's not enough information because I don't know what to change. So, what are some things that affect the way that I communicate that I can change? Voice level. Voice level. So, there's a couple things that go into voice level. Volume that I speak or the pitch that I can go through, up and down. Can I ask you a personal question? How do you feel when I ask you a personal question by lowering my voice like this? Lower the— You immediately look up, you look in, I look out at the audience, people who were snoozing are like, oh shit, what's about to happen right now? This is something that's really valuable when we're trying to communicate with our customers. Knowing that we can speak very loud, but if I speak loud this whole time, that can get very draining to listen to. If I come in quiet, this is also a really powerful way to make people want to listen to you. So changing how you communicate is great, but I notice there's a lot of young people in here. What do young people unfortunately do when they're not confident when they're speaking? Say again? They speak very fast. I know when I get really excited about something, I tend to speak really fast, especially when I'm training on emails and demos and all these things I really care about. That can get really hard to listen to. What else do young people unnaturally get categorized in doing? Rambling. Rambling. So sometimes you get off the broken path, you don't know exactly what you're doing. And I also noticed that sometimes when we're not confident, we end our sentences in questions even though it's not a question. Does anybody know what we call that? This is uptalk. I used to really struggle with uptalk, but my number one issue was filler words. I used to say uh every third word. The problem with uh is that it makes you sound not confident, not familiar in what you're saying. This is something that can be very distracting, especially when you're getting excited for a big investor meeting that's coming up, or your first few customers that you You just really want to get over the finish line. Does anybody know how to combat the issue of using filler words like um, yeah, yep, got it, cool, perfect, uh-huh? It's a short pause. It's what I just tried to do when I asked you that question. When you let there be silence, This allows the customer to fill it in because everyone gets uncomfortable with silence. Now, I don't want you to get awkward with silence. I don't want you to let it be so long, and I don't want you to go through that old-school sales tactic that is first person to talk loses. That's some old-school BS selling. What I'd like you to do though is realize that selling happens in the talking, buying happens in the silence. If you have something powerful that you want to say or a question that you really want answered, don't fill it in just because you're uncomfortable. Realize that you can ask a good, simple question and let there be silence. The first way that I want you to remember this is by calling this tone. Tone is the things that you can change in your voice to make people want to listen to you. I don't want you to change everything all at once. I want you to figure out one of the things that you can change to be a better communicator. We are not born with it. This is a skill like anything else. Don't just get complacent and comfortable with how you normally talk. Realize that you can change to be better communicators. And that was my first lesson working in the ER. Part of my job was helping people get splints on. They broke a limb, I would have to splint up their arm or their leg and then teach them how to take care of it. The same idea was there for a 6-year-old and an 86-year-old, but I had to change how I communicated depending on who was on the other side. How do old people talk? Slow, soft, deliberate. Sometimes it can be painful. When I used to talk to my grandma, I'd be like, why? Why are you talking so slow? There's too much to cover today, Grandma. I want to teach you how to use this iPhone. It's going to change your life. I can't wait to tell you about the internet. Get all your news articles on there and stop replying to those Nigerian princes. They don't have money for you. Now ultimately, this comes back— we need to change how we communicate, not on what we feel comfortable with, but on how the other person likes to communicate with. Treat it like a game. Next time you're in an Uber, a taxi, Lyft, I want you to use this idea to try and listen how they are communicating and match what they're saying. Questions for me on tone? How do you use it to combat filler words? How do I use it to combat filler words? Okay, the only antidote to filler words is replacing them with silence. I used to try and put uh on my computer screen with a big X out of it. I got blind to it. I ended up not saying it. The thing, and I don't advocate this for everybody, 'cause violence in the workplace is never a good idea, but the threat of violence really helped me. I told my colleague behind me who I loved, I was like, if you notice me on a demo with a customer and I start saying uh, I give you full permission to come over and just hit me on the arm. And I realized that the threat of violence Threat of getting hit in mid-demo made me snap out of this. When I started realizing I almost said uh, it made me get out of my normal flow. Figure out what that is for you, but realize the only way to really combat it is to get comfortable with silence. If you find that you speak too fast, or you accidentally overtalk your customer, I don't want you to do what some of the experts say, wait 3 to 5 seconds. 'Cause that's way too long. All I want you to do, take a deep breath before you start speaking again. That'll allow you to have enough silence, so if they wanna continue talking, they can jump back in, but also helps build a good cadence. Does that help answer your question?
