In this workshop segment, Dan Smith explains that the most effective way to influence a prospect is through active listening, specifically by mirroring the customer's own unusual words. He defines active listening as more than passive hearing; it involves picking out distinctive language (e.g., “dilly‑dallying”) and feeding it back in a question to demonstrate genuine attention. Smith contrasts three techniques: mirroring (using 1‑2 key words), repeating (echoing the entire statement, which feels robotic), and paraphrasing (re‑phrasing in your own words, which can dilute impact). He emphasizes that people have an innate desire to feel heard, and that using the prospect’s language builds trust and reduces resistance to sales pitches. Smith recommends Robert Cialdini’s book Influence as the essential sales read and suggests a 12‑minute YouTube recap as a low‑commitment entry point. He advises distilling lengthy resources (case studies, white papers) into concise, ultra‑relevant summaries for customers, positioning the seller as a time‑saving, valuable partner. He introduces a communication best‑practice framework called T‑A‑L and stresses the importance of taking notes with pen and paper rather than typing. Handwritten notes force the listener to capture only key words, reinforcing active listening, improving memory retention, and signaling empathy to the prospect. The overall message is that mastering these subtle, subconscious influence techniques—mirroring language, concise content delivery, and tactile note‑taking—significantly boosts sales effectiveness.
Chapters
I know that there's some workshops that you'll be doing as it relates to trying to get somebody to buy something unusual. The best way to influence somebody is to get them to open up using their own words. This is a hard skill to master. This is called active listening. Listening is a skill. Passively is a biological sense of recognizing sounds that go through your head. Active listening requires you to actually pick up what they said and mirror it and put it back in there. So the word I want you to remember here is mirroring, and I want you to pick up the unusual words that they say. If somebody says, oh, I'm interested in your solution because I've been dilly-dallying with all these other products in the past, What is the word that stands out there? Dilly-dallying. Dilly-dallying. That's a really weird word to use. So all I want you to do is, what are you dilly-dallying about? If they say, that is not particularly important to me, what is particularly important to you? I want you to pick up these unusual words and add it back into the question, because this proves to the person that you're talking with that you're actually listening to them. And we all have this innate desire to feel heard. And you can do that by not pitching to them, not talking at them, because we all resist getting sold to. But if you open them up and realize that you are somebody different, somebody who actually cares about them, their problems, the solutions they're looking for, active listening is the trick to getting somebody like Alex, closed up like this, to open up and want to talk to you. It is a really powerful skill. Now, some of you in the audience might say, like, Dan, I don't wanna do that. What if somebody feels like I'm making fun of them? And I think there's a balance there. Mirroring is only using 1 or 2 of the key tone words that the customer is saying. Repeating is literally saying back everything that they just said. So, Alex, let me get this right. You went to the roller skating rink this weekend? Now, if I repeat it back to you, you'd be like, Dan, you literally just asked me that, and I literally said those exact words. That is going too far. That's called repeating. What is going too soft is something that we were all trained to do in school called paraphrasing. Put it into your own words. If somebody says, I am so frustrated with my existing solution, I don't want you to say something like, oh, why is it so annoying to you? I literally want you to say the word frustrating. This level of insight is something that you can use with each other. It's something that is so subconscious, it's such a powerful influence technique, that usually if I notice that you're sitting like this, and I was just like talking to you, and I went like that, and I sit back, you might recognize that I'm mirroring you physically, but mirroring you with words is often imperceptible. It just feels right. If I'm having a conversation with somebody and they use my own words back, I just feel like this person gets it. They're listening to me. Practice this. Third book recommendation, Influence by Robert Cialdini. Has anybody read that? Yes. This is probably, if you only read one book as it relates to sales, that is gonna be it. It is not a traditional sales book. It is something that will give you some insight. It's Influence by Robert Cialdini. C-I-A-L-D-I-N-I. Okay, so anyway, that book really resonated with me, and the best part about it is that I know with everybody in the room here, there's probably only gonna be 2 of you that actually download and read it. It looks like you're even going on Amazon right now and downloading it. I love that, but what I want you to do to get started, I want you to go on YouTube and and search for that 12-minute video that recaps all of the best practices from that book for free. If you find it valuable, then go read the book. What I just did for you right now is a really powerful influence technique. What did I just do for you instead of just telling you to go read that book? You gave us a bunch of practices instead of the whole book. That's absolutely right. I didn't say, go read this book, it'll change your life. Well, I did say that, but then I said, if you wanna get started with it, here's a great way to do it. And I give you this snippet. It's the same kind of thing. If you have a case study or a white paper or research article that you want to share with a customer, we get way too much email, way too much information to have a stranger tell me to go read this big thing. You need to make it ultra relevant to me. I remember in school, I loved science and math, I hated English. If I was told to read a book, what would I read instead? Because I knew I had to still answer some test questions. What did I read? A book. Spark notes, Wikipedia, just get the summary there. And this is what I want you to do for your customers. I want you to distill the most important information into the smallest chunk to make it readily available to them. This is gonna make you look really valuable to your customers. You're saving time, you're being helpful. Ultimately, I wanna finish out my communication best practices framework. Right now I have the T-A-L. We know that when we're talking with customers, sometimes we can get nervous. Sometimes the customer can go on and on and on and tell us way too much info. So the only way to remember anything is to keep notes. But you have to keep notes with pen and paper. Does anybody know why? Now, I know I can type about 100 times faster than I can write, so it seems counterintuitive to do that. Why do you think? Absolutely. It makes you feel more important. Oh, what I'm saying is valuable. So now we tap back into this empathy as well. People feel like they're being listened to and they love that. But really, UCLA and Princeton came out with studies that show that that ultimately, when we keep notes with pen and paper, it helps us remember things better. Even though you can type faster, and the block that I went into is like, oh, I can get all these words down, I'll go back and read my notes, you end up just having it go through your ear, out through your fingers, you don't really listen to what they're saying. Because pen and paper forces you to only write down a couple keywords, it forces you to listen to those unusual, dilly-dally type words. You write that down, and then very quickly, you can figure out what's an actual priority. It forces you to listen. Thank you.
