A good salesperson knows how to bond with people based on making the other person feel good. A bad salesperson will get on the phone and just start selling immediately, saying “Hey, this is Joe from the Rubber Band Company, I know you need some new rubber bands…” Right? They’ll go right into their rehearsed sales pitch.
A good salesperson will get on the phone and talk to the person on the other end, “Hey man, how are you doing today? Are you having a great day?” He or she will start bantering back and forth.
For you, no sales pitches are necessary. Just flirt. If you think about it, we really flirt all day long.
You have to create that banter – whether you’re a salesperson or just looking for a date. Life is about cold calling. You never know what someone is going to say to you, so you have to start off with some type of friendly banter (instead of just going straight in for the kill!)
You think, I really want to ask her out, so you just walk over to her and say, “Hey, do you want to go out?” It doesn’t work that way. You have to start with friendly banter.
So how do you do this friendly banter? How do you cold call your way through life and succeed?
You succeed by picking up on the clues in your environment. You observe the clues of people’s body language. You observe the things that people are doing and experiencing. These are the things you make comments on. To bond with someone, you have to share something. You must share something about yourself to get that connection with someone.
Here is a good exercise to learn how to cold call in your life: think to yourself about how you can open this specific person based on your observations of what’s going on? How can you have the best cold call there is?
Think about who the best cold callers are in the business world – they are the ones that don’t care so much about the outcome. They just whip through as many as they can in an hour.
When you’re out there trying to meet women, you want to try to talk to everybody. You want to get through as many people as you can so you get warmed up. If you’re not sufficiently warmed up, every cold call you make is going to be very uncomfortable.
Start looking at your life as one giant cold call!
To go even deeper here, we need to go outside of our own self and try to understand what the other person is feeling at that moment. We are all humans, and we crave to be understood and felt important according to the first self help guru Dale Carnegie. Starting conversations, or “Cold Calls” requires that we show genuine interest in the other person first and initially conversate about something that they want to talk about or could benefit from. We all want to feel that we bought (our own idea) something instead of being sold (coerced, manipulated) something.
When I was younger I had anixety about talking to people. I changed that by working at a video store. I didn’t mean for the video store to help facilitate a change but after you work at one for a while, you realize that it is just like David says.
A person (man or woman) comes into a video store and you know what it is that is at the top of their mind. I would always ask people questions about their movie choices and it frequently led to great covnersations. What started it all was being able to focus on something that they were engaged in at the time. Pretty soon I got quite confident talking to anyone because of my video store experiences and I realized that I actually like that way of connecting. It is the same idea when you talk to someone about what kind of fruit they like buying in a grocery store.
Mike
I actually knew someone who was a very successful over-the-phone salesman. And yes, he was also good with girls.
great point today D.
i recall one time i wanted to take my date to a palm reader, so i call up this one lady, as soon as she picked up the phone all she cared for is getting the sale done, and she was pushy on the phone. I didn’t like her energy at all, i thought she was the worst sales person ever i spoke to on the phone. So ended the call quick, never wanted to talk to her again.
same principle applies in dating, if truly don’t show appreciation for the person as my buddy “justadjustit” mentioned, it comes out as needy or pushy, and no one wants to be around needy or pushy people!!!!
Taras- was he a Spua- salesmen pickup artist:)
When I see a guy that I want to talk to like today I was sitting there taking my break and seen this mobile cart sitting one of the cart pushers was walking across the parking lot and I motioned him to come over there and he strutted his stuff when he came up to me I said you know when a woman motions for you to come over to you don’t strut your stuff run to her and he ended up rolling his eyes and I said hey their is you a ride. Now I was thinking I would like to double on the back side but it would only turn over. Then I said to him you know I was only messing with you for it would not make my day unless I did. There is this one guy we give each other down the road about politics now we make a joke of it. Usually when I approach guys I will smile and ask how are they doing if I want to talk to them I usually go up to them and say what I want and they will talk back. End of story
I have absolutely no problem answering anyone who talks to me first but I was taught to leave people alone and not BOTHER them so I don’t initiate very often. I love a good pitch of any kind – doesn’t mean that I’m buying but I appreciate anything remotely resembling a decent presentation, regardless of subject matter. But taking on that role as the initiator is really difficult for me – I just can’t seem to make it fit right/feel right.
Hi K,
a similar thing happened with me. My parents when I was about 9 years old kept on saying to me “never talk to strangers” they drilled it into me for my own safety. The thing is, when we learn something at a young age we aften take that lesson straight into adult life. At 9 years old my parents were just trying to protect me but at 34 years of age that is just weird, but these lessons from parents get hard wired into our subconcious. So, as I often teach, we have to unlearn some of our thinking. When I interact with someone I always have in my mind that I will leave that person in a better state than when I found them…knowing this, I know that anyone is always happy to chat with me. As long as you come from a place of giving or sharing rather than trying to get something from someone then people will bond with you quickly….great blog David.
Thx for reminding us about the observation techniques again, it really helps to get the momentum going.
I am curently reading How to win friends and influence people by the author that ”Justadjustit” said. It’s a good read for today’s subject.
I shall use this blog tommorow when I have to call my insurence adjuster hehe
I agree and I found that it is an especially “Western” habit to directly come to the point. We have so much streamlined everything that we can buy a month’s supply of food in the supermarket without saying a word until we say “bye” to the person at the check-out counter.
I had a very different experience when I visited the Great Bazaar in Istanbul a couple of years ago. Although communication was a bit difficult, people just seemed to LOVE to talk. Of course you know they also want to sell something to you, but they obviously enjoy the communication. And in the end it was me who felt sorry for not being able to buy something from everybody who talked to me…
a.movie:
I’d be curious to know how you struck up conversations with people based on what movie(s)they brought up to the counter to check out. Or what ?s you would ask them. How did it usually begin? Did they ask you a question first, like “Is this a good movie?” or did you look at their selection and add a suggestion based on that?
Did you say something like, “I see you like Hugh Grant movies. Have you tried Notting Hill or About a Boy?
Or if somebody was renting 300 did you say “If you like this movie, I know you’ll love Braveheart or Gladiator.” ?
And speaking of cold calls and pushy salesman I’ve run into a few. A few weeks ago some door to door salesman came through my neighborhood wanting to sell something called GutterGuard, which is basically a protective screen over your gutters so leaves won’t fall in & clog them up.
It was a nice day and I was willing to give one of their reps a few minutes, say 3-4 minutes. I noticed another one of them in the same blue shirt was working the other side of the street. He started pressuring me into letting them come back the next day and give some kind of demonstration. Against my better judgment I gave him my # when he asked for it, saying his boss would call later to confirm the appointment. I told him I’d just have to look over the pamphlet he had handed me and would think about it.
I went back inside and sat down here at my comp and the telephone rang. It was their boss calling just like the salesman said he would. This was only 5 minutes later! I kid you not. They must have typed my # into some kind of PDA which e-mailed or texted my # to HQ. So I explained to that guy I’d need to look over the pamphlet and think about it, especially since the next day was going to be busy. The guy said he wanted to talk with me on the phone right then if he could and I said I needed to get work done, “so I have to go now, bye.”
Less than 10 seconds after I’d hung up, the guy called again! At that point I was officially pissed. He asked me why I hung up and began to resume his hard sell approach. So I told him, “You know, you just lost whatever chance you might’ve ever had to sell me anything. I told you I was busy & needed time to look over your material, but now you’ve blown it. Goodbye!!” And do you believe the asshole had the audacity to call me again and tell me that was not a very professional & courteous attitude and he started scolding ME! So I slammed the phone down on him and swore I’d call the police and the phone company for harassment if he dared call again.
That’s been a few weeks ago and we’ve had several nice days since, but they haven’t been back through this neighborhood. I suspect the other people on this street were as annoyed by them, particular the caller as I was. I doubt they’ll be back here. When it comes to social cluelessness and incompetence, I think that guy must be even worse than me! And that’s saying something!
I’ve been in the cold calling business before. Never liked it!
I had to call people and try to get them to do opinion polls… and it was the hardest thing for me. On the reverse… I was very good when I did tech support. People called me!
Great blog David! i just love this stuff
The psycology is the same weather you’re selling gutter guard to a homeowner , or trying to get to know the interesting woman in the produce section. Most of us are more than willing to at least listen to what someone else has to offer as long as we feel a level of comfort with them. So the difficulty that we all struggle with is how to make someone feel comfortable enough (in a short span of time) to listen and more importantly TRUST what is being presented.
True Jeff. Neither the woman in the produce section or the potential Gutter Guard customer wants to feel strong-armed into something they’re uncertain about or not ready for or not interested in.
Tony:
I suppose this is why we are all here , to learn from David and his coaches .. and each other, how we can connect with others, and how to avoid coming across as manipulative or like a PUA.
I have this wonderful analogy when it comes to cold calling. I call it “barfing” This is when you fail to talk to the potential client( or sexy produce shopper) to even see if there is interest, instead opting to spew out your scripted lines … no real interaction, no connection. BLAHHHHGH and then try to close them??
I’m can’t speak from experience but I believe this probably is what a lot of the PUA community is teaching… canned lines and magic(smoke and mirrors), and I can’t imagine it working on too many intelligent women.
This is the place to learn how to be real and genuine…. and that is never a bad thing.