You need to hear this straight talk from George Carlin to understand how your slick sales salutations and advertising lingo comes across so you can stop doing it and start sounding like a human.
(And is definitely not "PG" or "PC," so you've been warned.)
The real fact of the matter is that nobody reads ads. People read what interests them. Sometimes it’s an ad.”
~Howard Gossage
Your Insecurity Is Showing
I'm hanging out with a bunch of college buddies as I update this post. We're all turning 50 right now and it has been 27 years since we graduated college and despite the decades of accumulated wisdom—and gray hairs and lost brain cells due to all the bourbon we drank—none of us used any industry jargon or doublespeak or lingo when sharing with our friends how we're doing.
We told stories.
We laughed.
We would get serious from time to time as we discussed the various challenges going on in our lives that we all have, but we never used any B.S. jargon or fancy words to try and impress our friends.
Why?
Because we're secure and comfortable around one another and we realize we don't have to hide our feelings behind a big vocabulary.
To Prove You're Different, Prove You're Different
When you say things like:
- Tripwire
- Funnel hack
- Life hack
- Latent semantic indexing
- Thought leader
- Blue sky thinking
- Think outside the box
- Reaching out/following up/touching base
- Back of the envelope/pencil it in/rough numbers
- Bleeding edge/industry-leading/future-proof
- Bring to the table/brain-storming session
- Ducks in a row
- Face time/put a face to the name/I'll be in the area/reach out
- Don't reinvent the wheel
- Low-hanging fruit
- Key metrics/mission-critical
- Move the needle
- My understanding
- Not my first rodeo
- Take this offline
- Game-changer
- Path forward
- Move things forward
- Put some feelers out/Build a consensus
- Get a quick win/win-win
When you deliver slick sales slogans and ad-speak you sound like your competition.
When you sound like your competition, prospects won't remember you because they immediately tune you because they've heard it all before.
Since you have never stood out in their minds, when they go looking to fill their own self-realized needs and reach out to you and you sound like everyone else, the only way your prospects can differentiate you from your competitors is solely on price.
Selling On Price Sucks
When you are forced to sell on price because you weren't willing or able to do the work ahead of time to develop better communication skills and connect with your prospect at the human level (check out this podcast on emailing like a human and marketing like a human) that's when selling really sucks.
To sell on price and "win" usually means you are the least expensive.
Being the least expensive may be fine during a global recession or when you are trying to penetrate a new market or industry and you're going after marketshare with a plan to either raise prices on the renewal or you can make up margin on consumables or consulting, so selling on price has its place.
But to hit a million dollar quota, I'd rather have 10 clients who spend $100,000 each with me instead of 1,000 clients at $1,000 each. (Think Apple vs Samsung or Dell, although Apple is moving a lot of units nowadays even at higher prices.)
Join The Kool Kids Klub
If you're ready to use get noticed in your sales and/or marketing role (yes, that means you may offend a few weak-kneed, high-maintenance, whining people you don't want as clients anyway) and start making the phones ring and the cash registers sing give me a shout.
You can contact me here any time for a refreshingly direct, honest, and insightful conversation about what it will take for you to grow your business.
If you're the right person with the right attitude, it will be a fun and exciting call.
In fact, those are usually the only types of conversations I have because it's the thick-skinned Producers and Doers who have the willingness to call.
Which is why I have a lot of fun and success doing what I do, which is helping you get even better.
Now go sell something.
