Pull up your pants, close your kimono, and speak professionally
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Jun 20, 2011 @ 10:02 AM
Recently, I heard an inside sales rep use the following phrase when discussing price negotiation with a prospect: “I can’t drop my pants any lower and give you that discount.” Ouch! In my inside sales training classes, I tell folks that we’re in the business of painting pictures over the phone, and that rep certainly didn’t paint a nice one with that phrase.
A lot of what I teach involves calling high, to executive-level people (as well as their Executive Assistants), and a professional manner of speaking, in terms of opening the call, conducting a discussion, and closing on the next phase in the sales cycle, is an important key to successfully transacting business at that level. The terminology you use at home or in social situations may not be appropriate for business conversations. In addition to pants-dropping, here are a couple of other bits of phraseology I hear all too often:
1) “We’ll” or “Can you” “Open the kimono a bit.” As with the above example, this phrase creates a word picture that you really don’t want created. In addition, many Japanese people (and Asians in general) and a whole lot of women will find this offensive. And as I tell my classes, be careful of things that can be interpreted as ethnic slurs. Even if you don’t think your prospect is of that ethnic group, he or she may have a good friend or life partner who is.
2) Swearing. I don’t have to give you examples, you know them already. What surprised me recently is when a rep told me that he uses swear words when the prospect uses them first: he thinks it builds rapport. Not a good idea. Prospects have the leverage of being able to say just about anything they want, but they do expect a different level of professionalism from you. Prospects like to respect the person from whom they’re buying, so take the high road and keep swear words out of your professional vocabulary at all times.
Using professional language is a skillset, so consider cleaning things up a bit if any of the examples in this post resonate with you. And if you have more examples, blog back a response, and we’ll have a nice set of words and phrases we can avoid using when selling professionally.