Give Thought to Your Opening

I’m often asked how much courtship and conversation is good and when it’s better to get right to a request. One of the primary considerations is your business partner. Follow her lead. If she tends to speak in a direct style, speaks quickly, has a fairly serious businesslike demeanor, and is a cut-to-the-chase type, it is probably better to get to the point quickly. Your gift to her is time. If, on the other hand, she seems to place emphasis on relationships and conversation, connection is most important. As I discuss in more detail in The Confident Leader, there are three essential types of motivation: (1) achievement, (2) power and leadership, and (3) affiliation or social motivation. Figure out what motivates your referral partners and prospective clients. The first two (achievement and power) suggest cutting to the chase, and the third (affiliation) suggests spending some more time talking. Here are some other factors to consider, brought to light in recent research. …

When to chat

One of my clients, Robert, a mortgage broker, became good at using the relationship-building skills we’ve discussed thus far, and his marketing became very effective. He had a nice flow of prospective clients. Sometimes, however, he avoided calling people because he did not like to ask people for business. I gave him an unusual exercise:

“Robert,” I said, “I want you to write down everything you’d say in your sales monologue and call me back in five minutes.”

“Uh, okay,” he said, part confused, part curious.

When he called back, I pretended that I was a client and had him read his script to me. As expected, it didn’t go well.

“Okay, hang up the phone. Then rip it up,” I advised. “Call me back and chat with me for a few minutes, and then ask a question to open up the discussion about your products.”

When he did this, he had a completely different demeanor. We chatted for a bit. Then he asked me about my needs and described a product and asked some more questions. The conversation went back and forth like a Ping-Pong match.

“What was different?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” Robert said. “I guess it felt like the pressure was off, and I felt more like myself.”

This is not to say that you don’t want to be prepared for calls or even to have scripts or notes to refer to as long as you use them flexibly. What you don’t want is to deliver a lot of information at once in a speech-like way. In an interesting article called “Dialogue Involvement as a Social Influence Technique,” Polish researchers Dariusz Dolinski, Magdalena Nawrat, and Izabela Rudak describe how people are more likely to take desired action when a request is preceded by a casual dialogue rather than by a monologue. This effect may be because of the way people communicate. We tend to engage in more of a dialogue with friends and a monologue with strangers. When we engage in a dialogue, we may feel similarly to how we feel with a friend, which makes us comfortable. We tend to be more influenced by friends than strangers, so feeling like we do with friends makes us more likely to be influenced by that person even if that person is a stranger.

When, however, someone already is your friend, the reciprocity law may not be as strong. Recall the example at the beginning of the chapter about how people were more likely to purchase raffle tickets from a stranger who had bought them a soda. In 1995, a group of researchers discovered that the reciprocity effect did not hold true if the person who bought you the soda was a friend. People bought more raffle tickets after having received a favor from strangers but not after having received a favor from a friend. When a friend made a request, it did not matter whether or not they had first done a favor for you. So save your money if the person you’re trying to influence is a friend (just kidding). This stranger versus friend effect may exist because with friendships, you have a longer time perspective. You know that eventually you help each other out and reciprocate down the line.

Thus it may be that you don’t actually need to be friends with someone to influence them, but you need to communicate as though you were friends—in a conversational dialogue.

When to get to the point

Typically, when we tell a story, we share a beginning that may include background information, and the story builds to some form of punch line or natural conclusion. Consider, on the other hand, how news stories are presented. The lead or the most important part typically comes first. For example, on Yahoo! right now there is a story with the headline “8 Reasons Carbs Help You Lose Weight.” The first two sentences are: “Eating a diet packed with the right kind of carbs is the little-known secret to getting and staying slim for life. When we talk about the right kind of carbs, we mean Resistant Starch …” The article gets right to the point. We get pulled in and then continue reading. Look over the news headlines today and you’ll see how many headlines and first few sentences use this technique of leading with the lead. We respond well to it because we’re pressed for time and we want to know the important information right away.

Lead with the lead, like a news article, when you don’t have a lot of time to influence someone, when you need to have maximum impact, when you need to grab attention, or when you know that someone’s highest values are time and the bottom line. Also consider the person who you want to influence—the best way to influence behavior is to change it in yourself first. If you’re speaking with someone who tends to talk in circles before getting to the point, model the behavior that you’d like to see from them. Use the “bottom line technique” and help them pace themselves to get to the point more quickly.