Starting with prospecting, while advancing your applicants through the recruiting process, and all the way through to enlistment, you must constantly be asking your prospects and applicants for commitments. To reduce resistance and get them to comply with your requests, you must ask confidently, concisely, and assertively, with no hesitation (see Figure 6.1). There are three keys to asking:
Ask with confidence and assume you will get what you want.
Be intentional. Be decisive. Get to the point. When you are confident with your ask and assume you will get what you want, the probability increases exponentially that your prospect will respond in kind and comply with your request.
When recruiters ask with assertive confidence, qualified prospects say yes 50 to 70 percent of the time. Conversely, nonassertive, insecure, “I-don’t-want-to-seem-too-pushy” requests have a 10 to 30 percent success rate.
In a weird paradox, when you try not to be “pushy” because you think it will turn prospects off, you trigger objections. When you sound and look afraid, when you give off an insecure vibe, you transfer that fear to your prospect and create resistance where it didn’t previously exist.
One truth about human behavior is that people tend to respond in kind. “People are extremely good at picking up on other people’s emotions—both negative and positive—without consciously trying,” writes Shirley Wang in her article “Contagious Behavior.” 1
Emotional contagion is an automatic, subconscious response that causes humans to mirror or mimic the behaviors and emotions of those around them. It makes it very easy for humans to both feel what other humans are feeling and transfer emotions to other people. Knowing how to leverage emotional contagion is a powerful meta-skill for influencing human behavior.
When you are relaxed, confident, and assumptive, you transfer these emotions to your prospects, thus reducing resistance and objections. In turn, you get more wins, and with more wins your confidence grows.
The Assumptive Ask
Relaxed, assumptive confidence is the most powerful position for the military recruiter. Assuming that when you ask, you will get what you want creates a mind-set of positive expectation. This mind-set manifests itself in your outward body language, voice inflection, tone, and word patterns.
The foundation of the assumptive ask is your belief system and self-talk. When you tell yourself that you are going to win and keep telling yourself so, it bolsters your confidence and expectation for success. Ultra-high performers exude confidence. This confidence transfers to prospects, compelling them to comply with your requests.
I’ve spent most of my life around horses. Horses have an innate ability to sense fear. They test new riders and take advantage of them the moment they sense that a rider is afraid or lacks confidence. Horses have a 10-to-1 weight and size advantage over the average person. If the horse doesn’t believe that you are in charge, it can and will dump you.
Prospects, parents, educators, and administrators are no different. Your emotions influence their emotions. If they sense fear, weakness, defensiveness, or lack of confidence, they will shut you down or bulldoze right over you. For this reason, when horses or people challenge you, no matter what emotions you are feeling, you must respond with a noncomplementary behavior—a behavior that counters and disrupts their pattern—relaxed confidence.
Emotions are contagious. When asking for what you want, relaxed confidence is the most persuasive nonverbal message. When you lack confidence in yourself, people tend to lack confidence in you. In most cases, they don’t consciously understand why they feel the way they do. But things just don’t feel right. This creates big problems when you are attempting to build trust with prospects (and their parents) and convince them to join the military.
If the enemy can sense your fear, you are a weak target. Prospects are the same. For this reason, you must develop and practice techniques for building and demonstrating relaxed confidence even when you feel the opposite so that on the outside you appear poised. For example, stepping out from behind your table at events and maintaining a confident, military bearing, even when you are uncomfortable.
This begins with controlling the message you are transmitting to prospects by managing your nonverbal communication including:
Voice tone, inflection, pitch, and speed
Body language and facial expressions
Table 6.1 lists which nonverbal communication conveys insecurity and which nonverbal communication conveys confidence.
Table 6.1Comparison of Nonverbal Behaviors in Demonstrating Confidence
Demonstrates Lack of Confidence, Insecurity, and Fear
Demonstrates a Relaxed, Confident Demeanor
Speaking with a high-pitched voice.
Speaking with normal inflection and a deeper pitch.
Speaking fast. When you speak too fast, you sound untrustworthy.
Speaking at a relaxed pace with appropriate pauses.
Tense or defensive tone of voice.
Friendly tone—a smile in your voice.
Speaking too loudly or too softly.
Appropriate voice modulation with emotional emphasis on the right words and phrases.
Frail or nervous tone of voice with too many filler words, “ums,” “uhs,” and awkward pauses.
Direct, properly paced tone and speech that gets right to the point.
Lack of eye contact—looking away. Nothing says “I can’t be trusted” and “I’m not confident” like poor eye contact.
Direct, appropriate eye contact.
Hands in your pockets.
Hands by your side or out in front of you as you speak. Note: This may feel uncomfortable but it makes you look powerful and confident.
Wild gesticulations or hand motions.
Using hand gestures in a calm and controlled manner.
Touching your face or hair, or putting your fingers in your mouth—all clear signs that you are nervous or insecure.
Your hands in a power position—by your side or out in front of you in a controlled, nonthreatening manner.
Hunched over, head down, arms crossed.
Straight posture, chin up, shoulders straight and back. This posture will also make you feel more confident.
Shifting back and forth on your feet or rocking your body.
Standing still in a natural power pose.
Stiff posture, body tense.
Relaxed, natural posture.
Jaw clenched, tense look on face.
Relaxed smile. The smile is a universal language that says “I’m friendly and can be trusted.”
Weak, limp, sweaty-palm handshake.
Firm, confident handshake delivered while making direct eye contact.
People are also subconsciously assessing the meaning of your words and assessing whether the words you use are congruent with your voice tone and body language. Confident messages increase the probability that you will get a yes. Whether you are communicating on the phone, in person, or via e-mail or social media, language matters—the words you use and how you structure those words convey loud and clear whether you are insecure, passive, and weak or confident and trustworthy (see Table 6.2).
“I’m super busy with interviews, but I have a slot available at 11:00 a.m.”
“How does that sound?”
“Why don’t we go ahead and get you in today for your ASVAB. How about right after school?”
“What’s the best time for you?”
“I’ll be visiting an applicant not far from you on Monday. I can pick you up for lunch.”
“I kinda, sorta, was wondering if maybe you might have time to answer a few questions, if that would be okay?”
“Tell me about your plans after you graduate.”
“Would this be a good time for you?”
“How about we meet again next Thursday at 2:00 p.m.?”
“I wanted to find out . . .”
“When can we speak with your parents?”
“How do you feel about this so far?”
“Based on everything you’ve told me about your current situation, I think it makes sense for us to move to the next step.”
“What do you think?”
“The next step is getting you scheduled and ready for MEPS.”
“Do you have time now to take a practice test?”
“I recommend getting started with a short practice test to determine our next move.”
Getting past the emotions that disrupt confidence is among the most formidable challenges for military recruiters. It’s common to feel intimidated when meeting with educators and parents, have diminished confidence after experiencing a loss or failure, or become desperate when you are in danger of missing mission.
Even in emotionally draining situations, you must maintain the discipline to be aware of your emotions and how those emotions may be affecting other people. Self-awareness and self-control are like muscles. The more you exercise them, the stronger they get.
Shut Up
The hardest part of asking is learning to ask and shut up. When you’ve asked for what you want, you’ve put it all out there and left yourself vulnerable to rejection.
What happens when you feel vulnerable? You try to protect yourself.
In that awkward moment after you ask, your head spins, your gut tightens, and rejection flashes before your eyes. The split second of silence is unbearable. It feels like an eternity. In this moment of weakness, you start talking, and talking, and talking—in the delusional belief that as long as you keep talking, the prospect can’t reject you.
You attempt to deal with objections that have not even surfaced, introduce objections that didn’t previously exist, overexplain yourself, offer your prospect a way out, and start blabbing on and on about MOS, benefits, your military experience, your dog, cat, kids, high school, or what you had for lunch. Eventually the prospect who was ready to say yes gets talked into saying no—by you. Your insecurity pushes them away.
After you ask you must shut up! Despite the alarm bells going off in your adrenaline-soaked brain, despite your pounding heart, sweaty palms, and fear, you must bite your tongue, sit on your hands, put the phone on mute, shut up, and allow your prospect to answer.
Be Prepared for Objections
Your ability to handle and get past objections is where the rubber meets the road in recruiting. It’s where mission is made.
When you ask, you are going to get objections. It’s an unassailable fact, and your brain knows it. This is why you anticipate and brace for rejection. It’s why the mere seconds of silence between the ask and your prospect’s response seem interminable.
When you are prepared to handle any objection that comes at you, though, you gain the confidence and courage to wait for your prospect to answer.
Later in this book, I’ll give you the tools, techniques, and human influence frameworks you’ll need to get past prospecting objections effectively and break through resistance to engage, qualify, and advance prospects and applicants through the recruiting pipeline.
