What would you give to discover the formula for growing a consulting business? Today’s episode features the powerhouse duo, Adele Cehrs and Chip Massey, the founders of Convincing Company. Adele and Chip started the company before COVID, utilizing the relationships they built with previous clients to help build the foundation they have now for their business. Tune in as they share some FBI tactics to grow your consulting business. The discussion also highlights the value of connecting with people to better position your business for success. Dive right in and learn the secrets to expanding your consulting business today!
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We have a treat because we have not only one guest but two guests. We have Adele Cehrs and Chip Massey joining me. Welcome to both of you. You both have very interesting backgrounds. You have come together to create a powerhouse of a company, which we are going to get into a lot more detail so everybody understands what you do.
Adele, your background is in Public Relations and PR firms. You have worked with companies like Lockheed Martin and Facebook, even as a president from what I understand. You have also taught Crisis Communications at a place like Princeton, Cornell, and Georgetown. You have been around the block when it comes to PR and communications. I think it’s safe to say that.
Chip, you are the person that most people don’t want to have knocking on their front door, or maybe they do, depending on the situation. You are a former FBI hostage negotiator. You start a business after leaving that world. You and Adele came together and decided to create your company, which is now called the Convincing Company. Let me pass it over to you first, Chip. Fill us in for 30 seconds. Can you talk about being an FBI hostage negotiator, an agent, and then getting into a business? What was that business before you and Adele came together? What were you doing? Tell us a little bit about that for a moment.
Thanks for having us. Right after the Bureau, I started a company called PlowShare Communications. It was designed in the very beginning stages of how corporate professionals can better communicate using the techniques that I learned. When I met Adele at an entrepreneur networking event, we saw how our skillsets could work together. That’s how we started ou the Convincing Company.
Adele, fill in for me anything that I missed in terms of a PR company, or a little bit more of the work you were doing prior to starting the Convincing Company with Chip.
I started my career as a journalist. I worked for George Magazine, John F. Kennedy Jr.’s publication in Manhattan, which was a cool experience. After that, I worked for USA Today. I was a journalist for the first six years of my career and then I realized I had to pay my student loans back. As much as I loved journalism, I went over to the dark side that they call PR in New York City. I worked on Madison Avenue launching some huge brands like 1-800-FLOWERS.
I was moving some of the early dot-com companies. September 11th happened and it motivated me to want to do more good. I moved to the Washington DC area thinking I wanted to get into politics. I got into politics for a little while. I hate that and went back over to my PR route. I started a company and I have had the company ever since. I launched some household name brands.
I love PR. It’s a lot of fun. It’s something I’m very good at, but I realized I wanted to do something more serious. About halfway into my having an agency or about 6 years into the 15-year span of having it, I realized I needed to reposition my agency and narrow and find a niche that made me stand out from the rest of the other PR firms that were out there.
Crisis communication was that niche for me. That’s where Chip and I also came together. We realized that while both of us do crisis communications, we do it in very different ways and for very different reasons. He was trying to stop the bad guy from killing people, and I’m trying to stop the media and maybe people online from ruining your reputation.
They are both terrible situations and we both apps approached them in different ways, but we had a lot of the same ideas and skillsets. We thought, “What a cool combination of very different careers coming together to offer this very unique service.” What I can say is when I was doing crisis communications, I was always super focused on solving the problem.
I wanted to solve the problem and I wanted to solve it quickly. It wasn’t as much tuning into people’s emotional needs like, “You need to do these five things. You do it right now.” When Chip came in and we are solving crises together, he was so incredibly calming. While I’m doing all of the implementation and the writing and we are scrapping together to fix it, Chip was like, “How are you feeling now?”
You got the Yin and the Yang going to balance each other. I want to make this very tangible and actionable for everybody joining us. We are going to get into how you guys built a business, lessons learned, and best practices so that people can start to implement some of that stuff into their businesses and see results from it.
Before we do that, I want to address and understand more about how the two of you came together. You said it was at an entrepreneurial networking event. Oftentimes, people will do something similar. They will meet somebody at an event and they have this dream or idea, “We would be so powerful together if we did this.”
How did you guys formalize the partnership? I’m interested from the perspective of a consultant who is maybe thinking about what a partnership is. Is it the early stages? As somebody said to them, “We should partner together,” how did you ensure that committing to building a company together was the right thing as opposed to, “Why don’t we run our own separate companies and maybe we can collaborate at times if it makes sense?” Where did that decision come from in terms of formalizing the company together?
When we met at the event, we started talking. It was the idea that I had worked essentially my entire career in crisis mode. That’s what the FBI is about. You are not going to see us on sunny days. It’s the worst time of your life when you are going to come in contact with us. It was realizing that organizations devoted to crisis work, and trying to make a bad situation into one that is helpful, friendly, and hopefully, life-affirming.
If your previous clients had a good experience, there is always the possibility of working with you again. Click To TweetIt’s that idea along with, “How do people think under stress? How is it that some choose horribly and others choose well?” We were talking back and forth about this. We said, “We probably need to talk more about doing some work together.” We tested an idea out. We joined for a masterclass together in New York City.
Was this a live workshop?
It was exactly pre-COVID. Adele, how many months was it for us since we started talking about us putting it on?
It was probably 3 or 4 months. When Chip and I started talking, we both were at this inflection point in our businesses. I don’t like working by myself. I’d like to have somebody to bounce ideas off of. I thought Chip’s angle on how he handled things was so interesting and different. We had such a fun time talking together and working together that we said, “It makes sense for us to put these very different disciplines together. It’s such an interesting and unique position.”
I have never heard of a publicist and a special agent or a hostage negotiator working together. It seems so the opposite, yet it works the way people feel after we handle a crisis for them. We have had people be like, “I felt so good afterward. This was life-changing. I was feeling so much stress, and then you guys came in and you fixed this problem.” They turned it around into an opportunity. I was able to do that in my firm before, but the whole way we emotionally take care of people is such a different experience.
Looking at the timeline, you met at this event, 3 or 4 months go by, you tennis back and forth on ideas for this workshop, and then you decide to run this workshop. What happens in the workshop? Did it go well? How did you go from doing this workshop together to deciding, “Let’s create a company together?”
When we did the workshop, it sold out so quickly. Every person who attended it was like, “You guys are amazing. This is so interesting. I want to hear more about it. I want to learn more about it.” I started as a journalist, so writing is my natural strength. I said to Chip, “It’d be so fun to write a book on this masterclass.” He’s like, “Let’s do that.”
It started to make sense. We got clients from the masterclass. People automatically were like, “How do we hire you guys? How do we work with you?” We automatically got such a good feeling from us working together that we let the market tell us like, “You guys make sense. We like what we are seeing. It’s unique.” If you are going to pick a business partner, one that has been vetted by the FBI isn’t such a bad option.
You have had a criminal record check, or two.
Chip, from your side and perspective, if you are thinking about people who are looking or considering getting involved in a partnership, is there anything that you and Adele did that you feel maybe didn’t work that well and you had to work through it together? At the same time, anything that you think did work well. With the benefit of hindsight, what do you know now that you would recommend to others?
I came with such a lack of business experience. I was only out there for maybe a year before I met Adele. I did everything I could to learn about the business world and so forth. When you bring all those things and you are wondering what’s the next step and what’s the next order, Adele was so knowledgeable about the area, what needed to be done, when it needed to happen, what the best opportunities are, what’s not a good opportunity, and what are time wasters. It shaved years off the learning curve. From that perspective, it was a good match that Adele had the great experience I needed in terms of the business world. I brought in a different perspective on how to deal with people from a different set of skills that I learned while in the Bureau.
How do you both run the day-to-day in terms of your roles? How do you create a clear enough separation so you are not standing on top of each other or overlapping in an inefficient and ineffective way? How have you gone through it and how have you separated the roles?
One of the things that Chip focuses on is a lot of relationship building and continuing to keep the relationship. He’s focusing on making clients feel comfortable and feel valued. Whereas I’m doing that too, I hope. I’m doing some of the day-to-day, and also some of the sales. I’m doing a lot of the more practical implementation and application and working with outside consultants and vendors and things like that.
We have built a business that has good systems. One thing I would say is if you have two people, you have to have good systems in place. We have contracts and sales materials that are pre-written. We have a way at which to move somebody along our process that’s already done. What we are doing is putting Chip’s emotional intelligence and a ton of his knowledge and experience on top of that. That’s how we work well together. It’s easy. He’s easy to work with. I don’t know if he would say the same to me, but he’s easygoing. It’s a nice combination.
Is there anything that the two of you have been working through that was a bit of a challenge or is a bit of a challenge that you are actively trying to sort out? I’m trying to help to anticipate for those that are looking at partnerships what might be some red flags or areas that they need to prepare for in advance.
Figuring out finances and getting good outside counsel for finance is also good. We have an external CFO who’s awesome, and I hate doing accounting. It’s awful. I know Chip doesn’t love it either. We both were like, “We don’t like this.” When you find the things that you both don’t like especially if you have a partner, go find those external resources. We are consultants, but a lot of times we hesitate, especially as entrepreneurs.
We don’t want to reach out. We want to do it all by ourselves. That’s one of the biggest hurdles that a lot of entrepreneurs have. They are good at a lot of things and so they are like, “I’m not bad at it.” It might take me seventeen times longer to file a 1099 than would somebody with this experience. I’m a big proponent of just outsourcing it. If it’s going to take us a lot of time and we are both not loving it, let’s get it off our plate.
Let’s now shift and talk about sales. You mentioned that you both ran this masterclass before COVID started. From that, you got your first clients for what became the Convincing Company. Let’s fast forward now. Chip, I know Adele mentioned that you are quite involved on the sales side. Share with us what you have all been doing after you got those first initial clients from the masterclass. Where has the focus been? What has been working best for you from a lead generation business development perspective to fill your pipeline with new opportunities and clients coming in?
When we first started working together, Adele already had an extensive email list, and that is huge. We were able to work back on people that she has known, people she has worked for and worked with, and people she has had as clients. We use that list as huge grounds for reaching back out. There’s so much left and possibilities from previous clients.
If there was a good experience, they are always trying to find ways of working with you again. If you are able to continue to cultivate that to show them and be in touch with them, that’s the strongest portion of it. It is the outreach and calling these people up, and asking what they are working on. Do they need any help? There’s so much to be gleaned from that.
The first thing that Adele had me do when we started working together, she had me do a webinar. It was the second or third time we had met. She said, “We are doing a webinar tomorrow.” I said, “Okay.” It’s my first one. I said, “That’s fun.” We did it. We had huge subscribers to it and it was amazing. I didn’t feel nervous. I didn’t feel that this was putting me in a bad position. It was natural to use my skillsets and help people out. That’s when I realized, “This is helping people.” When you focus on that, people go onto that.
I want to dig a little bit deeper into what you were saying. You talked about this reactivation of past and current clients and diving into the database. Very often people have a more extensive network than they are first giving credit for. They have lots of connections on LinkedIn, people they have worked with in past jobs, people they met at conferences, business cards that are piling up, or whatever it might be.
The thought of picking up the phone and calling somebody or sending an email to somebody is scary. It feels like, “I don’t want to bother people. I don’t want to be promotional.” I would love it if either you or Adele could share some of the languages that you used. It’s like a bit of, “Here’s a template of what we said, or here’s what was in the email or what we said on the phone call,” so that people could hear the language or the structure that you all used that worked for you to check in with people and feel good about it, but also something successful in turning those actions and activities into clients.
Chip never likes to brag about himself as the promoter, and I’m going to do it. He’s going to hate this. He’s so good at making people feel super comfortable. He is somebody’s biggest cheerleader. He will get on the phone with somebody and you will be excited about what they are doing, “I saw that you did this cool thing on LinkedIn. I saw this article that you were in. I saw that you were connected with this person and you said this on this post.”
He gets on the phone and it’s such a natural thing for him to be a connector, which is why he was good as a hostage negotiator and he was good as a minister. He makes people feel automatically comfortable by getting excited about their success. I think so many people get on a call with a prospect and they are so focused on, “Here are the 5,000 reasons why I’m amazing and you should listen to me.” Nobody wants that.
I want to clarify one thing that is incredibly important. I want to confirm that this is what you are saying and what Chip is saying as well, or sounds like the process. You are not picking up the phone or sending an email to somebody and talking about your service and what you are doing. It sounds like your approach has been, or maybe still is, you are finding something that person did. It could be a post. It could be something on a social platform. It could be a talk they gave. It could be a mutual connection.
You are personalizing something that you saw. You are doing a little bit of homework on each of these people before you pick up the phone and call them. Is that correct, Chip? Did you do that for every single person you were calling, or do you pick up the phone and it’s like, “It’s Chip from the Convincing Company. How are you doing? It’s been a while.” Give us a little bit more color on that.
We know you already know this. We know this is for your audience. The idea is that if you are treating this person like a cold contact, it is going to be a cold result. There shouldn’t be cold contact. There are always ways of getting to somebody that you already know. Somebody knows somebody who knows somebody. It’s always the case.
As Adele said, you are able to see that there’s an article they put out or there’s a promotion they got or something like that. It resonates with them and makes them feel seen and heard when you respond to them and say something that connects to them. There’s no reason why you should hesitate to pick up a phone and congratulate somebody on that. It makes a conversation natural and warm, and then the next thing always approaches. It’s interest first, “I have an interest in you and what you are doing,” and then it evolves from there.
Talk to us about the transition from making the initial call or whatever the communication that’s being about them to what you have found to be the most effective in shifting that conversation to them wanting to hear about what you are doing. Just being able to have the opportunity to talk about what you are doing so that they can potentially become a client.
You can almost predict an entrepreneur’s success based on how they like to sell and connect with other people. Click To TweetIt’s always the case. After a certain point, people will want to turn to you if you are doing it in a genuine way. People sniff out. In about seventeen seconds, they are going to go to their pitch. What you have to do is understand their amygdalas are almost primed. Get ready. Defenses are up, but you never hit it. If you don’t hit it like that, then they are going to be relaxed. Once people are relaxed with you, the conversation goes natural and then they will ask, “What’s new with you? What are you working on?”
You have to wait for the other person to take an interest in what you are doing. If you force it, it feels ugly but it does. That’s why cold calls can be awkward. If you do a lot of research and understand what people’s aims are, and what they are trying to accomplish. If you zero in on what makes people feel like, “I’m glad people are noticing. I’m trying to position my business, my career, and who I am in a certain way,” and you take an interest, then you can shift and wait for them to offer. What most people won’t do is they won’t be patient enough to wait for the flip.
I will go even one step behind that, which is that most people don’t even take the time to do any of that initial research or personalization. What the two of you are talking about in this conversation is probably one of the most important factors that determine your success or failure, and success or struggle when it comes to lead generation and business development.
For everybody who’s joining us right now and going, “My marketing is not working. I’m not seeing success with sending these messages or these emails. I’m using this automation tool to shoot my message to hundreds of thousands of people all at once.” It’s probably because you are not spending the time doing the personalization.
You are treating people as numbers and not as people. This is such a big one and it takes a little bit more time. You will typically see faster results even though it takes more time. You can take quicker action with automation and not personalization, but it’s going to take you longer to see results. Good stuff, guys. Thank you for sharing that.
I couldn’t agree more with that. One of the things I said to Chip when we first met was, “Let me ask you a question.” As we were forming our partnership, I was like, “Do you like sales?” He was like, “I love sales.” He talked about all of the things he did as he was selling newspapers as a kid and he went into all these. I’m like, “I love it too.”
You could almost predict an entrepreneur’s success based on how much they like to sell, and just the thrill of it, but also the connection to other people. Do you have a strong interest in other people? If you are asking that question and you are like, “Do you like sales? Is it something you like?” you are getting something from them.
That’s the indicator of a good entrepreneur. Are you interested in others? Are you deeply interested in what’s making somebody tick? Are you going to position your services to what that person’s needs are? That’s a lot of what we talk about in the book that we are writing right now. This was so much fun. We called up a professor at Columbia. His name is Dr. Bontempo. He has such a fantastic professor name. He’s such a smart guy and he talked about this thing that’s been around for 40 years, and social scientists have studied it. It’s a continuum of how to be persuasive, influential, and convincing.
The idea is you never start. This was such a weird epiphany for me as a journalist. You never start with your strongest point first. If you start with your strongest point first, all you do is make the person dig in their heels for whatever they believed before you mentioned your argument. The example that Dr. Bontempo gave is so much fun. I’d love to take you through this real quick. It’s a fun experiment I’m going to do. On a scale of 1 to 100, do you believe America sent a man to the moon? What is the likelihood? Do you think it’s 100%?
Yeah, 100%.
Has there been any other country that has claimed to send an astronaut to the moon?
Yes, 100%.
Who?
Russia. The USSR.
Russia didn’t send a man to the moon. They sent a man around the moon.
It’s semantics, to the moon or beside the moon.
Have you ever been to the desert?
I have.
In a desert, there’s no air or light pollution. You look up at the night sky, what do you see?
Stars and these satellites.
Tons and tons of stars. It’s super clear. You see everything above. Let me ask you this question. When Neil Armstrong landed on the moon and he stuck the flag on it, why was the background all completely black? You can’t see any stars. Why do you think that is?
You tell me.
That’s where I have to stop.
I’m a consultant. I’m going to ask more questions before I provide a recommendation.
You are so smart. You are handling this well. That is what we would call the convincing cliffhanger. What we did was we took you from a place of certainty because you were certain. You are like, “I’m 100% certain that we sent a man to the moon.” We then created something called FUD, Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.
When I was saying to you, “Did Russia send one?” You are like, “I think they did.” I was like, “No.” You are like, “Maybe I don’t know as much about moon landing as I thought.” I then take you to the Armstrong example. Now, that is stuck in your head. For any intelligent and super-smart person like yourself, that’s too much dissonance in your brain, so you are going to have to go and look it up. You want to see that picture.
You are going to go to Google. You are going to go to images. You are going to look at that picture. It’s going to show you a bunch of data that’s going to support my argument, not necessarily what you started to believe. I’m moving you slowly down this continuum. If I started with my strongest point first, which is we never landed a man on the moon. You’d be like, “This lady is crazy. I am not listening to a word she says because I believe we landed a man on the moon.” There’s science.
You are creating space for the buyer or the person on the other side to recognize or start questioning themselves they may not have all of the answers. They become more open to hearing your perspective, your point of view, or maybe your recommendations.
Certainty is the biggest barrier to being convincing because the person already thinks they know. If you point out that they don’t know, you sound obnoxious. If you take them down the continuum and they learn themselves, “Maybe I don’t know as much about this.” They then go seek research and then you can be part of their research journey. It all of a sudden becomes more collaborative, intellectual, and research-based. People like to feel like they are making a decision on their own. They don’t want to feel coerced.
Based on this concept, for a consultant, an advisor, someone that’s working with organizations, or decision-makers, let’s say there’s a recommendation or something that their client should do. Before saying, “Here’s what you should do or here’s the way that you should be looking at things,” are you advocating for the person asking a bunch of questions first that might create that space? I want to see what the application of this concept is. How do you think it can be applied in the most effective way for consultants?
As an entrepreneur, you live and breathe your business. If you don’t love what you’re doing, the world will not respond to it well. Click To TweetI had some fun with this because I’m like, “I’m going to try this with our messaging.” We started offering this pricing program. I’m like, “We want to help people price their services.” You got to start at the point where there is agreement. Everybody can agree on one. We can all agree that pricing your services is one of the most difficult things for entrepreneurs. The person says, “That has been difficult for me. I can’t figure out what my prices are.” You then start adding fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
What if the pricing strategy you are using is not optimal? What if you are potentially leaving a lot of money on the table then they are starting to think?
What if your competitors are charging so much more than you because you don’t know how much the market will bear for your service? Do you see how it becomes more of they are discovering it rather than you forcing them? It’s a different tack, but it’s effective.
I’m going to put a little pin in this for a moment. The two of you are going to cover this in your upcoming book, Convince Me, in a lot more detail. Everybody should check that out. You said it’s available for pre-order. Check Amazon or all those good places. It’s published by McGraw Hill. I want to bring this back to you and into your business. You got your first clients from the masterclass that you did. After that, it sounds like you had this database or this list. You were able to reach out to people that turned into conversations.
Now, you provide several different services. When you started, is there any service that you found over time that wasn’t maybe the right one? Is there any service that’s no longer offered but you used to offer? How much have your offerings changed over the years?
I want to do less public relations work. I have been an entrepreneur for seventeen years. I come from four generations of an entrepreneur. Because I’m a publicist, I have been very successful in this area. It’s a double-edged sword because I keep getting calls like, “Can you do public relations? Can you do this for us? Can you get me visibility?” It’s like, “I can, but should I?” As a business owner, what you have to do is go, “I can’t offer a lot of things but I have to focus on the things that I know are going to make more sense for my business long-term.” It can be hard for people to give up the things they are good at, especially if they have multiple businesses. That’s hard.
You are giving up the short-term win/cashflow that could come from the demand, but you are doing it because that offering may no longer be of interest to you to provide, it is not in your best interest, or it doesn’t necessarily fit your values or your long-term goals. Walk us through that for a moment. How are you making that decision? That’s challenging. If a client is offering you $10,000, $50,000, or whatever it might be to provide a service that you know you can provide, but it’s not the core of what your new model is, how do you navigate that decision process in your mind?
It’s an opportunity cost. You have to keep looking at it like, “If this person is willing to offer me this, I know there are other projects over here that I could be doing that are better for where I want to take the business long term.” That’s what we did when we decided to publish the book. Writing a book is an incredible commitment. It’s a long process.
What do you mean? I thought you used the artificial intelligence ChatGPT where you throw a few things in, copy, paste, publish, and you are done.
No way. What we did was a long-term investment in our business because Chip told me what he knows and I told him what I know. We were able to discuss this and put this down in such a way that I think I feel so much more educated as a result of writing the book. I know so much about Chip’s background and what he offers. We created new intellectual property as a result of taking the time to write the book.
Michael, I would love to hear your perspective on this too, but what is so fantastic about writing is every time you write a book, you are learning a ton. You are super hyper-focused. You become an expert on that topic much more than you would hadn’t you written the book. You can read a bunch of articles but it’s a different comprehension.
It’s the same as when you teach. You often know so much when you are teaching others because you see what lands and what doesn’t land. You see what people understand right away or where there’s a lack of clarity to work through. All that makes complete sense to me. I’m still wondering about that decision process. When there’s money on the table or demand, and somebody is knocking at your door, why are you feeling comfortable? What are you telling yourself to go, “I’m going to say no to that right now because it doesn’t fit X?” What’s that switch that you are hitting that’s allowing you to forego that opportunity?
It’s just a long-term vision. What do I want my business life to look like long term? I gave up having a PR firm with a decent-size staff because I didn’t love it. I wasn’t having fun with it anymore. I don’t want to create another business. I know people can identify with this. As an entrepreneur, you live and breathe your business. If you are not doing something that you love and that you are super passionate about, the world’s not going to respond to it well. You are not going to get the business. I was successful before but I wasn’t loving it.
That’s the filter that I’m putting on. Are people going to gravitate toward me because they can sense, “This is a passion project?” The things that we have done in the book, the stuff that we have discovered, and the way in which we approach this are so interesting. I am excited for the world to see it. If I take on all these other projects that don’t serve us, then we are never going to get to that larger dream.
Short-term pain for long-term gain is another way to say it. Here are the two of you together. You have a PR Crisis Communications background. You have the FBI hostage negotiator also crisis communication or how to deal with crises experience. You put that together. You are sitting on now a bunch of intellectual property that you have developed and are continuing to refine and develop new stuff as well.
What are you applying in your own business that you feel has helped you to grow or to land more clients that you think others maybe aren’t doing or you maybe know that people are overlooking? What’s working well for you guys right now? Is there anything unique that you feel like, “We are doing this and it’s working well for us, I have no idea why nobody else is doing this?”
There are two things, predictive statements and the other one is forensic listening. Chip, could you tell them about forensic listening?
How I would answer your question, Michael, is training. For me, our training arm is one of the most exciting parts of what we do right now. We help company executives and sales to have a better mindset around dealing with customers, whether they are irate or they are just regular and they want to find out more, or whatever they are on the spectrum.
That comes from what we have developed that’s called forensic listening. The idea here is we are talking about in the training, what does a conversation have to say after it happened? What we do is examine a conversation when it’s over. To do that, you can do it quickly or you can do this over time. The idea for forensic listening is that everyone has a way of understanding another person. You can do it either methodically or you can do it haphazardly. We are suggesting a way of doing this in a very almost scientific method.
What’s the application of this? Let’s say a salesperson is talking to a prospective client or buyer. How do you measure the conversation after it has happened?
As we are talking to somebody, everyone has an unstated narrative that’s going on in their head. That means that they have a belief about you, your product, your company, and your service that they aren’t necessarily going to tell you about. It may be negative or positive. Who knows? We all have thousands of tapes running in our heads at any given time about something. If you are talking to a prospective client, it would be a huge advantage for you to understand as close as you could what they believe about you, your product, and your service.
It’s not what they are saying but what they believe.
How do we do that?
The disconnect happens. Understand that what they are saying isn’t going to be 100% of the total picture. Asking good open-ended questions in one way. Adele, go ahead with predictive statements.
Predictive statements are so fun. Chip thinks this is a little crazy, but I think it’s so fun. When we first started talking, I was like, “Who are the most convincing people in the world?” They are like, “Fortune tellers. You walk in, you give them $100, and they immediately read you so much so that you think they have mystical powers.”
They are using something called the foyer effect or predictive statement that anybody can use in sales settings. One of them is, “You have an enormous amount of untapped potential that’s yet to be discovered.” People love it. To go back to the forensic listening for a second, Chip is so good at this. While I’m asking the questions, he’s analyzing someone literally in real time. Chip, what are you looking at?
Their body positioning. What are they indicating to that? We are differentiating that from body language because there’s a difference. We are also trying to figure out what they are trying to communicate through the questions that they are asking or not asking. There’s always more to be said from what somebody’s not saying to you than what they are. You can also understand people and how they interact with others. All that brings into the context of who that person is.
That makes sense and I understand that statement or the question that you asked, Adele. Anyone in their right mind is probably going to answer yes to that unless they are maybe very depressed or something along those lines. I could say, “Yeah. I have more potential.” Take us a little bit further down that line of maybe some examples of questions that you could ask that would help you to understand what that buyer is thinking and truly believes, not just what they are telling you.
Chip, do you want to do the one that you used as a hostage negotiator? “What got us here today?” That’s a great question that you could use, be a hostage negotiator or a salesperson.
The idea is to start where people are. We often make the mistake of expecting somebody to be certain when we greet somebody. We are expecting them to be at a base level of understanding of where somebody else is. If you have a little bit of background knowledge about that person when you meet somebody, you are getting information on their aspect. Are their shoulders hunched? Are they pulling back from you? Are they bladed away from you? Are they fully frontal engaged with you? Are their eyes opened wide? Are they anticipating what you are saying next, or are they trying to get away?
If you take an interest in somebody, it creates a level of engagement. Click To TweetThere are ways of getting to that. The idea is that if you can generate excitement in that person about what they are doing and what they are about, and you share that excitement with them, that’s what we call the energy exchange. You are hitting on something that person has perhaps felt dormant but wants to bring out.
To Adele’s point, maybe they are not being utilized at work the way they want to be. Let’s say they work for a company and they want to be in sales, but they have been stuck in accounting and they want to get out. You say, “From your enthusiasm for sales and the way you are connecting with me, I can tell that you are a people person. That’s an easy transition for you. Let’s talk about ways how you get there. Let’s talk about how we are going to bridge you in the future to where you want to be.” When you take an interest in somebody like that, it creates a different level of engagement.
In the book, we called it the dial-in method because you are dialing into that person in such a way. You get people who are not going to match your energy level. We were selling to somebody the other day with super low energy. You are like, “Okay.” You have to match your energy to theirs. Slow down the pitch, tone, or cadence of your voice to match the person that you are talking to. Most people will not make that adjustment
If we use that as an example, you are talking here to a buyer that maybe didn’t necessarily seem super interested or didn’t have high energy at that moment. What did you both do in that situation to tap into understanding what’s going on in their mind? How can we work with this person to potentially move things forward to turn it into a win?
Adele has a great question she always uses when we are talking to clients and it cuts away all minutia. It’s also an excitement generator. Adele says, “Let’s say we would work together, and at the end of the year, we were celebrating the success of this engagement, your company, and your endeavor. What would that look like?”
It’s almost like the magic-wand question. What it does is forces the person to take a look at the possibility of success. If I was going to have outrageous success, what is that going to look like for me? It makes them say it. When you put words out there, you are getting a sense of what they are thinking. If they repeat it, we call that theme development. If you are repeating something a few times, “I know now in my head I’m going to make a memo note,” that’s significant to that person. Let’s start building that thread out.
That’s a great example and I appreciate you sharing that question that Adele always uses. Let me ask you for one as well then, Chip. What’s one question that you find as a go-to for you that you bring into almost every client conversation or buyer conversation that you find to be effective?
What’s the best experience you have ever had? What has been life-changing for you? I also ask people, “What event in your life was so significant that it altered your course?” Sometimes it’s a book. Sometimes it’s meeting somebody. When people start to identify, it’s almost like how Marvel and so forth have that origin narrative. We also do that in our lives. The great news for us is that we can pick and choose which one we are going to put forward next. I think that’s important for people.
People are revealing that interest all the time.
I’m wondering about that specific question. When do you tend to ask that? Is that earlier on in the conversation? Do you wait for a certain level of rapport to be established? What’s your guidance on when somebody should think of asking a question like that? That’s a very personal question but it’s also one that removes barriers and allows you to have an open flow of communication on a person-to-person level.
One of the things that Chip does is he’s looking at what that person wants to talk about. It’s not just, “What do you feel like? Is this a pivotal moment?” He will look at what they have said throughout the whole conversation. Towards the end, it’s like, “Tell me about that project. Talk to me about something that you are excited about coming up.” He’s reading the person through the whole conversation. Chip, wouldn’t you say you were doing that?
That’s a very good point, Adele. We have all been on calls with other salespeople. They first want to get out what they need to get out. They got something they got to sell and you feel it. Even if there’s a tertiary nod to something about me, it’s going to quickly go back to, “I got this thing that I got to say.” If we are failing to pick up the nuances about what that person needs and what they are looking for. If we miss those opportunities for that thing, it might have been a subtle lilt in their voice that you could easily miss if you were doing emails at the same time. If we hear the clicky clack on the keyboard, “You are not focused on me,” or they are queuing up the next call.
You did it on the last call that we had with the guy who had low energy. He had mentioned. He subtly dropped in. He’s like, “I have a Master’s degree in business and they gave me this assignment but I’m not that.” He is not interested in doing this. They gave him something he doesn’t want to do and he’s zeroed in on that. You make the guy feel comfortable, “You are a business guy.” The guy was like, “Yeah.” He then started talking about that. It’s almost like people have misidentified you and then you are giving them an opportunity to go, “This is who I am.”
We have covered a lot. This has been quite a tactical episode. I have so many more questions for you guys about your business, and how you got to where you are, but I want to respect your time. I know we are already a little bit over the time that we had scheduled for today. Before wrapping up, I’d like to make sure that people can learn where they should go to learn more about your company.
I know you also have your book that is coming out. I think you said around September of 2023 called Convince Me. It’s available for pre-order already. You mentioned Amazon and maybe other fine places. Adele, where’s the best place for people to go to learn more about the company and what you and Chip are up to?
ConvincingCompany.com. That’s our website, so check that out.
One quick question before I wrap up because I tend to ask this and I don’t want to leave people hanging. We talk about your book. Aside from your book, from each of you, one book that you have read or listened to in the last six months. It can be fiction or non-fiction, but it’s something that you have enjoyed that you would recommend to others.
I so enjoyed Rob Lowe’s book.
I don’t know who’s Rob Lowe. What was the book talking about?
Rob Lowe is this teen idol in the US. He’s in his 50s now. He had a mediocre career, but the way he describes his experiences in his book is so much fun to listen to. It seems like he’s been at every major cultural event and he has somehow crossed into it. It’s just so fun. He tells great stories and I so enjoyed listening to them. I would recommend it.
Chip, how about you?
I was listening to a radio station and they were playing the soundtrack To Kill a Mockingbird. I revisited that book. There are so many lessons that you can learn from novels like that. It’s from the human experience when authors go to the pain to describe somebody’s back character and emotions that are involved in it. It’s so enriching and can help you think in different ways about the people you are interacting with every day. It’s fun.
Adele and Chip, thank you again so much for coming on here. For everybody joining us, think about what you can take away from this episode. What’s one thing you can implement in your business? Maybe it’s how you go about asking a question. Maybe it’s listening better. Maybe it’s personalizing your emails, phone calls, or outreach. Think more about building relationships and focus on value over volume. Whatever it is, apply at least one thing from this episode. Adele and Chip, thanks again for coming on.
Thank you. It’s a pleasure.
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