Maximizing Performance Through Applied Common Sense*

If you are going to lose weight, you know you have to exercise more and eat less. When you want to move, you want to spend more time doing something with your heart and with your muscles. So park farther away from the store or take the stairs instead of the elevator, take a walk with your loved ones, take a run, take a swim or some form of movement. If you get into the habit of moving on a regular basis you are going to increase your heart rate and you’re going to lose more weight. Plus, you are going to live longer and be healthier. So move, move, move. Put your sneakers on and get going!

A summary close takes place after everything is all said and done, and you think you’ve reached agreement; it’s always helpful to summarize to the person your understanding of the agreement. If you do that, it actually puts a bow on it. The summary close is extraordinarily valuable even when you are just making an appointment. So, if you are talking with someone on the phone, and you know you are going to meet them next Tuesday at nine, just before you hang up say, “Well, once again, to confirm, I’m going to see you at your offices, on Tuesday at nine.” It is remarkable how a summary close can help people feel like you now have confirmation on everything and sometimes they say yes, and they want to buy something more.

Lots of people have trouble with the notion of closing because it creates all kinds of fear of rejection. You can calm down your fear of rejection by remembering that closing starts at the beginning. Remember the open-ended questions and use them a lot. When you ask open-ended questions, the person is going to come to conclusions sooner and you get them signed up to buy. Remember questions like this, “How would you like to proceed? What’s the next step? How would you like a proposal? How many would you like? When do you want to start?” If you remember those kinds of questions, you are going to get much less anxiety and you’re much more likely to close the deal sooner.

If you are logical, this will appeal to you and it will particularly work if the person to whom you are talking is also logical. You will want to remember your algebra. If you remember algebra, you remember something like this: If A is true and if B is true then C must also be true. If you remember it that way, then you can create questions in that sequence and get somebody to conclude that it is a good idea to buy. Sir, would you agree that this is important. Yes. Would you also agree that that is important? Yes. Well, then clearly this product would be good because it would serve your needs. Oh, I see what you are talking about. If you think about it that way and position those questions, with practice you are going to get much better sales and much better results.

The two-option or three-option move--this is an open-ended question, so you always want to start it with the word “Which.” For example, if I want to meet with you next week, I would ask, “Which day is better for you, Monday or Tuesday?” Remember to put your preferred option last. Or, a three-option move is where you give three options and put the preferred option last. So I would ask, “Which day is better to meet you next week, Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday?” Remember, the preferred option is last. You can ask two or three options. Make sure you open with the question, “Which?” So, ask the two-option or three-option move, put the “which” in front and it will sound something like this, “Which is better for you, buying one CD, two CD’s or the entire series?”

Some of us have naturally smiling faces, others of us when we are having a good time we forget to notify our face. Research shows that if you smile it is pretty hard to feel bad, so force yourself to smile. The same research also shows that there is an endocrinological change that happens in your body when you smile that actually makes you feel better, so get in the habit of smiling. Even if you feel bad, the more you smile it’s hard to stay feeling bad. The whole notion is when you smile, the whole world smiles with you. And that’s absolutely true. So, show your pearly whites and brighten everybody’s day.

Common courtesy is very uncommon. Do you ever notice that when somebody thanks you, you actually feel good? And yet it is so rare that people actually do it, particularly from the heart. It is even rarer when you get a “thank you” note in the mail. And if you get a “thank you” note in the mail it makes your day. You save it and read it again and again. Why, because “thank you’s” touch people’s lives. So my recommendation is to listen to what your mother told you when you were little and write a “thank you note.” Make somebody’s day and show that you care. That small bit of effort will brighten their day, bring a smile to their face and you will be differentiated in their minds at which point the whole world gets more special. So, remember, thank you very much!

People will resist when they are forced or when they feel forced. Do you ever notice that when you try influence somebody or you try to get them to do something and you have zero intention to try to force them to anything and yet they still resist? Why? Because they feel forced; this means that you unintentionally approach them in such a way that they actually resist even more. They get defensive. So what do you do? You think through about how they might resist and try to position it differently. One of the things I always say is “you reduce resistance by letting people have your way.” If you think about it in that context, you package how you want to approach somebody in anticipation of resistance and then change the approach in such a way that you are going to get less of it.

Sometimes when you’re accurate and you tell people an accurate answer, they have trouble with the way it sounds and they push back. If you say things like, “Generally this is what people do.” The reaction might be, “No, that’s not what I do.” So, how do you get people to accept information? What you do is build in cushion words. Cushion words are words that allow some degree of flexibility so people will be less defensive. So instead of saying, “This is what people do,” you would say, “Often, this is what people seem to do.” If you put the seem to, appears that , etc.., in there, people will accept the information with a lot less resistance and you are going to get your point across. So, put some cushion words in there and it will tend to improve.

Listening is so essential in marriages, between supervisors and supervisees, and between customer service reps and the market. Very often surveys point to the fact that people really fail to listen. What we need to do is spend more time listening. The way you do it is you listen to what people are saying to you and then you play back what they said, particularly when it is important. So somebody says something and you say, “Let me see if I understand what you are saying, what you are saying to me is… this or that.” When you play back to the person what you thought they said, particularly in the beginning of important conversations you are much more likely to get on track and people will get a lot less defensive.

Often, people speak in dis-jointed thoughts and sentences. What that means is they start an idea, they stop it in the middle, they get anxious then they start another idea stop that in the middle and keep going. Very often it goes something like this, “people talk about, well, actually, they talk about a lot of things, well, it really doesn’t matter. Well, you know. Okay, this is what I am talking about…” When people do that, it is very, very hard to follow them. You might do that. So, what do you do instead? Well, you realize that sometimes your mind is ready for the information sooner than your mouth can get to it. So what do you do? You slow down. You simply complete the thought before you start another one. If you slow down and concentrate on what you are saying, you are much more likely to get complete thoughts and people will have an easier time following you.

Do you ever notice the way people very often forecast failure. They will say things like, “this may be a stupid question” or “you probably won’t like this” or “this may sound kind of dumb.” Do you ever notice that people do that? You might do that. You might actually advertise or forecast failure. You may actually encourage people to think that your question is about to be stupid. Do you ever notice when you do that, you say, “this may be a stupid question” and people think, yep, right on schedule, a stupid question. So what do you do instead? What you do is you actually forecast success. You say, “This may be interesting” or “this may be worth considering” or “I encourage you to consider this.” If you forecast success instead of failure you will get by far better results.

One of the most common habits that people have is they do a self-discount. The self-discount is where you actually water-down your perspective before you even announce it. It’s like saying “well, I’m not very educated about this,” or “I don’t know much about it, but here we go.” It’s like saying, “I’m lucky to be breathing.” So instead of watering it down, how about you actually promote it. Instead of saying, “I’m not very educated about this,” simply say, “Well, from my perspective, here are my thoughts.” You are going to get more attention from people when you actually promote your idea rather than apologize for it. So stop watering it down, it’ll make a difference.