Archive for Category: Communication breakdown

How To successfully ‘hack’ jargon (not IEBC) when selling

It’s not easy ‘speaking in English’, especially for an expert (and every seller is one). And yet, the fact that your larger audience is almost always lay, the importance of doing so cannot be gainsaid. Obfuscation. Chicanery. Subterfuge. Experts say these are the ingredients of successful politics; flummoxing the audience to leave them nonplussed. Unfortunately,

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Embrace Social Media Platforms And Accelerate The Sale

WhatsApp is a salesperson’s tool of trade; it clears any grey areas, and removes time wastage in, communication. How things change! Slightly less than two decades ago, email was considered ‘unofficial’. The hard copy (preferably posted letter-‘snail mail’) took precedence. Today, the plethora ways of instant messaging make email the new snail mail. Yet, for

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For successful selling, compare and contrast your product

She had been attracted to both phones but wants help in deciding why she should take one over the other, and the seller’s inability to demonstrate similarities and differences between the two is not helping. Flashback! Remember exam questions in school which would start with “compare and contrast…”? Well, we are back at the two:

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Adapt to the habits of the buyer for a smoother sales process

Style is also personality dependent. For instance, does the buyer interrupt a lot? And if so, it is your responsibility to remember where the conversation veered off. Adapt to the buyer. One more advantage of taking notes as he speaks. Selling is about as close a human interaction can come to, as a romantic relationship.

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Connect with the customer by using his jargon-not yours

Tribe is not a bad thing; it’s just twisted to be so. When one is obviously struggling to speak in English or Kiswahili and, judging from their accent or name, you switch to speaking in one’s vernacular, an emotional bond is quickly formed. You Connect With The Customer “You are so anti-jargon,” a reader told

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Treat Customers Like Patients To Help Them Make Sound Buying Decisions

Customers don’t know what they want. It is a sad truth, rarely verbalized. So treat customers like patients. Help treat their pain through insightful questions, thought through before the meeting Customers are like patients. Sell to them like a doctor. When you are feeling unwell and visit the doctor, the only thing you know is

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Maintain customer dignity when he’s cornered

When you have a customer ‘cornered’, instead of chest thumping for outing him, give him an out instead. Maintain customer dignity. Even if he’s wrong he’s still right. I learnt from a security expert, that riot police have several techniques at their disposal to disperse a riotous crowd. This was after one of the anti-IEBC

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Why we need to mind our language

Communication is one of the most complex, yet indispensable tool we use daily. It is made even more complex when the language of, er, communication is English. To declare competence in communication means that you have the ability to do something successfully. And because perfection doesn’t exist, competence therefore implies a perpetual work in progress.

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Valuable lessons learnt in sales as we welcome 2016

Today is the last day of 2015.Let us look at the valuable lessons in sales we’ve shared across the year. As is tradition, and in keeping with the New Year cheer, herewith highlights of the Sales Pitch year. 2015 promises to be the year you want it to be, this column assured us in January.

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Simplicity is king when selling to prospective buyers

“When I first heard about the cloud, I thought the information was held somewhere in the skies.” I was told this by the CEO of a thriving I.T solutions firm. If you know what ‘the cloud’ in computer terminology means, you must be laughing. Don’t! That’s how you lose sales. By assuming buyers know, and

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