Can You Hear Me

by Nick Morgan

  IV. Thou shalt not begin thy pitch with a joke.* Thou shalt remember that humor is personal, local, and as likely to offend as it is to please. Especially political humor. Thou shalt derive thy humor spontaneously from the situation and the customer in front of thee, not from one-liners.

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  V. Thou shalt speak with all appropriate passion and not be boring. Thou shalt refrain from the dreaded information dump. Thou shalt help the customer by sharing the high points of thy wisdom, not the entire body of knowledge thou hast.

  VI. Thou shalt tell stories and not kill thy customer with endless data. Thou shalt tell stories with a minimum of detail and a maximum of drama. Thou shalt tell real stories and refrain from retailing anecdotes with little point and no excitement.

  VII. Thou shalt not make a sales pitch for thy company or thy services before the customer has indicated readiness. Thou shalt not sell without being asked in any shape, form, or way. Thou shalt be content with implicit selling of the sort that comes from doing a good job.

  VIII. Thou shalt not begin with talk of thyself. Nor shalt thou begin with an agenda or an agenda slide. Nor shalt thou begin with aimless chitchat about the color of thy tie or thy relationship to thine organization.

  IX. Thou shalt not speak through thy nose or at the floor.

  If thou dost insist on using slides, thou shalt not speak while regarding them with admiration. Thou shalt not argue with thy slides. Thou shalt not need to interpret the thousand numbers on thy slides, because thou shalt not have a thousand numbers on thy slides.

  X. Thou shalt not exceed thine allotted time. Thou shalt not answer thine own questions. Thou shalt not find the sound of thine own voice more fascinating than anyone else’s, especially the customer’s.

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  230 Specific Techniques for Specific Digital Channels The online sales cheat sheet

  All the ideas this book has proposed for virtual communication also apply to the salesperson-customer relationship. But the following suggestions can help you fine-tune your online sales skills.

  1. Begin by listening to discover the customer’s state of need.

  Don’t sell yourself; get third-party endorsements to do the work.

  2. Referrals are more important than ever.

  3. Establish credibility by offering the right information depending on where the customer is in the sales-decision journey.

  4. Establish trust by solving the customer’s problem.

  5. Look to establish a relationship that lasts beyond the sale.

  6. Involve the customer in the process; don’t do all the work for the customer.

  7. Mirror your customer’s language, habits, and practices—

  but keep it real.

  8. Become a subject-matter expert in your field.

  9. Customization and personalization are more important than ever.

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  CHAPTER SUMMARY

  • The internet has profoundly changed the sales cycle.

  • You can use the weak-tie relationships of the online world to establish credibility.

  • It’s best to seek third-party endorsements rather than trumpet your own success.

  • Customers manage their own sales decisions and typically come to you much further along in the cycle.

  • Listening is therefore more important than ever.

  • Online, pay attention to how your customers remember—and how they forget.

  • Become a trusted source of information—a subject-matter expert—in your field.

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  CoNCLUSION

  Something basic is changing about the way we form relationships in the digital world. Will the next generations be able to invest in online connections the same way that everyone now invests in “real” face-to-face relationships?

  As I’ve mentioned, the nature of trust in the virtual world has changed forever. Trust is much more fragile, though perhaps easier to establish initially. But the big difference comes when something threatens the trust. In face-to-face relationships where there is trust, one party may do something to screw up, causing friction, anger, and even a bit of mistrust to creep in. But if the connection is strong enough, the issue will get thrashed out, the perpetrator will apologize, and trust will be restored.

  Indeed, once restored, the trust may be stronger than ever.

  How different the situation is in the virtual world! Once trust is threatened, it’s instantly broken, and it’s virtually impossible to reestablish it. People simply move on. Since trust was more fragile in the first place, it shatters with very little provocation.

  We must face the final virtual problem

  If most of your relationships are virtual, the fragility of those relationships may make you less able to get through the bumps Conclusion.indd 233

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  and shocks that every (face-to-face) relationship naturally endures. If you take the pattern of commitment from the virtual world, your understanding of the meaning of relationship will be attenuated and weak.

  And these weaker ties mean we inhabit a more toxic world.

  The research shows that negative conversations stay with us longer than do positive ones because of how we metabolize oxytocin and cortisol differently.1 How will we evolve as we move into a more and more virtual existence? Today, we still live in both worlds—face-to-face relationships and virtual ones. But how will we act in 2050? Or 2100?

  What could the future look like?

  I hope we’ll learn to live in a variety of worlds and become pro-ficient in many of them, code-switching easily, with perhaps an inevitably attenuated sense of emotional participation in all of them. That’s the future. Instead of having work and home and perhaps a third world of an outside interest or a pub, we’ll have many worlds, half real and half virtual, some all virtual, and few all real. The adepts will be people who can move from one world to the next with ease. You will learn to switch between worlds, but will also be comfortable with inhabiting—and having everyone you know inhabiting—a variety of worlds.

  As the saying goes, generals fight the last war. They use a strategy aimed at the war they’ve already fought. In today’s business world, we’re not showing ourselves to be any wiser. We still communicate in nonvirtual ways and expect those approaches to work in the virtual environment. We instead need to learn new ways of working.

  We have the choice of worlds now, virtual, real, virtual-1, virtual-2, virtual-3—one at a time or all at once. We may Conclusion.indd 234

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  interact with work colleagues on various text-based platforms.

  We may message friends and family. We may participate in online fantasy sports or other online gaming worlds. Our hobbies may have online versions or chat functions. We need to either learn to embrace more worlds at once—with less attention paid in each—or embrace one world even more deeply. Hence the popularity, after the work day is over, of watching TV while hanging out with the family and catching up on email. Or, setting everything else aside to binge-watch Game of Thrones for most of the weekend.

  But as part of embracing more worlds or one world more deeply, we need to learn to use new criteria for what constitutes attention. We’ve come to expect instant responses to our virtual queries from employees, spouses, and others while at the same time deploring other people’s lack of attention because they’re texting while we speak to them face-to-face. These are symp-toms of our halting efforts to adapt to the new virtual multiverse.

  We’re using old criteria for what constitutes attention.


  What are the new rules? How can we make them work?

  How can we make it worthwhile to work virtually and find it as satisfying as face-to-face work can be? In the virtual world, you have to become more intentional and clear about putting the emotions into what you’re doing, rather than taking them for granted as you could in the face-to-face world. What does that look like?

  In the virtual world, we have to be

  intentional about emotion

  In the old, face-to-face world, we could afford to be lazy about our communications, relying on our unconscious minds to do most of the work. In the new world, we have to be intentional Conclusion.indd 235

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  about our emotions. Now, we realize how hard it is to get it right, to deliver emotions with sensitivity, to communicate precisely what’s needed. We’re becoming more aware of how complicated those relations always were.

  What can we do to make all our communication more successful in the virtual world? The following are my final top eight if-you-get-nothing-else-from-this-book takeaways for improving virtual communication.

  Begin by accepting the less-than-perfect nature of virtual communication. Don’t try to make virtual communication into something it’s not or try to make it carry freight it can’t. Do the less important things via virtual meetings whenever possible.

  Save the emotional stuff for face-to-face meetings because it’s emotions and attitudes that are conveyed mostly through body language.

  Schedule regular face-to-face meetings to reinvigorate the team. If you are kicking off something important, are celebrating a big win, or have significant problems to discuss, bite the meeting bullet and bring everyone together. Trying to solve disagreements or rev people up via a digital phone line is pure folly and engineered disappointment. Our emotional investment in a phone call is simply less than in a face-to-face meeting, and the lack of visual and tonal information makes it much harder to get key messages across.

  Never go longer than ten minutes in any format without some kind of break. The breaks will allow people to reengage. You can either stop the meeting entirely or just urge everyone to get up and stretch. People don’t need a long break, just a chance for a quick change of pace. Keep your text-based communications short, too.

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  Get regular group input. What most people do during long phone meetings is put the phone on mute and take care of other chores while half-listening. You can keep the group involved by going around the phones asking for input. In a face-to-face meeting, you’re able to tell how people are doing by monitoring their body language. In a virtual meeting, you need to stop regularly to take everyone’s temperature. And I do mean everyone. Go right around the list, asking each locale or person for input. If you’re really gutsy, let people know they’ll be quizzed; research suggests they’ll remember more if you suggest that they’ll be asked about things after the meeting.2

  Have an MC. The group can’t run itself without the virtual equiv-

  alent of body language. You need someone who’s in charge of making sure that each person talks and that everyone is engaged.

  Identify your emotions verbally. Lacking visual cues, we have a very hard time reading other people’s feelings, so make yours clear verbally and train other people on the call to do the same. Say, “I’m excited about everything we’re accomplishing!”

  Or, “Bob, I’m concerned that you don’t seem confident in the third-quarter numbers. How are you really feeling about them?”

  You’ve got to put back in what the digital links are removing.

  Use video to bring the group together. Face-to-face meetings allow a group to share emotions easily. Such sharing keeps them together and feeling connected. Sharing your emotions is much harder to do in a virtual meeting. So do the small talk—but make it video small talk. Get the group to send each other thirty-second or one-minute clips of what they’re up to or what the weather’s like where they are. Something personal really adds a sense of connection back to the group. Put some of Conclusion.indd 237

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  that money you’re saving on travel to good technological use.

  It’s not a perfect solution, but it will help.

  Finally, embrace the technology; don’t fight it. And don’t fight the last war. The virtual world we have created is not going away. We need to learn new ways to cope and behave in the virtual space. Just as we have to learn how to be savvy citizens of the

  “real” business world, now we need to learn the rules and tricks of the virtual business world.

  How will our new digital worlds change us?

  People are going to google you. They’re googling you now, in fact. To have a conversation in the future, we will call up holograms of each other, with all the essential facts about each of us hovering in space above the person. You can’t hide yourself in the virtual world. But you can shape yourself.

  Take charge of your persona

  before it takes charge of you

  If your online presence and your current content—what you’re selling, talking about, or arguing for—don’t align, the people are going to believe the online persona that’s already out there.

  On August 3, 2017, a judge in Massachusetts sentenced Michelle Carter, who was twenty, to fifteen months in prison for exhort-ing her boyfriend to kill himself via text message. Her online persona, in the form of those saved text messages, had preceded her and left her (and her lawyer’s) arguments in the dust of credibility.3 In that case, her online world (with her boyfriend) and her real world collided, and prison time was the result.

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  In the classic 1950s mentality, home and work were two very separate spheres with very little overlap. Now we’re increasingly living in all our worlds at once—even if they don’t collide with fatal consequences. You’re at work, texting your friends about your fantasy football league, looking at pictures from your trip to Comic-Con, where you ran into your boss dressed as a stormtrooper. All these worlds are half physical and half virtual, and increasingly, they all connect with one another. The true adepts in these worlds of the future will be people who develop the ability to code-switch from one world to the next—while maintaining a consistent and authentic personality that works seamlessly in all the worlds.

  But that’s only the beginning. Research shows that millennials demand greater and greater transparency from their leaders.4

  When their managers say jump, they don’t say, “How high?”

  They say, “Why?” or “What will this accomplish?” or “How high will you be jumping?” This demand for transparency is increasingly the new reality in the world of work, and it has huge implications for everyone. Not only must team leaders and managers work much harder to show their teams how their work contributes to the broader mission, but team members must also be prepared to work more collaboratively and with more eyes on their progress than ever before. The rise of digital communications has inverted power relationships, empowered customers, and changed the nature of the employer-employee relationship forever.

  Let’s close this book about the perils of virtual communications by looking at a couple of trends. One that might be considered right at the epicenter of the real-versus-virtual collision is virtual reality, or VR.

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  Virtual reality eventually replaces

  most face-to-face meetings

  Kristopher Blom has been working in virtual reality since 1998.5

  At the time, movies and books had made many promises about what VR would be like, but the technology was still far from ready for the mainstream. “At the time, VR was extremely expensive,” Blom sa
ys. The devices involved looked nothing like the simple head-mounted displays you see today. These early VR systems would project images into an entire room. “There weren’t a lot of people who got to use them,” Blom says.

  But even at this early stage in the development of VR, the technology could start creating the sense that two people in different places were sharing the same virtual space. The first question, Blom says, was, “Can we have a shared experience where we’re both virtually in the same space?” In those early days, researchers could create a shared virtual space, but “there wasn’t much of a representation of me or you on the other end,” he says.

  You might have an avatar that represented you in the space, but it couldn’t do much to reflect your movements.

  Today, of course, the technology has improved greatly, but the goals are still largely the same: create a shared virtual experience for people who aren’t physically in the same place. Blom has worked on research that involves creating an avatar to represent a user’s body, so that when you look down, you see a body that’s moving in the same ways you do. “This experience is very powerful,” Blom says. “Our brains are so plastic that we can accept that that body is ours nearly instantaneously.”

  Blom now works on a product called the Virtual Orator, which aims to help people conquer their fear of public speaking by allowing them to practice on a virtual audience. “It’s kind Conclusion.indd 240

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  of the tool I wish I’d had, so that I didn’t have to learn public speaking the hard way,” he says.

  The virtual audience can be programmed to respond positively or negatively. Either way, the key is how much the virtual experience feels like the real experience of speaking in front of an audience. “You have to practice looking at the people, and you don’t practice in the same way as you would normally,” Blom says. “Once you really get into practicing, they become people.”

  The VR experience is so powerful, Blom explains, because

  “we’re visual people.” Our visual sense tends to dominate our other senses. “As long as what we give you is visual input, basically the brain has very little choice but to accept this as reality.”