Trust Us, this Script SLAYS
Why is the script the center of nearly every “sales training”?
JStar begins, “We’re going to play a game called Death in a Minute. What happens here is, you have one minute to get onstage, show us a room in your house, and then find some unorthodox but arbitrary way to die . . . AND you have to do all of this in under one minute. Who wants to go first?”
“I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory.” — Hamilton
All of a sudden, Jim had some confidence to jump onstage.
“I got this.”
The key to this game is imagining your own house, thinking of familiar things that you can see in your own mind, and then pretending you are there while onstage. You are alone, so speaking isn’t really an option unless you want to sound crazy.
I start right in the middle of the front edge of the stage and mime making a sandwich. I open up the twist tie on the loaf of bread, take out two slices, and set them on an invisible plate on the invisible counter.
“I suppose I’ll spread some mayonnaise on it,” I think to myself as I pretend slather the bread.
“Oh shit. I only have a minute,” still thinking to myself, “better smash the two slices together and place it in the microwave.”
I mimic the noises a microwave makes when setting the time and push “start.”
The sandwich heats up, and I walk to the sink to wash some dishes. The sink is a mess (imagining my own kitchen) and looks to be clogged.
Flip the garbage disposal on. Nothing happens.
“Hmmm, put your hand in there and pull out whatever is blocking it, yeah?” Again, thinking to myself.
The disposal turns on, and I die by having my whole arm ground up. I never get to enjoy my warm, invisible mayonnaise sandwich.
To this day, I have an irrational fear of garbage disposals. Those things are loose cannons, man.
“Just stick to the script, and you’ll be fine,” I was told. “Listen, guys, we’ve honed this script over thousands of hours, so we know it works — just follow it, and don’t try to ad-lib.”
It was as if he was looking at me:
“Trust us, this script works.”
And that is the problem. Scripts aren’t natural conversation, and they aren’t a familiar way for one human to communicate with another human.
“If you’re selling off a script, and your customer doesn’t know their lines, maybe it’s time to throw away the script,” writes Troy Harrison.
And he’s right. In improv, we assume the other actors don’t know their lines. We know that they’ll do their best to adapt, and we will do the same.
But that doesn’t mean we don’t try to lead our fellow actors through the scene together. We call this “setting the scene” — and in sales, it’s about creating a scene of things “they are familiar with.”
It’s why I’ve thrown out scripts.
Improv selling — using YES, AND — focuses the seller on creating a familiar environment that lends itself to a human interaction that isn’t forced, isn’t scripted, and is how humans communicate.
As Harrison writes, “Successful selling understands that we are dealing with people. While people can behave in patterns that are somewhat predictable, with human beings we always have that ‘X’ factor that mean that salespeople should be prepared for a conversation that goes anywhere.”
That means, do your best to set the familiar kitchen scene to create a human conversation with your prospect — one that will lead to the best results for everyone. And of course, you should still be prepared for your own version of the garbage-disposal disaster.
Finding the common denominator between you and the customer is the catalyst to your rapport.
Improv selling — using YES, AND — focused the seller on creating a familiar environment that lends itself to a human interaction that isn’t forced, isn’t scripted, and is how humans communicate.
Empathy is damn near impossible if you’re stuck reading from a script.
But it’s much easier if you’re all just actors in a shared, familiar setting.
Even if that’s a scene involving death by garbage disposal.
