Effective Sales Communication - The "CHILL" method

Are you in sales and trying to make sure that you are performing well in your calls?

Well, let me tell you this:

It is all about the perspective!

Changing your perspective to sales meetings can incredibly improve your performance, and consequently, change the outcome of those meetings.

Personally, I have never entered a sales meeting with the ‘sales’ mindset where you are eager to convince the prospects by all ways to buy your product.

Taking that stress off your shoulder will help you perform way better and gain the trust of the prospects.

The better way to look at it is that you are a part of a business that has something valuable to offer. And your prospects are a part of a business that is looking for a solution to a problem. In your meeting, you are discussing a potential partnership.

Entering your meetings with this mindset will boost your confidence, make you more focused, and let you deliver better value.

And here is where the “CHILL” method comes to help you conduct effective communication and build more trust.

What is the "CHILL" method?

The "CHILL" method is an overall guideline for you to interact with potential customers during sales.

It is actually possible to make sales without talking to your users with a self-selling product,

It consists of 5 parts:

• Listen.
• Learn.
• Interact.
• Hold your horses.
• Care.

I'm pretty sure you have an idea what each part presents, but let's dig in more:

1- Listen:

This might look a bit odd to start with, but believe me, as a salesperson, listening to your prospects is -at some point- even more crucial than talking about your product.

Even in our daily life, we always admire ‘the good listener’. People who have the patience to listen and pay attention to details are more likely to be trusted.

And the more we feel they understand our situation, the more we are likely to take their advice into more serious consideration.

The same goes for your sales process too.

Each business has its unique problem that they need to solve, give them the chance to elaborate on those problems, listen with patience, ask good questions, and take down your notes.

Listening will also help you understand what kind of language your prospects use, and enable you to adapt to the same language in your presentation to deliver the information more smoothly with the way they can perceive it.

Chill and listen!

2- Learn:

Remember again that you are here to help a specific real live business who has a particular problem that they need to solve.

It’s really good that you have listened, good job!

But here I’m emphasizing that the goal is not just to pretend that you are interested, and eventually go do the same presentation you do every time no matter what you have just listened to.

You are lucky to meet people from different kinds of backgrounds who gave the time to explain real challenges in their business, how they tried to overcome it in the past and ended up asking for your help.

This is a great chance for you to collect and process all this amount of information from different sources, analyze it and try to come to conclusions and feedback that will help you give just the right advice for the current prospects and the future ones.

Learn so you can adapt.

Understanding what exactly the pain is will help you modify your presentation to prioritize talking about the features or the kind of utilization of your solution that seems the best to solve their problems.

This will motivate them to ask more questions and thus the whole conversation will go more seamless.

This is way more effective than just going over all the features and services that your solution provides in detail which your prospect might not even be interested in. A theme of more professionalism and expertise will surely be on your side when you do this technique.

Chill and learn!

3- Interact:

You listened and learned, fantastic!

But you are not a reporter!

Be sure that a big part of your prospect's motive for setting a meeting with your company is to have this human touch impact.

Still, we prefer humans over robots and who knows till when 😜

The prospects would surely love to have a great human connection that makes them feel confident that they are in professional and trustworthy hands.

Make sure you interact with what your prospects tell you about their business challenges and goals. Showing empathy, having a sense of humor, making insightful comments, and sharing your opinions that are based on expertise are all vital techniques to a great experience that they will surely remember even if they didn’t decide to proceed with you.

Chill and Interact!

4- Hold your horses:

This is probably the best technique that fits the “CHILL” method title.

After listening, learning, and now interacting; it’s imperative to make sure you hold your horses.

I know, at this part of the conversation, you might feel that now it’s your time.

Now you have all the information, you have processed in your mind how your solution can actually solve the prospect's problem and you started fantasizing about how your features are perfectly applied to their pains and how they are driving success.

All this going in your mind is likely to make you lose the balance of your professional approach by falling into the pitch trap.

Over excitement, very detailed explanations, long phrases with no chance for questions, moving from one feature to another with no time for discussion, and irrelevant context are all bad things that you might find yourself doing if you don’t pay attention to ‘holding your horses’.

Mind that energizing with over excitement and diving in unnecessary details about your solution will not be in your favor and will not make your prospects as excited.

It might rather have a counter effect on them by causing distraction and disappointment. Therefore, Move on smartly, deliver your value clear and straight to the point, talk about the outcomes, and provide tailored advice for their case.

If you do that, the prospect will leave the meetings with a better impression and more organized vision.

Chill and hold your horses!.

5- Care:

All the techniques above are essential to assuring your professional performance.

But if you add the care part, you can make a difference.

Caring smartly can change the whole equation for your favor.

I know that you might be drowning in a lot of calls, deals, and mails which make you more automated in your process, but try not to miss a chance to show that you care about each of your prospects' problems in a genuine and personalized way.

I’m not suggesting fake care pretending here, what I’m suggesting is an additional concentration to catch the different small details at each deal’s problem and try to tackle that during your communication in a more personalized way.

Take notes of those special details they mention, their feature names, the methods they used to overcome their problems, the names in their team they mention, and the events they talk about.

All these notes will look great in your follow up mails and along all your communication journey. Share some resources or information you have gone through your reads with a prospect that might find that helpful, even if it’s not a part of your regular sales process.

Again, we all love to be taken care of!

Caring will let them feel that you are involved as a part of their team who is trying to solve that problem and will surely grant you more reliability as someone to stick with.

Chill and care!

Conclusion

And the final super technique is, “CHILL!”,

seriously just chill!

It’s not the end of the world if you lose a deal. There is a toxic unnecessary amount of stress that you can notice among the sales community, and I don’t see how that can contribute to better closing rates.

Many complicated elements play a role in closing a deal that is beyond your super sales powers :).

Be determined to shape your skills and continuously improve your process, do the job and you will be on the right track.

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