Sandler Brief: Don't Fill In the Blanks

It’s time for a 21st-century reality check: We all live (and sell) in a ridiculously fast-paced environment.

We all have more platforms, more information, more commitments, more conversations, and more priorities to address than we can comfortably handle. That’s kind of our defining trait these days: data overload and compressed timelines. As a result, we are sometimes spread too thin, which means we are prone to miss things, perhaps important things, that are going on in someone else’s world. For a sales professional, the possibility that we might miss something important that’s going on in a prospective buyer’s world is a major issue — an issue that needs to be addressed strategically.

We need to understand that, when we're talking to a buyer, there are going to be times when they’re going to say things and we are going to be tempted to fill in the blanks about what they mean — perhaps without even realizing that that’s what we’re doing. This may happen because we make an unwarranted assumption about what they’re talking about. Or it may happen because we fall into the trap of hearing what we want to hear (known as the “happy ears” phenomenon).  Or it may happen because we don’t feel like asking for clarification on something that seems unimportant . . . but it actually is.

Regardless of why it happens, we need to understand that this filling-in-the-blanks thing does happen. It happens on both sides of the conversation, especially when things get hectic and we are pressed for time. As professionals, we want to make a point of addressing this problem proactively. We want to learn to recognize when people may be operating under different assumptions or with different understandings than we have about their world.

So for instance, if we make a presentation and in response, the prospect says to us, “You’re certainly close” – what does that really mean? Does it mean that there used to be seven companies who were in the running for this business, and now there are only six? Does it mean as soon as the CEO gets back from vacation, we have a meeting with them to launch the project? Does it mean that if we change the color we’re proposing from blue to red, we’ve just won the sale? “You’re close” could be any of those things. Or it could mean something else. We just don’t know. And if we pretend we do know, we’re contributing to a dangerous cycle known as “mutual mystification.”

Whenever we don’t know the meaning of something a prospective buyer is saying to us – or even if we think there is a chance we don’t know the meaning – we have a professional obligation to say something. We have to pause the conversation and say something like this:

That’s great to hear. I’m curious—when you say that we’re “close,” what does that mean? What needs to happen next for us to be able to work together on this?

What you just read follows a pattern called “stroke/repeat/reverse.” We give the person a stroke, meaning we say something positive about what they just said to us (“That’s great to hear”). We find a way to repeat or restate it (“…when you say that we’re close…”). Then we reverse the direction of the conversation back toward them by posing a clarifying question (“…what does that mean? What needs to happen next for us to be able to work together on this?”).

Of course, we could be right about what we think they mean. But then again, we could be wrong. Which is why we need to get into the habit, even if we’re busy, of hitting that pause button, and using stroke/repeat/reverse to confirm that we both understand exactly what’s being said and what its implications are.

The next time you hear a buyer say something that could be interpreted in more than one way – like “This looks pretty good,” or “Let me think about that,” or “You’re in the ballpark,” or even “Money is no object” – remove the mutual mystification. Use the stroke/repeat/reverse technique to find out what they really mean, what’s really going on, and what’s really going to happen next. You’ll save yourself and the other person a lot of time, energy, and aggravation that would otherwise have gone into fixing a problem somewhere down the line, a problem arising from mutual mystification. In an era of data overload and compressed timelines, you don’t need any more problems to solve than you already have!