Not too much polish is the key, a polished call doesn’t fit. It feels out of place with today’s savvy customers. Let me explain and give you some ideas to help.
Every Sunday night I polish my family’s shoes in preparation for the next day’s school and work. I think shiny polished shoes are the epitome of smartness. But by Monday night, the children’s shoes have deteriorated into mud strewn, scratched and dented specimens and bear little resemblance to my Sunday efforts
So why bother? I like them to go to school looking smart and polished but school soon knocks them into shape. My youngest son Euan even admitted to deliberately scuffing them. Asked why, he replied they looked odd, different and he didn’t fit in, so he scuffed them
That’s school for you. Polishing doesn’t fit in. But what about telephone prospecting calls. Should they be polished? No, if you want to fit in, in the same manner with my school shoes, they will look and sound odd and out of place
So I ask you to un-polish your scripts and make them sound like real phrases and sentences you would normally use. You know, ones that we speak, ones where we pause suddenly and “uhm” every now and then. Sentences that you could imagine come from a human rather than a computer generated recorded message. Sound normal.
The key is write how you speak. If you find this difficult, then record your script onto your computer and play it back at the same time, type it up. Use a free service on the internet that transcribes the spoken word into type. Just type it out, leave out punctuation, pauses, sentences.
And then when you practise the words, put in your normal pauses, uhms, stutters etc. Try not to be too polished as this can quickly be heard and it turns customers off who think you sound like a cold calling merchant.
But I will continue to polish the family’s shoes on a Sunday night, one must have one’s principles you know.
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