It's All About Tonality

Tone and Disposition for Sales

Oct 18, 2023

We’ve covered last week that the best way to sell isn’t to convince prospects that your solution is the best. It’s simply to understand if they’re ready to buy and guide them from there.

“So what do you want to do from here?”

It’s a typical question I ask customers if they haven’t outlined clear next steps in a call.

Why?

It puts the prospect in the driver’s seat. No one likes being sold to, not even sales people. This question also accomplishes two things:

Allows you to surface remaining objections (they’ll give you a sense of y/n)
Opens the door for you as a sales person to make suggestions (if you’ve done a good job they’ll be open to it)

The way to develop that trust and comfort is to ask questions. It’s important to note that it’s not just what you’re asking, but also how you’re asking.

We’ll cover three topics today:

Questions to Ask and Best Practices
Tonality
Disposition

Questions to Ask and Best Practices

I won’t spend too much time on going over questions to ask. A majority of what I write is centered around that. However, one resource that recently caught my attention recently was this article from Gong:

9 Elements of an Effective Sales conversation

Credit: Chris Orlob

Each element is still effective today but the ones that stood out and are particularly relevant for today’s article:

Listening
Using Powerful Language
Sentiment and Speed of Speech

Chris Voss talks about a tactic called “mirroring” in his book Never Split the Difference. It’s … literally mirroring the way with which someone is speaking during a conversation. Gong had found that the best reps actually get THEIR prospects to be able to mirror THEM.

If you look at the data in the article, a lot of the underlying drivers of this have to do with overall tone and disposition.

"Part of what it means to have a powerful or persuasive personality, then, is that you can draw others into your own rhythms and dictate the terms of the interaction"
-Malcolm Gladwell

Tonality

One of the most under looked aspects of sales communication is how you speak. The way with which you ask your questions. Think about the tone in how you ask questions and even maintain a conversation.

Credit: Michael Hewitt (Video in Tweet)

Michael goes deep into tonality which I find fascinating, definitely worth a follow if you want to dive more into the subject.

It’s worth being self aware and observe things around:

How are you asking questions?
Are you calm or rushed during a sales call?
How are you framing sentiment?

Think about not just what you’re saying but what you DON’T SAY.

Disposition

This is another element of tonality but I think that it’s important to expand on. It’s easy to get excited when a prospect is saying or indicating that they want to move forward with a purchase.

How do you act?