During a phone call the other day, I felt the hair stand up on the back of my neck.
Something about the way this man spoke was just “too nice”.
And something about the way he said “thanks” at the end of the call was a bit odd.
Now this guy is in the type of business where he deals with a wide variety of people. So he wears a “mask” a lot in public.
The thing is, I can tell when the mask is on.
And I think a lot of other people can too.
I think most people know when someone is a phony.
Some people like myself are really tuned into the nuances of other people’s personalities, and we can see when someone is being fake, and when they are not.
But even people are not as consciously aware of the nuances of other people’s behavior still sense phoniness when it’s going on. They may not call it that. But they do react with a general sense of “I don’t like that person” or “I don’t trust that person”.
One of the nuances that I became aware of through this phone conversation was how hard it is – in fact nearly impossible – for people to maintain the mask of how they think they should be acting in a certain situation, versus how they really feel.
In this phone call, the other man was projecting an image of enthusiasm through how he spoke to me. But on certain words, he dropped the mask of enthusiasm, and you could hear it in his voice.
The key word he said that gave away that he wasn’t really as enthusiastic as he pretended to be was this one word: thanks.
The reason why that one word gave it all away was it was the last word he spoke before we ended the phone call.
He uttered that word flatly, with no enthusiasm at all. The word was just there.
And if he had really been truly enthusiastic about our conversation, that enthusiasm would have been there to the last word, as sort of punctuation to the conversation.
You can’t fake enthusiasm.
And frankly, you shouldn’t.
People can spot a phony. Whether than can say why or not doesn’t matter. They just won’t trust you.
You need to be real when you sell.
You should have enough interest in what you sell and what you do so that your emotions around the people you sell to are genuine and complement your sales efforts.
People trust you when you are real.
And when people trust you, you will make more sales.
Sell with Pride,
Shameless Shamus Brown
P.S. Discover how you can rapidly create the kind of bond that causes your prospects to innately trust you more than your competition and will 2X or 3X your sales with the Persuasive Selling Skills Audio Program.
