How Can Small Talk Help You Sell?

December 12, 2011

Many people may think that small talk is either random or trivial. The truth is that it is not at all. Each subject of small talk comes furnished with a wide or narrow context, varyingly obvious or subtle. Leveraging that context is the important factor that you can take from small talk and apply to the world of sales. Consider the following scenario. You find yourself at your significant other’s office party. You’re sitting next to the husband of the CMO of the company. He introduces himself to you, mentions that he works at, let’s say, NASA, and asks you what you do for a living. Being that you’ve already discussed this with everyone else at the party, your challenge now is to direct the conversation to something you want to talk about. However, you can’t be unsubtle or you risk offending his curiosity and halting the conversation abruptly. Your best, and often automatic, maneuver is to leverage contexts that are relevant to the current topic but favorable to your interests. My response in this scenario might be, “I work at a full lifecycle sales consulting firm, and we work a lot with CMO’s like your wife. You work at NASA, you all must have intense PR campaigns in this recession, when government funding has to be in jeopardy every couple months.” This accomplishes the task of redirecting the conversation, and it has another benefit for a salesperson: it gets the other person talking! Now compare this scenario to the context-less environment of cold-calling. Your challenge is to find or devise contexts that take your cold call to a warm conversation. This is the same thing you might do at a holiday party, but the conversation needs to be more focused, while the environment can be more hostile. Instead of immediately presenting your pitch, there are a number of factors you can pull from to introduce the context of your call. You should introduce how your call is relevant to the prospect’s job function, or how it is related to recent company news you read about, for example. It is a common view that to get an unsolicited call is to get an irrelevant and unwanted call. These contexts will show to the prospect the importance of your call, and that might even catch him or her off guard. Once accomplished, the environment becomes less cold and more viable for a meaningful conversation about your shared interests. Whether you are an admirer or a critic of small talk, share some techniques you’ve learned from social functions that you related to the sales world. Also, share some of your experiences with applying a more focused approach to small talk and some of your successes and the unforeseen pitfalls!