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#418 - Tonality in Sales | Jeremy Miner | 30MPC Hall of Fame

32m 6s

#418 - Tonality in Sales | Jeremy Miner | 30MPC Hall of Fame

This episode of "30 Minutes to President's Club" features sales expert Jeremy Lee Miner, who emphasizes that tone and approach are more critical than the actual words spoken in sales conversations. He provides three actionable takeaways. First, shift prospects from cost-based to results-based thinking by immediately framing questions around outcomes, such as automating a process rather than discussing the product. Second, prevent objections by addressing uncertainty early, like pausing to clarify a prospect's hesitation during a presentation, which builds certainty and reduces procrastination. Third, always disarm the prospect by using a soft, curious tone to lower their guard, encouraging emotional openness. Miner explains five key tonalities, including a curious tone for neutral questions and a familiar tone for cold calls, which mimics a known contact to avoid triggering fight-or-flight responses. He demonstrates techniques like rustling papers or using intentional pauses and stutters to sound natural and unscripted, as prospects react to tone before words. By mastering these nuances, salespeople can improve engagement and booking rates significantly, with some companies seeing up to 73% success in moving cold calls to next steps.

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[Music] Good morning everybody and welcome to this special episode of 30 Minutes to President's Club. My name is Aron Froke and I'm here with my ghost Nick Skalski. And folks, today we have one of the legends out there in the sales world. His name is Jeremy Lee Miner. He is the founder of 7th-level sales. He is running a 10-figure training business. He has massive clientele all over the world and he has over 700,000 followers on Instagram. And he is a master of tonality throughout your sales process. Nick, why should people listen? This was the best episode I think that we have done on tone because Jeremy breaks down the five, maybe five and a half different types of tone that you use in sales conversations. He gives a ton of examples. He gives the rationale and logic behind it. He talks about everything from using your face as a remote control for your tone to the pacing of asking questions to rustling papers as a way to sort of add to the tone and environment. This is a really good one if you believe which I do what you say matters less than how you say it. And three, two, one. That's a roll. All right Jeremy, welcome to the show. We start every single episode with your top three actionable takeaways. So let's get your three. All right. So the first one is how do you get a prospect into results based thinking over price or cost based thinking even from the very first words or questions out of your mouth? Because the problem that most sales people have is when they get on there, let's say if it's a zoom call or something like that, it could be in person or whatever, we think we're building rapport by saying, hey, how's your day going? How are you doing? Oh, where do you live? You live in Atlanta? Oh, your offices are there. I love Atlanta. You know, I'm going to go there. I love the Atlanta Braves. I love the Braves. I love the first two minutes. And you can probably tell if you can see the prospects body language that they're just kind of like, yeah, even if you think they care more than likely they don't care. Why? Because they're used to every sales person's ever tried to sell them anything, asking them the same predictable questions. So why you're going through your questions in that conversation. A lot of your prospects are thinking the whole time. How much is this going to cost? How much is the price? They might not have asked you that, but they're thinking of that. And so what I want to do is I want to reframe their way of thinking immediately into the end result. OK, you're not selling the thing. You're always selling the results of what your thing does, right? So if I'm selling life insurance, I'm not selling them a policy. I'm selling them the results of what that policy does when one spouse dies and the rest of the family is financially protected, right? If I sell, let's say, SaaS, I'm not selling them a software. It could be for one company. I might be selling them on automating their award ceremony, right? So I'm selling the results of what the thing does. So when I'm getting them into results based thinking, I'm changing the way they're thinking. Just give an example. Let's say I think a lot of your listeners are in SaaS. That's a big industry retraining. And let's say that they sell to associations that manually have to do everything for their contest awards and everything in the Amazon for their automates. So it saves hours a day. Their employees have until I do that, rather than other tasks they're supposed to be doing. So I might get on there for that first appointment and just get on there. Hey, welcome to the call. Okay, so I've got and I'm looking down my notes. Okay, so I've got, can you hear me? Okay, good. Now, I've got, looks like you talked with my associate Tyler, the other day about looking at some possible help with maybe automating your awards program instead of having to do it manually, right? Right. See, that's a question, right? See, I'm getting them immediately automating your awards program so you don't have to keep doing it manually, right? I'm getting them to do that in result if that's what I was selling. That would be an example of what we call an any PQ connection question. Now, throughout that conversation, I'm always asking questions that keep them into that results based thinking over price or cost. If you're only focused on the money, money, money, all you're doing is seeding in their brain that maybe they can get it cheaper somewhere else and you get commoditized and that's when they go around looking at all these other quotes and bids when you don't have to, if you knew how to get it to results based thinking. Really good. What's number two? Number two is what's the difference between objection prevention versus objection handling? Because I would say that most salespeople have been taught like, oh, I've got to get really good at handling objections. I would suggest if you want to be a top 1% salesperson, you got to get really good at preventing objections from even happening in their mind. Why do objections even happen? What triggers a prospect to have an objection? Did they wake up that morning and say, you know what, today at 3.45, when that salesperson tries to close me on that policy, I think I'm going to go into fight or flight mode and I think I'm going to tell them I need to talk with my spouse. I'm going to blow them off. That's not what they planned on. It wasn't a planned reaction. That's a triggered reaction because of your sales ability. You didn't build enough gap from where they are to where they now see they can be that they have uncertainty. They have a lack of certainty, lack of certainty or uncertainty causes a prospect to procrastinate and have objections. We as human beings have a core fear of change. Our job as salespeople is how do we help them overcome the fear of change? One little technique you can do is let's say that you're presenting in a boardroom. Give me an example. It could be on Zoom. You go through slide 10 and you notice direction like crosser arms like this and looks up and grimaces. What are you going to do? Hope and pray that direction doesn't have an objection and hope and pray that after you leave that you're two people you already know in that boardroom are going to sell it for you? No, I don't want to take that chance. I might stop. Hey, Gretchen, you seemed a bit hesitant when I went over that last slide. What's behind that? What's going on? Just a little soft concern to him. You seemed a bit hesitant when I went through that last slide. What's behind that? Just so I understand. Well, Jeremy, I didn't understand how that was going to integrate with our database and blah, blah, oh, okay. Well, in that example, here's how it works. And now, boom, I prevented an objection from happening after I left or maybe even when I was there trying to close in. That's just one little example of how to prevent objections from happening in their mind. Love it. Round of sound, Jeremy. What's number three? Always be disarming. So everybody's sort of always be closing, which obviously you have to close, but I'm more concerned about how do I always disarm the prospect? Is it easier to sell to prospects if guards down or if they're guards up? I think we all know the answer. Well, the thing is, do you know what triggers a prospect's guard to come up compared to you know how to trigger it to come down? That is called always be disarming, okay? So from the first words out of my mouth, the first questions I'm asking, I'm always looking and I'm reading their tone and I'm looking to, how do I disarm this prospect where they start to emotionally open up? So let's say I get three-fourths of the way into the conversation and the prospect, they really haven't opened up. They've been very surface-subble because I haven't learned how to use my tone to open them up yet. I might lean in and say, "John, can I ask you something?" See that soft concern tone? Yeah, sure. Go ahead. You know, this is between you and me. You know, it's of course off the record. I'm not going to go share it on social media. That's the real reason why you guys might be looking at other vendors rather than staying with who you have, okay? So I lower that tone into that soft concern tone and you'll find that the guard starts to come down, they start to emotionally open up. So that's just one little example in that context of what to do to disarm the prospect. Jeremy, you just talked about using tone to get someone to open up. And what that means to me is someone can ask a question with the wrong tone up front. Yeah. You're going to get a completely different answer versus if I use the soft concern tone of the curious tone. So let's just transport ourselves back to your first takeaway. Yeah. So you said, "Oh, it sounds like you talked to this person on my team and you wanted to learn more about automating your reward ceremony so you don't have to do it manually anymore." And so they're like, "Yeah, that's why I reached out. How do you open them up from there?" Well, you'd go into your next what we call any BQ connection question. So I might say, "Hey, so when you were talking with Ty there, what was it that you guys were, I guess, kind of going over that caused you to want to look into this further?" That's it. It's just a connection question because what I'm doing is once again, I want to take the focus off me and immediately put on them. I wanted to disarm the prospect and I want to get them into results based thinking over price or cost based thinking. So that type of question in that context gets them to start telling me what they said that cause them to want to look into this further. Notice I'm very neutral. I can't be a sumptive here too early because I don't have any trust or credibility with this prospect. When I get further than the conversation, I can be more sumptive. But right here, you start assuming things, especially with A type C level executives, thinking like, "Well, we're just kind of looking into it right now." So that caused you to want to look into this further. See, I'm still neutral. Now as I build the gap and pull out pain and have them relive the pain, I get more sumptive, right? But I'm not going to do that in the beginning. And also most importantly, the them telling me while they're looking, more importantly, who are they telling? Themselves. See how I'm automatically getting them into that result based thinking of why they even talked with the SDR or why they responded to an ad, whatever it was. I know that you are extremely intentional with your tone. And you've mentioned a couple different types of tonality you use. Can you talk to me about the different types of tonality when you use them and what they should sound like? There's five types of tones you have to master. There's subcategories of itch these tones, but I don't want to go over anybody's heads. So, there's the curious tone? Okay, in certain questions I have to ask it more of a curious tone. There's reasons for that. So when do I want to ask a question in a curious tone? It would be those type of questions I just asked. It's like you're coming across from like a curious manner. And I might get into situation questions. Now can you give me an idea of the volume of submissions you get for your words every year? Or what do you have in place right now to pay off the full mortgage in like your credit card debt in the cars when you do pass away? Right? If I was selling life insurance. So it doesn't really matter. See that's kind of a curious tone like I'm curious. Now I do want to talk about one subcategory of the curious tone because it's probably one of the most important. And that is a familiar tone. Okay. Now a familiar tone is really really important if you call outbound leads meaning that they respond to some type of ad put in their name, email phone number, but they don't know who's calling and when. There's no scheduled thing. Or especially if you call call. Okay. So when I call I had to learn this the hard way because my first interest I sold in was door to door sales while I was in college. Right? I started learning tonalities and different things like that for my background behavioral science in school. And I started to have to learn how do I discern them on the doors? Well then I went into B2B sales at the enterprise level selling debt relief services to larger companies in some SMB. And I had to learn I'm on the phone now they can't see me. So I had to learn how do I sound familiar when I called call these companies where they feel like they should know who I am. Because what are most sales people do when they call call? What's the average pitch? Like hi, is this John? Yeah, John, hey, it's James Miller with XYZ company. Hey, listen, the reason why I'm calling you is and right at that point, where does the prospects brain go to? They're like, what are you trying to sell? It's fight or flat mode. It's a survival part of our brain. It's just have God wired us when every put on first humans here millions of years ago, thousands of years ago. I don't know when that was. We'll find out one day, but it's that survival part of our brain that when we feel like somebody's trying to sell us something, we instantly like our guard goes up and we're trying to protect ourselves, right? Not from the saber to tighter. Now we're trying to protect ourselves from like marketers and salespeople because we're sold to all the time. Okay? So if I come across with more of a familiar tone, what I also learned how to do, I actually show you guys this, let me grab a piece of paper. I actually learned how to do this when I was cold calling about a month in with my B2B career. And I was just shuffling through some papers when I was just calling a random lead. And I noticed that the person like, they're just listening the whole time. And I'm like, what is that? You know, so I just started doing that shuffling paper. So like legitimately, we teach companies and salespeople to do this time. So yeah, is this John? Yeah, John, hey, it's Jeremy. Jeremy Minor with XYZ company. Yes, it's John, John Smith with XYZ company. I'm holding a copy of your 2023 revenue reports. I was wondering if you could possibly help me out for a moment or whatever it is. Let's say you're an investor calling a home that's going in for closure because you want to flip it or whatever. Yeah, is this is this marrying? Yeah, Mary, it's James James James Miller with XYZ company. I'm holding a copy of your property taxes on your home there at 55 willow lane there in Savannah. I was wondering if you could help me out for a moment. See, it's a panorup. So the first part of that is John, John Smith. That sounds like what? Somebody they already should know. It's familiar. Okay. So these little nuances add up because if you ever got a call from something like, hey, Nick, it's Amy. Amy Smith. How are you doing? And you're Nick, you're not like, who is this? You're like, I'm doing great. And they keep talking and you keep going in your mind like, who's I mean, so did I go on a date with her? Did I meet her in networking? I should know her. And you wouldn't dare be rude and say, who is this? I'm telling you on call calls, we have some companies in different industries, especially real estate. They're getting like a 71 to 73% booked call from call calls from a first call call to book in the second call. So out of 10 people, the answer, you're talking seven out of 10, go to the next step. And a lot of it is just learning how to have that familiar tone, right? Roughly the papers. I know it sounds kind of stupid and corny, but they're hearing something on the phone. It triggers curiosity. Yeah, I'm holding a copy of your, looks like your, it's your property taxors here on that home and at the 55 willow lane there in Savannah. I was wondering if you could help me out from them. They don't know if you're an IRS agent, they don't know if you're a county clerk. They quite literally don't know who you are. But the point is, is I'm triggering curiosity rather than triggering fight or fight mode where they're trying to get rid of me. And then I go in the second half. Well, I'm not even sure if it makes sense for us to talk. I've worked with the group of buyers who are looking to buy four or five different properties there and that four block area Savannah home is. And after they had me go through your tax records on the home, they asked me to reach out to you to see if you would be maybe even opposed to getting an offer on the home. Would you be against talking about that? No, I'm not against that. What do you have? Like, not are you open to that? Okay, where I get a yes, I actually in certain circumstances, I want them to say no. You guys ever heard of Chris Voss? Chris Voss was on a podcast. Yeah, I love Chris. So a lot of that you don't really learn in school, but in behavioral science, there's a theory called social dynamics. And so you learn how the brain is triggered to say yes, compared to how is the brain triggered to say no? Like what neurons go off? And so what Chris has done well is he's learned that actually getting them to say no in certain context is actually way better than forcing them to say yes. So we've got this curious tone. And this is how you and I actually met is you tour down one of our reels where we were teaching the heard the name testosterone. And you actually said this one's much better than most openers that I hear. And the main critique you had was I want to make sure that people are doing it with the familiar tone. I was yelling at a hat, be out on the clip, I was screaming in the mic. And so the way that we teach it is it honestly matters much less what you say. But if I'm like, Hey Jeremy, we work with a few other Sequoia portfolios. It's Armand from from Northwestern. Have you heard of a name testosterone? Some of those intentional stutters, those stops, those repeating my name two times. It almost makes you sound human. And it's similar to why you crumple the papers too is if I say Jeremy, we work with a few other Sequoia portfolio companies. It's Armand from Northwestern. It's too clean, it's too tight, it's too rehearsed. And it's almost like you're stumbling upon it. So say, that's what a lot of people don't think is you know sometimes I'll do a real no you know every once in a while look at some of the comments and they'll be like some person you sound like confused you you got to be professional. And I'm like that's why you're getting one out of a hundred people you talked to the book because you sound so damn professional and scripted in that first 30 seconds and your prospects are used to 20 other salespeople call calling them every week that sound exactly like you scripted that they're not even hearing your words quite literally. Let's say if I'm walking across the street and I hear somebody yet like a woman scream instantly you're like this but your brain the first thing it heard was the sound or the tone but it didn't hear the words that's why you react am I safe you're reacting you didn't even hear the words she said so that goes in your survival brain the sound survival or brain some people called the reptilian brother brain then in me that goes the about a second or so later into your mid brain that starts to interpret the words and then it goes up to your neocortex which is your problem solving part of the brain that says oh that lady was just yelling at her son to be safe crossing the street you see how that is so in a call call you're right they don't even really hear your words at first 10 15 seconds they're just hearing your tone and if your tone sounds scripted salesy too excited you're quite literally you could be like this is the iris you know you have got a refund of $750,000 and if not interested right they don't they don't hear the words they're hear your tone so if I have that familiar tone and kind of like confused but not confused like you're an old man that has dementia confused I think that's a difference like confused like you're not quite sure if you're the right person talk to you're not quite sure if you can help them that's what I mean by confused tone which is the second tone okay or let me give you another example here let's say that the prospects of gosh this is this problem is causing us a lot of stress oh how how do you mean by stress see that's a confused tone now my facial expression has to match my tone right because your facial expression if I always say is the remote control to your tone because should I have a confused tone with a straight face really hard to do okay so oh how how do you mean by confused or how do you mean by feeling pressure at work see now what happens immediately in the subconscious part of the brain is their brain says oh he didn't understand what I meant by stress I need to expand on that I need to explain that better well what I mean Jeremy is just last week we had this issue where blah blah blah blah and now that confused tone cause them to emotionally open up and start to relive their pain of the situation and that's where most salespeople just haven't learned because they asked surface level questions can you tell me two problems you're having what are some challenges are going on what's your budget for this sort of thing what are you looking for in a solution and then we go into our pitch and then we wonder why most say I need to think it over keep looking because you're not emotionally getting them to relive the pain the two biggest emotional drivers that causes a human being to want to change our pain and the fear of future pain. So if you can't help them relive their pain of their current situation or their past and then have a fear of continuous pain or let's say if I sell life insurance, have a fear of future pain, I'm going to die if family is not protected, that prospect feels no need to change. And when they feel no need to change, that's why you get tons of objections and that's why they don't buy. So my tone can influence whether I open them up emotionally or not. That's just one little example of where I'd use a confused tone. So to recap, you've given us three and a half types of tone. Number one was your curious tone and you're using that oftentimes at the beginning of a call when you're trying to get someone to open up as to, "Oh, what was that reason that you took the call in the first place?" And then the familiar tone is almost reminding them of someone or reminding them of a story. So that was type one and type 1.5. And then you gave us number two, which was the confused tone. And it sounds like you're asking people to expand on something. Yeah. It's a technique to get them to open it. Oh, how do you mean by your feeling pressure at work? That brings us to the concern tone, which you mentioned a little bit earlier. And it sounds like you're using the concern tone to confront uncomfortable objections or conversations. Could you expand on that? Yeah. A concern tone is a tone that shows empathy. So in a concern tone, there's so many times I might use a concern tone and it depends on the context, right? So let's say if I ask a, I don't know, like a consequence question, let's say if you sold life insurance, okay? How long would sending the kids be able to pay for the house and the credit cards and the cars without your income? See that's a very personal question. I'm not going to ask that in the first two minutes. That's later in the conversation. But you see, my tone sounds concerned. I'm concerned for you, okay? That builds trust. Because if they feel like you're concerned for their situation, they feel like you're trying to help them solve something or get some or they don't feel like you're just selling them something to make money. Let's say they're not moving forward. They keep procrastinating. You've had call after call after call. They're just procrastinating. I might start and say, Nick, just replace. Can I ask you something? Yeah, go ahead and mess with me anything, Jeremy. That's off the record. I'm not going to tag you on social media. What's really holding you back from moving forward? See the tone. That's it. Now, the way you really start to learn how to use a concern tone is when you ask a question with a concern tone, it's easier for you if you're standing up or setting down if you lean in like this. Your body, your vocal cords will soften up a little bit rather than up here. I can do it up here because I've done this for so long. But if you're new to this and you're learning a concern tone, you won't sound that concerned up here like standing or setting straight up, you've got to lean forward. What's really holding you back? See, when we lean forward, our voice tends to become a little bit softer. It's hard for us to be so loud when we lean forward in a chair. So that's a concern tone that shows empathy. And we have the challenging tone. Now, you're not going to use a challenging tone early in the conversation. You don't have much trust or credibility. But let's say I get closer to the end of the conversation. I might say, "So what happens if you don't do anything about this and you keep getting these complaints from the judges and the board about the process you're running?" And then at that point, they start questioning if you're even going to have the job. I start challenging because I'm triggering an emotion and then I end with a concern tone. So what if you don't do anything about this, you keep getting these low quality leads and your salespeople keep going over to all those competitors? I mean, what's going to happen to your business at that point? See, I can have different tones within the same sentence or the same question that's going to trigger them differently. How does it sound if I said this? So that consequence which I just gave you was like if you were a marketing agency just a second ago. Let me go back to the same example. John, let me ask you what happens if you don't do anything about this and you keep getting these low quality leads to your salespeople and they leave you for your competition? What happens to your business at that point? Oh, I don't know. I mean, we just tire different people. I don't think they're going to leave because you're not triggering any. You're not getting them to think deeper about the consequences. You're saying the question, "Monotone," and you're saying it too fast. The biggest reason why prospects give salespeople vague generalized surface-level answers is you ask the question so fast you literally give them no time to internalize what you just asked. You just ask it too fast. Now, notice how I asked the question somewhat fast, but you notice how there's like little verbal pauses in between. Why do I do that? Because it keeps the prospect engaged. Well, what happens if you don't do anything about this? If you keep getting these low quality leads, then your salespeople keep getting recruited by those other companies. See the verbal pauses? I verbal paste the question out. I'm still saying certain things fast for that reason because when I use a challenging tone, I can't have a challenging tone and ask the question really slow, right? I have to ask it fast. I have to put verbal pauses in between certain things I want their brain to focus on. A lot of nuances there if you want to be great at sales. The other thing is you've got the more challenging, more aggressive tone for the things that they know they don't like. What are you going to do if you keep getting these bad quality leads? But then you soften it with the concerned tone when you think of the thing they want to protect, which is what's going to happen to your business that? Yeah. Downward inflections. So you start up with challenging tone on that consequence question because it raises their emotion like, oh, shit, I don't want that to happen. But then you lower your voice into that soft tone like you just did. Where at the end they feel like you're generally concerned for the consequence, which you are. I want to make sure everybody understands this is not acting. You are concerned if they don't solve this problem because that what's up? Totally. So last tone, we've got those four, what's number five? The last tone is the playful tone. The playful tone is really important because let's say, okay, so let's say Nick will play with me again. Jump on Zoom, five minutes late and you're like, I'm so sorry, I'm late, you're a prospect. Do you ever mean I'm sorry, I'm late, crazy day. Let's hear what you got. Well, what are we going to do if you should I forgive you this time? Yeah, I guess. All right, I'm okay. I'm just making sure I don't worry. I'm not going to tag you on Instagram saying that you're related to the appointment. Now see, that's a playful tone. Now what happens is Nick starts laughing. Now why that's important. I'm not doing that to be a comedian or to be funny. I'm doing that because I'm literally getting him to release dopamine in his brain, which causes you to laugh and lower your guard. That's a playful tone. I feel like what you're also doing in that scenario, Jeremy, is you're sort of, you're not inferior. You're sort of keeping your status the same as the customers. What most people, they've been there, they're like, oh, don't worry. I'm so grateful that you came here that we can have the time with you to discuss our never ending greatest opportunity in the world and the prospects like that just lowers your status because that means in their brains, psychologically, that you value their time far more than they should value your time. And that's not where you want to be as a lower status sales person. Well, Jeremy, speaking of time, the clock is ticking and we got to move to our last question. So our last question is that we've talked about a lot of really great things sales people should be doing. Now we're going to flip that question on a tag and ask you about a shouldn't. My last question is what is one bad habit that you see a lot of sales people exhibiting that you think they need to break because it hurts them more than it helps. Getting defensive when the prospect gives you a concern. If you get defensive when a prospect gives you a concern or if you try to cut them off in the middle of a concern, so it's better for you to like even clarify why they have, oh, what caused you to feel that way just so I understand. It's almost like you're a psychologist and you're just letting them dump their concern on you. And a lot of times you'll find out that they just dump it out. It's like they don't have the concern anymore, but it's easier for you to address it once you understand what the actual concern is because of prices says, you know, this, this proposal is just too expensive. Well, what does that even mean? Too expensive to what? Too expensive like they don't have the funding or budget for it. Too expensive like they don't have the money for 30 days. Too expensive that they've got other quotes that yours is more expensive. Too expensive that their current vendor is less than yours like you don't even know what that means. So I simply would ask, oh, how do you mean by it's too expensive? Well, I was looking at another vendor and see now I know what they mean by too expensive. So a lot of times we just need to ask a clarifying question first. So we actually understand what the real objection is or what's behind the objection. And then it's really easy once you know what the objection is instead of guessing to help them overcome it. That's a huge mistake. We see a lot of salespeople do phenomenal. Jeremy, thank you for joining us. Please stick around for a 60 second recap coming up soon. I already know it's time for a two by two recap from this episode with Jeremy Lee Minor. What do you have for your two? My first one is that your facial expression is the remote control for your tone. If you want to sound concerned, you may need to lean in. If you want to sound curious, you might need to tilt your chin up and have a bit more of a uptone at the end of what you say. So use your face to get the right tone out of your voice. Number two is one of the biggest reasons you get crummy answers to your questions from prospects is that you ask your question too quickly and it doesn't give them time to process and think. So it Jeremy, right? recommends is to actually slow down the back half of your question to give your prospect a little more time to think through an actual response that gives you the actual information you're looking for. Number three, Jeremy gave us the five types of tone. The first was a curious tone which he uses to get people to tell them a little bit more about something. The second is a confused tone which he'll oftentimes use when someone says you know really stressed about something he'll get them to expand on a feeling. The third is a concerned tone which will oftentimes use when asking pretty tough questions around how would you pay for the mortgage if you ended up passing away. The fourth is a challenging tone which is when you're trying to push on someone to take action and then the last is a playful tone when you're oftentimes using to build rapport without lowering your status. And then lastly number four, let's zoom in on the challenging tone. Jeremy's challenging tone sounds like this Nick how are you going to deal with the fact that your sales reps keep getting these low quality leads. You're not hitting the sales targets boom boom and boom. If this stuff keeps happening, what's gonna happen to your business? What he does is he pushes the things that are frustrating Nick the prospect but then he softens the blow and he ends in a softer down tone when he asks what it actually means for your business and that's a non-cringey way to ask an impact question. All right Nick, how can people help us out here? We talked a lot about tone in this episode and tone is probably the most important on cold calls because you're making a very flash impression with your prospect. Luckily Arma, you and I wrote a book about cold calling and if you want to get the audio book version of it even if you picked up the physical copy you can actually hear the tone for every single element of that book because Arma that I got in a studio together for eight and a half hours to make sure we were voicing over the way you say things on a cold call. So there's a link in the show notes to get the audio book of cold calling sucks and that's why it works. A step-by-step guide to calling strangers and sales. Pick it up. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week on the show.

Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. Focus on results-based thinking from the start to avoid price objections; ask questions that highlight the end benefit, not the product itself.
  2. Prevent objections by addressing uncertainty early, such as pausing to clarify hesitations during a presentation.
  3. Use a disarming tone (e.g., soft concern or familiar tone) to lower prospects' guards, making them more open.
  4. Master five tonalities
  5. Techniques like rustling papers or intentional stutters create a natural, less scripted sound that triggers curiosity rather than defensiveness.

Summary:

This episode of "30 Minutes to President's Club" features sales expert Jeremy Lee Miner, who emphasizes that tone and approach are more critical than the actual words spoken in sales conversations. He provides three actionable takeaways. First, shift prospects from cost-based to results-based thinking by immediately framing questions around outcomes, such as automating a process rather than discussing the product.

Second, prevent objections by addressing uncertainty early, like pausing to clarify a prospect's hesitation during a presentation, which builds certainty and reduces procrastination. Third, always disarm the prospect by using a soft, curious tone to lower their guard, encouraging emotional openness. Miner explains five key tonalities, including a curious tone for neutral questions and a familiar tone for cold calls, which mimics a known contact to avoid triggering fight-or-flight responses.

He demonstrates techniques like rustling papers or using intentional pauses and stutters to sound natural and unscripted, as prospects react to tone before words. By mastering these nuances, salespeople can improve engagement and booking rates significantly, with some companies seeing up to 73% success in moving cold calls to next steps.

FAQs

Results-based thinking focuses on the end result of what your product does rather than the price. You can achieve it by asking questions that reframe the conversation around the outcome, like 'So you want to automate your awards program to save hours a day?'

Objection prevention stops objections from forming in the prospect's mind by building certainty and addressing concerns early. Objection handling deals with objections after they arise. Prevention is more effective for top salespeople.

Always be disarming means using techniques to lower the prospect's guard and make them emotionally open up. It's easier to sell to a prospect with their guard down, so disarming from the start improves trust and engagement.

The five types include curious tone, familiar tone, soft concern tone, and others. Curious tone is used for neutral questions, familiar tone for cold calls to sound known, and soft concern tone to open up guarded prospects.

A familiar tone makes you sound like someone the prospect should know, reducing fight-or-flight. Rustling papers adds realism and curiosity, like saying 'I'm holding a copy of your 2023 revenue reports,' which triggers interest instead of resistance.

Getting a 'no' in certain contexts, like asking 'Would you be against talking about this?' feels safer to the prospect and reduces pressure. This technique, based on behavioral science, can lead to more genuine engagement.

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