Don't Talk Business in Business Settings

What if the fastest way to lose a deal is trying to close it too soon? I'm working with a client right now who's had to retrain his brain — every conversation with a potential client used to feel like it had to be a pitch. In today's episode, I break down why relationship selling beats transactional selling, and how to actually make the shift.

In this episode: → Why leading with business kills trust before it starts → A framework for splitting your focus between relationship and business → What changes when you let the business conversation come to you

Want to go deeper on leadership? Free Launch with Confidence Course on www.connectioncrue.com

#LeadWithConfidence #RelationshipSelling #Sales #Leadership #Business

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Welcome to Lee with Confidence. I'm JP Warren. Every episode we take a theme from our Monday morning leadership call and apply it to real life scenarios. So you can build your confidence, crush your imposter syndrome, and step into the leader you actually want to be. Short, real, straight to the point. Let's get into it. Welcome back to Lead with Confidence with me, your host, JP Warren. Today's episode is me kind of uh counterintuitive. This is about not talking business in every business setting. And this kind of came to light uh recently because I was working with a client of mine, and it's one of those things we're trying to retrain his brain. And honestly, I wish a lot of people would take this initiative to retrain our brains that whenever we are in these business settings, whether we're meeting someone for the first time, the second time, even if you have an established relationship with someone, not always being the person that brings up shop talk. All right, not stop bringing up the pitch or like what's an angle I can work my way in to actually further this conversation, help me out and make it very transactional. So it's actually kind of very relevant right now. And I see this a with a lot of people, how whenever there's any time that people have uh in front of a potential customer or target audience, they default to business and pitching. All right. So this is gonna be kind of a some frameworks to kind of move away from that. And recently I just had a I had a lunch with a with a client of mine, a client friend of mine, and also another buddy of mine who's, you know, in the industry and all that stuff. And before the meeting, I say, listen, uh, you know, this person does not like talking shop. This person doesn't like being pitched to. They can smell a pitch a mile away and that shuts them down. And it was very interesting. At the table, everything was going great, everything was going smooth. And then I heard it very kind of subtly being dropped in, kind of a little pitch, a little kind of like this is what we can do, or like these are challenges that you know we're solving at our company and all that stuff. The next thing I know, he felt it, I felt it, and obviously the person we were talking to, they kind of felt it too, and they started shutting down a little bit. And I loved how my my clients immediately pivoted and went back to the personal side of things because 85% of our success, I've said this many times before, probably on every episode, is based on our soft skills. And if we are unable to connect, influence, and have a good conversation with someone, then you are not going to get to that business level. And if you do, it's just a pitch. It's just transactional. And that's not long-term business. All right. So let's talk about actually some frameworks about how to actually not talk about business in a business setting. So you can actually build that foundation of trust, build that foundation of established conversations, hobbies, common interests. So once you do start talking shop, or once you do start, quote, pitching, it's a lot much more easier and more natural, right? I think it's interesting. I'm reflected back on my sales uh career previously, you know, you know, back in my sales career, we're always in sales, but I remember it was one of those things where it's like, I found it so much more easy to bring up business or so much more easy to talk about, you know, having our company satisfy this person's needs or fixing their problem or fixing their challenge or utilizing us for their for their work after that relationship was built. But if the relationship wasn't built there, it felt very unnatural and it doesn't come across authentic. It's very transactional. And that's when people put up their boundaries and push back. All right. So let's dive into some frameworks, some ideas. So maybe the next meeting you have, you maybe you have something today, maybe you have something this week. Then you're gonna meet someone maybe the first, second, maybe it's the first, you know, a couple of meetings you've had with this person. Like this is a great way to actually kind of build the foundation versus defaulting into that business pitch mode, okay? Because this might be a shocker to a lot of people out there. People have lives outside their work. So how do we connect with that to establish that trust? All right. The first thing is it's the 80-20 rule, right? 80% of the conversation, you know, you know, I think historically people walk in with 80% talking about business. 20% is usually the small talk in the beginning of the conversation, you launch into business. Try to flip that. Try to flip that script. Have 80% be about personal lives, right? Their family, their hobbies, their passions, their fuels, what they get into, their podcasts, things of that nature, and have the other 20% being about business. And I often challenge you this when you are talking about shop, have it have them talking about, you know, business or the industry or the market, something like that, versus you talking about that, okay? Because next thing you know, we start kind of talking more. And obviously, the 80-20% rule, just like in networking, they should be doing the majority of the talking, okay? The second thing is uh whenever you're walking into all this stuff, talk about the person before you start talking about the problem, okay? Focus on that person. Did they get into any activities with their kids that weekend? Did they do something with their wives? Or are they doing something uh uh outside of work? Are they uh taking, you know, back in school, maybe get pursuing an executive MBA. Talk about the person before you even bring up the problem you're actually there to solve, okay? And then what I try to default to, and this is kind of a good resource for everyone, I had coffee this morning with a client friend, call it what you want of mine, and we literally scheduled from 9:30 to 11 uh to tag up for coffee, right? It was probably until about five or six minutes left of the of the conversation before we had a split, we were we actually brought up work and actually he brought it up, okay? So I always allow the other person to bring up work first, okay? And I mean, sometimes, and this is one thing I was talking to my clients, sometimes it feels like such a waste of time. Man, we didn't even talk work. We didn't even bring up what I do, we didn't even bring up, you know, the challenge that they're facing, you know, at their job and the role and all this stuff. To me, that doesn't matter. I think those lunches are probably the most beneficial because what you're doing, you're standing out from everyone else, all the competition. When all the competition does is bring them to lunch and probably talk shop, right? What you are doing, you're making yourself come obviously, listen, I'm not saying fake genuine being genuine, but you're being more of a genuine person when you ever exploring and learning about their personal side of things versus just business all the time. And actually, at the end of the conversation, again, it was a much more, you know, the conversation that's more over coffee. It was a much more natural way to engage in business and that shop talk because they brought it up and I didn't. And after that, it was much more natural for me to kind of bring up what we can do, what we can't do, you know, what I envisioned for them. But what that did, that also set me up a meeting in about two weeks with this person to actually talk shop. Okay. So that's kind of that was kind of the one of those things that I actually utilized this morning. I think that's why it's caused me to kind of speak to today on this podcast. All right. And then another thing is though, whenever you are walking in and we had a small talk uh uh episode previously, if you go find that. But this is one of those things where it's like go in a little bit prepared. Don't get go, don't go in there, just expect it to wing uh the conversation or wing things. Have a couple of things that once the conversation does start getting silent or does start getting stale and all that stuff, you can bring something back in and kind of spark it up, whether it's again interest, uh kid sports, whatever it is. So you can still continue the the the uh the personal side of things versus just business. And listen, this isn't one of those pieces. I'm sure a lot of sales managers out there listen to this. That's stupid. I want to report every time you talk to someone. If you start pushing your people just to get information about their activity, then that's all the customer will view your people as, as a transactional vendor, right? And we don't want to be vendors, okay? Nobody wants to be a vendor, okay? No one wants to be a service or a service order taker, okay? You want to have an established relationship uh with your clients, and this is a great way to do this. Again, sales takes time, relationship building takes time, trust takes time. And nobody's gonna work with you if they don't trust you. All right. So now the benefits, and I actually have this uh jotted down too. The benefits to actually not pitching, all right. First off, it removes the pressure from these meetings. I know that I teach in my courses, in my workshops, like pitching, there's so much pressure behind pitching. You're waiting for the right time to chime in, you're waiting for the scripted question to ask, you know, or the challenges keeping you up at night. You ask all these random things because you're just you're kind of like waiting for that pitch or waiting for the right moment to bring it up. So the benefits of not bringing it up, it's much more human, it's much more human interaction that you're getting with this person. It builds the trust that's only in the compound throughout each conversation. You're gonna start learning little bits of nuggets, and who knows, you might make a lifelong friend out of this. Okay. And eventually, uh, I brought this up before. Eventually, whenever you do talk shop or whenever you do start having that business conversation, it's gonna be much more natural, kind of like a conversation between two friends versus a salesperson with a target audience trying to pitch and you know, feeling that, you know, oh, there's all this competition around me. I gotta get this, I gotta say the right things, ask the right questions at the right time, and I gotta kind of really like seal in the pitch. Okay. I often don't teach pitching in my c in my uh courses and workshops. There's something else that I teach, and we'll talk about that later, uh, maybe on another episode in the future. So, my questions for you today is number one, where did you learn that every interaction has to be transactional? Now, I think that uh over the past decade or so, even more than a decade, obviously with activity getting uh slower in a lot of industries, obviously with you know, of you know, people having to go out and get work, people have forgotten the idea of building these natural relationships. So now it's like the motivator is like, hey, listen, activity is going down, you better go out and sell. So naturally, people are gonna go out there and start pitching and having these transactional conversations, right? And then what does that do? That makes your target audience. Does anyone else notice that you know your target audience really isn't at these uh big conferences or networking events anymore? Probably because they go in and they're like chum in the water, okay? Because the, and again, people respond very naturally like humans do. If your job is to go sell and there's less activity, higher pressure from your manager or above, you're gonna go out there and do what you do, and that's pitch, but no one likes being pitched to, okay? And now the second question is what's a relationship you've built slow that has eventually turned into business? All right, think about that. Chances are a lot of them has, and chances are if you're probably looking for a job, that's where your jobs come from, your network, right? Your casual, your casual yet professional network, right? They plug you in because you have that relationship with them. All right. So now then the challenge I have for you in your next three client or potential customer meetings or whatever it has, try not to mention business until they bring it up. See what happens. See if you just kind of go in there with the flow and have really no agenda of the meeting other than to connect with this person and just see how far that takes you. So that's what we have of um this week's uh Lead with Confidence. And if you are, hey, uh this is something that I did also. If you are a student, if you're an early career professional, or maybe you just want someone that kind of needs a kind of a crash course on, you know, building your elevator pitch, on navigating free affairs and interviews and building out like your your LinkedIn and your personal brand and how to build a network that works for you. I have a free course that's about two hours or less. All right, that you can find on connectioncrew.com. That's connection C-R-U-E, like Motleycrew.com. And it's a free course for you to take, get a certificate at the end and all that fun stuff. So if you are out there, you want a crash course and something like that, it's called Launch with Confidence. And I encourage you to take it and let us know what you think. So that's it. I'm out of time, actually, over on time, 20 seconds. So get out there, stop talking shop, and go make some connections. That's it for Lead with Confidence, and we'll see you in the next episode. That's your framework for the day. Go lead with it. I'm JP Warren, lead with confidence.