Hey, 👋 Scott from The Sales Mastermind here.

Today’s edition only takes 2 minutes.

Stop leaving things unsaid; they'll often cause frustration for you, the buyer, and everyone involved.

Instead, use labels.

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Today, we'll cover:

• Lions and Zebras
• Language
• Labeling

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Lions and Zebras

A group of researchers were studying wild zebras. No matter how hard they tried, it was a struggle to identify individual animals and how they interacted with the dazzle. Yes, the collective noun for zebras is "dazzle."

So, the research team drove an open-top jeep to catch and label individual zebras with dinner-plate-sized dots of red or blue paint.

It was an ingenious plan to help the researchers visually track individual animals within a dazzle.

Over time, the researchers counted fewer and fewer of the paint-labeled zebras.

One day, they saw the dazzle attacked by a lion pride. The hunt was more straightforward than the researchers had expected because the lions focused on a red-paint labeled zebra.

You see, zebras have irregular stripes for a number of reasons. One is to make it more difficult for predators to distinguish an individual from the dazzle.

When lions can effectively select an individual zebra, they can easily pick it off from the dazzle. And the coloured dots made it easy to track individual zebras.

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Language

Humans' ability to communicate sophisticatedly is our greatest strength and limiter.

Language is the reason we clawed our way from being just another mammal to the apex of the aminal kingdom - despite having no claws.

As sellers, our greatest strength is our ability to listen to buyers, translate their words, and respond with what buyers need to hear.

And nothing kills a deal faster than a buyer thinking,

And wildly, when asked, only 13% of B2B buyers think sales reps genuinely understand their needs

Instead of guessing, start Labeling.

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Hang a Label on it

Black Swan Group, run by Chris Voss of Never Split The Difference fame, coined labeling as:

It's when you give a name to the thing the buyer is thinking.

When starting a label, you'll use framing such as:

• It looks like…
• It sounds like…
• It feels like…

I'm sure you remember a sales meeting that was not going well, but you were too afraid to call it out. Imagine if you had taken a second, picked a label, and made the statement:

In the past, I have resurrected about 50% of sales meetings that were fizzling out.

Labeling is also great to double down when the meeting is going well. Use it similar to how you would use a Really Bombs (<< link to https://motivated-maker-1313.ck.page/posts/014-drop-a-really-bomb).

If a buyer says, "I love that," put a label on what they just saw;

Most importantly, labels allow us to use language as our strength to give the buyer certainty you are listening.

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Happy labeling!

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Until next week,
Scott Cowley

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