7 Tonality Secrets That Will 10x Your Sales (From a Former CEO)

:: 00:00:00

Speaker 1

Today, we're talking about one of the most overlooked things in sales. It's tonality. It can make or break a deal. I'm going to show you exactly how to use that to your advantage. Yeah, that's what we're talking about. Let's go.

:: 00:16:17

Speaker 1

Hey. What's up? I'm Ray green, former CEO turned entrepreneur. I have 15 years of B2B sales management and executive sales management experience. That includes managing director of national small and mid-sized business for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, overseeing field sales and phone sales and digital sales and direct mail sales, and includes being CEO for a handful of investor groups to help them drive more sales and increase the value of a business.

:: 00:36:21

Speaker 1

And I've turned around eight sales teams in my career. And across all of those sales, different industries, different channels, different people, different levels of sales, what are the obvious patterns is that the best salespeople know exactly how to use tonality, and they understand that if you do it intentionally, you can use tonality to build trust, build rapport, get past gatekeepers, and make sure that your prospect hears exactly what you want them to know way that you want them to.

:: 01:03:17

Speaker 1

Now, what is tonality? It is a bundle of skills and behaviors that you're using to ensure that your message is received. And it really comes down to seven key things that you want to look at to ensure that you're leveraging tonality to your advantage and not missing opportunities. Let's break those down here. Now the first of these seven things is going to be pitch right.

:: 01:21:21

Speaker 1

And this is a really important one. One that I see salespeople misuse time and time and time again. And most of the time they don't even realize they're doing it. Right. So you've got high pitch and you've got low pitch. Now, what a lot of salespeople do is they use the high pitch to try to show, hey, I'm friendly and I'm chipper.

:: 01:39:10

Speaker 1

But what they don't realize is a lot of times that's actually signaling weakness. It's signaling nervousness. It signals overeager, it signals lower status. Because I feel like I've got to talk up to you, which is exactly what you don't want to do as a salesperson. I don't care if you're a leader or closing million dollar deals. Your objective is to be an equal to whoever you are talking to.

:: 02:01:09

Speaker 1

You don't want to come across as lower than the person that you're talking to. You need to come across as certain, confident, authoritative. When you use a lower pitch, you actually come across as more sure of yourself. And that's particularly important when you're talking to a gatekeeper or when you're talking about money. You're talking about closing the deal, which is exactly when people tend to use the opposite.

:: 02:24:20

Speaker 1

And you can hear the voice go up an entire octave. We actually reviewed a sales call a couple weeks ago, and when it came time to ask for money, he went up an entire octave and I replayed it over and over and over. I said, man, it's like, right here. You can tell that's the piece that makes you nervous.

:: 02:37:16

Speaker 1

I can tell strictly by the pitch that they're using. So you want to be conscious this when you're talking to the other person, are you trying to win them over by sounding like a cheerleader, or are you sounding like somebody that knows what they're doing, is a professional at this is confident and self-assured? Next, we're going to talk about I'm kidding.

:: 02:53:06

Speaker 1

Next we're going to talk about pacing. All right. Pacing is the speed at which you are talking. And there are times where are you going to speed it up? There are times you're going to slow it down. Some people more naturally talk faster than others, and some people more naturally talk slower than others. Sometimes when you're talking fast, it can show that you're excited, but many times it's actually showing anxiety or impatience and you end up talking so fast that not only are they not hearing the word, you're not giving them time to, like, actually digest it.

:: 03:19:00

Speaker 1

So you're just ripping through things so you overwhelm people. So more often than not, when I'm doing sales coaching, I've got to ask people to slow down just a little bit because they actually are nervous. They actually do have some anxiety and it's coming through and how fast that they are talking. And what you need to do is be more methodical about it.

:: 03:33:07

Speaker 1

When you slow down. Just a little bit, you allow your words to be digested. You also signal that you're confident. What you don't want to do, though, is bore the shit out of people like you don't want your prospecting. Got them like say it already. The other thing to consider is how fast is the prospect of the person that you're talking to?

:: 03:53:16

Speaker 1

Talking? If they're talking really fast, nothing wrong with mirroring that, so that you keep like a natural ebb and flow. When I was doing national sales on the phone, I would pick geographies and I would call those geographies for that day or for that week. My friends could tell when I was calling New York because I came home on all day and all week I just been talking faster.

:: 04:09:18

Speaker 1

I've been mirroring people. I increase the pace and the speed deliberately to mirror my audience. Slower does typically signal confidence actually can come across condescending. So find the right balance for you. Be intentional with it. And to the degree that you can try to mirror the person or the prospect that you're talking to. Now, the third thing we're going to talk about is emphasis.

:: 04:29:03

Speaker 1

What words you emphasize in a sentence can dramatically change the meaning of it. Alex Ramsey actually uses the sentence. I didn't say he beat his wife, because you can say I didn't say he beat his wife. I didn't say that he beat his wife. I didn't say that he beat his wife. I didn't say that he beat his wife.

:: 04:49:00

Speaker 1

I didn't say that he beat his wife. I didn't say that he beat his wife. What I emphasize in the sentence changes the meaning of the sentence. It changes what you as a listener hear. So you will look at your talk track. You're going to look at your script or listen to your calls and identify what words should be emphasized.

:: 05:05:28

Speaker 1

And then make sure that you're doing that, that you're conveying the message that you want your prospect to actually receive. Now the fourth thing is inflection. Now inflection takes into account a little bit of pitch, but it's more so around how you in the sentence is going to change the actual sentence. You're going to that meeting, you're going to that meeting.

:: 05:23:26

Speaker 1

Now the first is obviously a statement. The second is obviously a question, but I can't tell you how many times I've listened to sales calls. And right when it gets to the price point, right when it gets to the close, it goes up like instantly the pitch and everything goes up and it actually changes what should be a sentence into what's almost a question.

:: 05:41:18

Speaker 1

Now, when you do that, you're giving up control of the call. You're actually taking something where you're trying to lead them with a statement, and you're turning it into a question and handing over control. The other thing that I've seen to do is signal, whatever you're talking about is negotiable because you quote a price or you quote a package and you do it with the wrong inflection at the end, which means instead of me telling you what the price is, or me telling you what package I'm offering you, I'm actually asking if this price is okay, or I'm asking you if this is a package that you'll buy.

:: 06:06:21

Speaker 1

You get to a part that's supposed to be where you say, this is it, and you say, this is it. You've potentially cost in yourself big time. So inflection is another thing that you want to be really intentional about. Now the fifth thing is volume or volume matters and volume can be adjusted throughout your sales call based on different things.

:: 06:24:20

Speaker 1

Now if you're talking really low, that can actually sometimes pull people in, like pull people in so that they're starting to listen to you. But if you use it at the wrong time, it can also sound weak. It can also sound like you're not sure of yourself. So you want to be sure around inflection points or impact points in the call.

:: 06:41:29

Speaker 1

You're increasing your volume so that you sound more certain, that you sound more confident, and volume has the potential to actually increase the energy in the room. If you're talking loud and you increase the volume, you can increase the energy of a room. Have you ever seen a public speaker step up and then they talk. Really? They don't talk low, and then they're followed by somebody who just crushed it.

:: 06:59:15

Speaker 1

And they're excited and they've got the volume up. And you can feel the energy volume has the potential to do that. You don't want to yell the entire time that you're giving a presentation and overwhelm people with your volume and your energy and everything else. You want to be sure that you're lowering it and being strategic and increasing it to say, I got you a deal.

:: 07:16:29

Speaker 1

The sixth thing is pauses, pauses, kind of like volume caused people to perk up. If I pause at weird times, it screws up the pace of the call too. So don't pause at all the wrong times, but pauses at really important parts of the call. Allow them to digest something, like when you're going through a lot of information, perhaps you've gone through like an entire proposal or something like that.

:: 07:44:26

Speaker 1

You want to pause at key moments to give them a chance to digest what you just said. This is going to save you 30% or $3.5 million a year. I want that to set in. I don't want to constantly talks that you're drinking through a firehose and each individual bit and piece, you kind of process as it goes through, but you collectively, it never really resonates because you're too overwhelmed to like all the information.

:: 08:07:09

Speaker 1

So know the points of your presentation where you are going to have strategic pauses, and make sure that the message was heard the first couple times you do this might feel awkward. It's only awkward to you, right? As long as you're doing it at the right time. When you're doing it intentionally, you're doing it deliberately. It won't be weird.

:: 08:24:02

Speaker 1

The seventh thing is just tone of emotion. And what I mean by that is, and different parts of a sales process, you're going to want to convey a different emotion. What I'm doing discovery, for example, and I'm talking about the pain points, I'm talking about the frustrations, or I'm talking about the mistakes that they're perhaps making. Then what I want to do is ensure that there's some empathy that's being conveyed.

:: 08:44:02

Speaker 1

And I'm gonna do that by oh, okay. Like for example, if I'm doing discovery and they're talking about the pain points, they're talking about their frustrations, then the tone of emotion that I'm going to use is going to be more empathetic. On the other hand, when we get to objections, then what I'm going to do is convey a tone of emotion that is just compose like I'm not going to get overly emotional.

:: 09:03:27

Speaker 1

I'm not going to get upset. I'm not going to get offended. And when I'm actually excited about a deal or a package or something that I've put together for someone, and I know that it is going to solve their problem, I'm confident this is the transformation that you want, and I'm confident I'm absolutely certain that we can deliver it.

:: 09:19:24

Speaker 1

I want to convey that tone of emotion so that they feel it. I want to project that. And this is what separates really polished sales professionals and how they're presenting and how they're closing deals and how much trust they built and how much rapport they built. It's being able to master the tone of emotion throughout the entire sales process.

:: 09:36:26

Speaker 1

Now, if you've got an hour long sales call, it's going to be different than if you've got a 45 second pitch. But it still matters, because even if it's a very short call, it's like an outbound SDR appointment setting call. You can't come across as frustrating. You can't let the emotion of the last seven people that hung up on you.

:: 09:52:25

Speaker 1

This the only call this person is getting from you today. So are you conveying the tone and the emotion that you want. This new person who's never talked to you before to receive. And this is the same whether you were running an hour long sales proposal call or a 92nd pitch as an outbound appointment setter. So there you have it.

:: 10:09:26

Speaker 1

The seven elements of tonality that you've got to master in sales pitch, pacing, emphasis, inflection, volume, pauses, and overall tone of emotion. The other seven things you'll take full control of your sales calls and get more deals. I promise you, if this has been helpful, then feel free to. Just kidding. Feel free to subscribe to the channel for more business and sales tips.

:: 10:33:08

Speaker 1

Audios.