{"id":10374,"date":"2023-05-09T14:23:43","date_gmt":"2023-05-09T14:23:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/?p=10374"},"modified":"2023-05-09T14:23:43","modified_gmt":"2023-05-09T14:23:43","slug":"improv-in-sales-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/improv-in-sales-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Improv in Sales"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Whose Line is it Anyway?<\/em> and a sales meeting may not seem to have much in common. However, at this point in my life, I have done a fair amount of both. There are certain aspects of each that feel exactly the same. One of the improv groups that I run is called <em>Scriptless in Seattle<\/em>. The name, other than alluding to a 90s rom com with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, suggests that everything the group performs everthing without a script. All the scenes and sketches and songs are written right in front of the audience. No where is there a set of lines or characters written down that we perform our scenes from. But, the longer I have done this, the more I have realized that there <em>is<\/em> a script of sorts. It is not printed in ink or labored over by some stuffy playwrite in a corner coffee shop on a rainy day. It is right in front of you. Improvised comedian and regular on <em>Whose Line<\/em>, Colin Mochrie, says that your resources is the performer you&#8217;re on stage with. The best ideas come from reacting to them. The more I&#8217;ve learned to treat those on stage around me like a <em>de facto<\/em> &#8220;script,&#8221; the better I have gotten. The same principle is true in sales conversations. If you go into a conversation with a planned set of points you want to hit or a list of features and benefits you want to enumerate, you are missing the mark. The best sales conversations I&#8217;ve ever had have come from ideas posed by the client, not strategies I had drawn up or phrases I had wordsmithed before hand. Sometimes the client says something that gives me an idea for a whole new way of selling it, and a whole new line of questioning to get there. Sometimes clients are looking for certain applications from your product or service that you don&#8217;t normally lead with and may not have even realized you can do. Improv&#8211; and sales&#8211; is listening. It seems like it&#8217;s speaking or telling, but its listening and reacting. That&#8217;s all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Whose Line is it Anyway? and a sales meeting may not seem to have much in common. However, at this point in my life, I have done a fair amount of both. There are certain aspects of each that feel exactly the same. One of the improv groups that I run is called Scriptless in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3115,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3115"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10374"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10374\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10375,"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10374\/revisions\/10375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}