speaking their language

Posted by JFrias on Jul 21, 2008 in Blog | Comments Off

SELLING POINTS

Ease customers by speaking their language

7/4/2008

By Tom Richard

Hola, me llamo Tòmas. Those four words are all that I can show for my three years of studying Spanish. During those three years, I was wonderful at memorizing information; I studied hard and was able to pull out phrases at exactly the right time. Learning a foreign language was never easy. I certainly did not pick it up as well as others in my class, but I made it through three years with excellent grades.

As I look back on those years, I realize that I was never able to make the leap from memorizing the language to actually speaking it. When I needed to speak in Spanish, I would have to translate things in my head before I spoke. It is impossible to speak a foreign language fluently if you have to do that. This is the main reason I was never able to pick up Spanish.

It sounds strange to say somebody actually thinks in another language, but that is exactly what happens. Those who are able to speak fluently in another language are thinking in a foreign language as well. They see something and, rather than visualizing their native word first, are able to jump right to the alternate word.

Those who are studying a foreign language, and start to pick it up probably experience a moment where things just start to fall into place; an “Aha!” moment when the language is second nature and no longer an academic subject. This is the moment when foreign words flow naturally, and people are able to sustain an intellectual conversation with those who speak the native language.

Just as I never picked up fluent Spanish, many business professionals never make the leap to speaking their customer’s native language. Instead of sustaining an intelligent, fluent conversation, their words come out sounding memorized and regurgitated. To the customer, these rehearsed and canned conversations sound just as foreign and hilarious as I would sound if I tried to speak fluent Spanish.

Any businessperson can memorize things about his or her products, companies or competitors, but few are able to fully digest the meaning behind the words. Few are able to start thinking in the customer’s language. You must be able to see your product and yourself the same way the customer sees you. You must understand how your customers feel about the decision you are asking them to make and truly understand where they stand on an issue.

The only way you are going to be able to make the leap from rote memorization to fluent conversation is when you stop thinking and start feeling, so put the canned, purely academic language on the shelf. Once you make the leap from thinking like a salesperson to thinking like a customer your primary passion and focus will shift from selling to wanting to help others. That is right. You will stop wanting to sell for the sake of selling.

Sometimes your passion will be focused on the customer, and sometimes it will be a passion about what your product can do for others. In either scenario, your leap will be made when you stop memorizing and switch your passion from the desire to sell to a pure desire to serve and help the person with whom you are talking. It is only through embracing and cultivating a passion for the natives that you’ll be able to pick up their language. Once you make that transition and begin to think like the customer and are no longer translating things in your head, everything you see, hear, do and say is in the customer’s native language.

This is when you will be able to speak the same language and, just like anybody who speaks the native tongue, you will be well-received, taken seriously and you will be putting your customers at ease because you will be, literally, speaking their language.