2/28/2025-Getting Ned-No-Talker to talk

Getting your customer to talk in a meeting starts well before the meeting. It’s what you do to prep your customer that determines how much they’ll participate.

You’re excited as heck to meet with that hard-to-nail-down prospect, but in the first two minutes of the meeting, it’s apparent the customer won’t talk.

Your attempt at pleasantries to start the meeting went nowhere. (Uh-oh.)

You move to easy, open-ended general questions and get nothing answers.

You dash to specific, strategic questions…and even those get shut down. (Gulp.)

The worst thing you can do is show that you’re flustered.

The best thing you can do is to probe smarter.

Practice this script today for the next time you meet with Ned-No-Talker (it works for Zoom meetings too)…

After your customer gives their sixth consecutive response of five words or less, pause for three seconds, put your pen down, look them in the eye, and say calmly, "What do you want to talk about today, Ned?" or "What’s important to you today, Ned?"

If Ned says, "…it’s up to you, it’s your meeting." You reply, "I’ve asked a few questions and haven’t heard much, so honestly, I am not sure why you took the meeting."

What have you got to lose? Seriously?

Getting a tough customer to open up requires building trust, active listening, empathy, and creating a safe and comfortable environment. In other words, the work you put into setting up the meeting will go far on how you unlock your customer’s voice box.

Your odds of getting them to trust you – and talk – improve if you send an agenda well before your meeting date. (They’ve been burned too many times by sellers who have wasted their time.) But hey, they took the meeting, right?

Make your agenda customer-focused, not you-focused. Create a specific and strategic agenda for your meeting to prove that the time spent with you will offer value to them. That means you need to research what that specific person truly cares about. (Backchannel info hunting, anyone?)

While you’re at it, leak a few of the high-quality questions you’ll ask in the meeting ahead of time in your agenda…that’ll signal to the customer that you are prepared and they are expected to contribute to the meeting.

You are equally responsible for what you get from Ned as he is.

The number one reason sellers don’t get what they want from their interactions with buyers is that they don’t prepare their questions before the meeting.

Excelling at asking questions does not happen without committed and focused work. Communications expert Amber Wright can help if you watch her excellent TED Talk.