I still use scripts. They just don't look much like scripts.

I've spent a lot of my career on the telephone, selling, prospecting, account managing, following up and training other people to do all of those things. So I'm not going to tell you scripts are inherently bad. I've used them, written them and trained people who needed them.

But over time, mine became shorter and shorter. Eventually, a script for me was a few bullet points, trigger words or phrases sitting in front of me to remind me what I needed to cover and stop me wandering completely off track. It wasn't there to tell me exactly what to say.

That distinction matters because the problem with a script is that it doesn't follow the way the other person is thinking and speaking. We can't predict what their priorities are, and the moment sticking to the script becomes more important than responding to what they've just told us, we've stopped having a conversation.

Please don't introduce yourself with War and Peace

When I'm training people to have commercial conversations, one of the first things we usually work on is the introduction. How do you introduce yourself without it becoming War and Peace and running out of breath before you've reached the point?

People often try so hard to sound professional that they explain the company, their role, what the business specialises in, how long it's been established and several other things nobody has asked them yet. Meanwhile, the person at the other end is waiting for an opportunity to participate.

Chunking the introduction down changes things. Say enough for somebody to understand who you are and then get to them as quickly as you reasonably can. When you stop concentrating on yourself and ask people about themselves, their answers tend to become longer and more useful. The conversation starts giving you information you couldn't possibly have put into a script beforehand.

That's where the value is.

The most important thing is to sound like yourself. Trying too hard to sound professional can make perfectly capable people sound cumbersome because they're concentrating on a voice they think they're supposed to use rather than the person they're speaking to. Being yourself doesn't mean being unprepared. Good preparation should make it easier to listen because you're not desperately trying to remember a paragraph.

You know what you need to understand. You know what you may need to explain. You have enough structure to keep you on track. Then you can pay attention to the human being in the conversation.

Preparation isn't always about reading the company website

We're often told to research somebody before a sales conversation, and quite rightly. But research doesn't have to mean reading every page of their website and turning up armed with facts about their latest product launch. Sometimes I'm looking for common ground.

My LinkedIn profile tells you I've volunteered with the Scouts. That might open a genuine conversation about children, volunteering or supporting young people if there is a real connection there. You may even spot me posting about my gardening. What sort of gardening? Have I got a lot of ground? What was I doing? Which bits do I enjoy?

If it's something you're genuinely interested in as well, those aren't difficult questions to ask. They don't feel like selling because, at that point, you're not selling. You're talking.

There is an important qualification. I'm not suggesting trawling somebody's LinkedIn profile looking for a personal detail you can manufacture into a clever sales opening. Common ground only works when it's actually common. Otherwise we've simply invented another kind of script.

The point is to give two people somewhere natural to begin. Once people begin talking naturally, it becomes much easier to move towards why you're actually there.

"You're probably wondering why I was calling"

At some point, of course, the conversation needs a reason. I'm not ringing somebody to discuss their runner beans for forty-five minutes and hoping they'll eventually ask whether I sell telephone systems. Rapport isn't an elaborate disguise for avoiding the purpose of the call.

One transition I've used many times is remarkably simple: "You're probably wondering why I was calling..."

Usually, they are.

I might want to introduce a particular product or service, but whether it makes sense to go any further depends on where they are now and what they're already doing. Take a telephone system. If somebody replaced theirs last year, there's a good chance they're committed to a finance agreement for another three years and quite possibly five.

I could still follow my script. I could explain all the features, tell them why our solution is wonderful, overcome objections they haven't actually raised and attempt to secure a meeting. But they've just given me information that changes what kind of conversation makes sense.

Perhaps this isn't the Right Time for that conversation. On the other hand, they might tell me they've recently extended the building and now need additional capacity. Their existing supplier might have gone out of business. Something else might have changed and suddenly there is a relevant reason to keep talking.

The difference isn't my script. It's their situation.

The 4R Formula has to survive contact with another human being

In Paper 004, I introduced Konpasu's 4R Formula: Right People · Right Reason · Right Time · Right Results.

None of the four can be completely predetermined before the conversation starts.

Right People doesn't mean deciding whether somebody is worth talking to according to their likelihood of buying. What they tell me may instead change my understanding of what kind of conversation is right. I might have a perfectly good reason for calling, but I still need to discover whether there's a Right Reason for them to engage. I don't get to declare it the Right Time simply because my CRM told me to call today. And if I've already decided the only acceptable Right Result is a sale or meeting, I may completely miss the useful result the conversation is actually offering.

There's research behind that distinction

Sales researchers have been studying what they call adaptive selling for decades. The terminology is more academic than mine, but the principle is remarkably familiar: a salesperson adjusts their behaviour during an interaction according to what they perceive about the customer, their needs and the situation.

A 2006 meta-analysis by George Franke and Jeong-Eun Park combined findings from 155 samples involving more than 31,000 salespeople. Their analysis found adaptive selling was positively related to self-rated, manager-rated and objective measures of salesperson performance.

More recent research continues to describe adaptive selling in terms of responding to customer needs and adjusting an approach using cues that emerge during the interaction.

That doesn't prove scripts are ineffective. The research wasn't a controlled test of scripted calls against unscripted ones, and I don't think it should be used to make that claim.

What it does support is the principle underneath my experience: the ability to adapt matters. You cannot fully adapt to information you haven't heard yet. And that is precisely the limitation of trying to predetermine an entire conversation.

Sometimes timing announces itself

I once worked on a campaign for a design agency where we'd emailed potential customers. The following morning, I looked at the engagement and started calling the people who had opened the email most.

One of them answered and, when I explained why I was calling, joked that I must have been sitting on their shoulder. They'd just gone back to look at the email again.

That's timing you couldn't manufacture if you tried. At precisely the moment I called, they had a need. There was no useful reason to leave a gap and give that need the opportunity to wander somewhere else because we were already talking.

But catching somebody at the right moment didn't mean launching into a pitch. It gave us stronger ground to qualify what they were thinking, understand the situation and explore the outcome they wanted.

The timing opened the door. The conversation still had to find out what was on the other side.

That's the part a script couldn't know.

A script knows the next question. A conversation notices the answer.

My conversation with sales trainer John Barrows has stayed with me because we were circling around the same distinction years before I started describing it this way.

John wasn't arguing that people shouldn't learn technique or have a process. Quite the opposite. Structure is particularly useful when somebody is learning. But technique has to become something that helps you have the conversation rather than something that replaces it. Once you're concentrating more on executing the process than understanding the person, the process has started getting in the way.

That fits my experience almost perfectly. Good salespeople prepare. They know what they need to understand. They develop questions, practise, learn their products and recognise what matters. But preparation should support responsiveness rather than replace it.

A script can tell you what question comes next. It cannot tell you what the answer means.

It doesn't know that the thing you thought would matter to somebody doesn't matter at all, while something you considered a minor detail has suddenly become central. It doesn't know that what they've just said has made another question far more important than the one you've got written down.

And if I'm genuinely asking questions, I have to accept that I don't know what the answers will be. Otherwise they aren't really questions. They're cues.

Structure should give you freedom

There are good reasons businesses use scripts. They can help somebody new remember important information, make sure essential questions are asked and support consistency. In some environments there are regulatory or procedural things that genuinely have to be said. When somebody is learning, structure can give them confidence.

So this isn't a false choice between scripts and brilliant free-flowing improvisation. That's not how I work and it isn't how I train. It's also why my Commercial Conversation & Sales Training focuses on helping people develop the structure, confidence and judgement to have better conversations rather than simply giving them more words to remember.

The distinction I care about is whether the structure remains in service of the conversation.

If somebody tells you something important and you ignore it because line seven says you're supposed to ask something else, the script has become more important than the customer. If you're concentrating so hard on remembering your next sentence that you don't hear their answer, the same thing has happened. And if you're asking questions simply because they're written down rather than because you care what comes back, you've stopped being curious.

That's why my own scripts became bullet points, trigger words and reminders. Enough structure to stop me losing the thread, but enough space to let the other person change it.

Because sometimes they will. In fact, if the conversation is doing its job, they probably should.

The script isn't the conversation

Perhaps we've spent too much time trying to give salespeople the perfect words for every possible situation.

Openings. Objection handlers. Closing lines. Questions. Pitches.

There is value in practising language. Words matter. But we cannot prepare the perfect response to every situation because there are too many humans involved.

What we can do is prepare people well enough that they don't need to hide behind the words.

Know why you're there. Know what you need to understand. Prepare well enough to recognise relevance. Ask something worth answering. Listen to what comes back. Then decide what makes sense next.

There will even be moments when you ask a perfectly good question and the other person says nothing at all. A rigid script can make that silence feel like a failure or a gap that needs filling. Sometimes it is neither. Sometimes the other person is simply thinking.

We'll come to that next.