From the Making Conversations Count archive

A Script Isn't a Conversation

What my conversation with John Barrows taught me about sales calls, structure and why the best techniques should eventually become invisible.

TL;DR: John Barrows doesn't particularly enjoy cold calling either. What he enjoys is helping people solve problems, and that's an important distinction. When John joined me on Making Conversations Count, we talked about why scripts have their place but shouldn't become a crutch, how technology can distract salespeople from the human being they're supposed to be talking to, and why genuinely caring about the person at the other end changes the quality of the conversation. Then John shared the conversation that became what he calls his MBA: going back to the man who had fired him and asking what he could learn from it. The lesson underneath both stories is remarkably similar. Structure can help you know what to do, but eventually you have to stop hiding behind the process and have the conversation.

Even John Barrows doesn't love cold calling

There is something rather reassuring about hearing one of the world's best-known sales trainers admit that he doesn't particularly enjoy making cold calls. John Barrows has spent decades selling, training sales teams and helping some very well-known businesses improve the way their people sell. Yet when he joined me on Making Conversations Count, he was very clear about it. He doesn't get a thrill from being rejected, hung up on or told no repeatedly. What he enjoys is the one conversation where he can genuinely help somebody solve a problem or achieve a goal.

That distinction matters because I've spent years training people who believe being good on the telephone requires a particular kind of personality. You have to be extroverted, endlessly confident and somehow immune to rejection. You don't. What you need is a better reason for making the call.

John's approach was to tell somebody that if they gave him five minutes, one of two useful things would happen. They would discover that he could genuinely make a difference and continue the conversation, or they'd discover he couldn't and he'd go away. Either way, his responsibility was to make those five minutes useful to the person who'd given them to him. That's a very different mindset from picking up the telephone thinking, how am I going to convince this person to buy something?

When it works, you stop selling

John described himself as a transparent seller. He didn't enjoy the games, the withholding of information or trying to manoeuvre somebody towards an outcome. He wanted to cut through all of that and ask, essentially, can we just have a conversation here?

When the right person has the right problem and you genuinely believe you can help them, John said something rather lovely happens. You stop feeling as though you're selling. You're having a real conversation, solving a real problem and hopefully making a real difference. At that point, you don't feel as though you're reaching into your bag of sales tactics at all.

That prompted a little disagreement between us, or perhaps more accurately, a useful distinction. I've never particularly liked the language of influence, persuasion, strategies and tactics when they're used to make selling sound like something we do to another person. Why can't we ask an open and honest question? John's answer was that he wished it were that simple. By the time somebody receives your cold call, they've already experienced enough bad selling to be suspicious of you. They don't automatically answer the telephone delighted that a stranger has called and ready to share their problems. Trust has been eroded, and John argued that technique helps us get through those early stages well enough to reach the point where a proper conversation can happen.

And that's an important distinction. Technique shouldn't replace the conversation. It should help you become capable of having one.

A script can have a job without becoming your voice

John has always disliked cold-call scripts. What he does like is structure. That difference is something I've taught for years too, because when somebody is learning telephone sales, there's an enormous amount happening at once. They're trying to understand the product or service, remember the CRM, work out what needs recording and where, listen properly, formulate the next question and hold a conversation with another human being without sounding as though their brain is quietly exploding. Giving somebody structure helps.

John even conceded that scripts can be useful at the beginning. He used the example of training his own trainers. A new trainer might initially need to use John's slides, stories and examples simply because they don't yet have enough experience of their own. But if he returned a few months later and they were still delivering his slides in his way, telling his stories and even using his jokes, he'd be disappointed. The point was to learn the fundamentals and then make them your own.

That's exactly where scripts so often go wrong. Someone else's words might give you somewhere to start, but if you continue parroting them, the person on the other end isn't having a conversation with you. They're having a conversation with the person who wrote the script. And people can hear the difference.

The aim is unconscious competence

John described the journey towards what psychologists call unconscious competence. At the beginning, you don't know what you don't know. Then you become painfully aware of everything you're trying to remember. With practice, you can consciously do it well. Eventually, the skills become embedded enough that you simply do them.

John doesn't consciously think, now I shall deploy technique number seven. He knows how to set the stage for a conversation, manage it, listen, follow up and agree a next step because he's been doing it for decades. The structure hasn't disappeared. It's simply become invisible.

I think that's what good telephone training should ultimately do. I don't want somebody leaving one of my sessions sounding like me. I want them to understand why something works well enough that they can make it sound like themselves. The training wheels should eventually come off.

When the process becomes more important than the person

This is where our conversation became particularly relevant to the way businesses sell now. Technology can make salespeople enormously efficient. CRMs, cadence tools, automation and all the other clever things available to sales teams can help us manage far more activity than we could manually.

But John had a warning. In inexperienced hands, technology can become a crutch. People become so focused on completing the process that they stop focusing on the customer. The human being becomes another telephone number, another email address, another task to complete in the cadence.

John told me about somebody on his team whose results had plateaued. He appeared to be doing all the right things, using the messaging and following the process, but something wasn't translating into better results. John's diagnosis was characteristically direct. Until you genuinely care about the person on the other end of that telephone number or email address, your results are likely to remain mediocre. You have to think about their day, the pressures they're under, how often they're being approached and what might actually matter to them.

Once you stop looking at the technology and start looking at the person as a human being, John said, some pretty impressive things begin to happen. That might be the most important sales technique in the whole episode. Care about the person you're talking to. Properly care.

The dreaded sales demo

John then described one of his least favourite things in sales: the standard demonstration. Everyone has accepted the meeting. It's in the calendar. Yet the salesperson still begins with, "Is this still a good time?"

Then come the opening slides about the company, its history, its background and its impressive logos. The salesperson works methodically through the deck, stopping occasionally to ask, "Does that make sense?" As I pointed out to John, who's going to answer, "No, I'm stupid. I can't follow"?

Then, at the end of the meeting, comes the phrase John really doesn't want to hear: "I just need some time to digest this." His response made me laugh, but he's right. If the customer leaves needing to digest everything you've just told them because they're more confused than when they arrived, you've done a pretty poor job. It was your job to help them digest it during the conversation.

That's what happens when we become so focused on delivering our process that we forget to notice what's happening to the other person. The presentation was completed. Every slide was shown. Every box was ticked. And the conversation failed.

We were already talking about the 4R Formula

Listening back to this episode now, there's another reason it belongs in this archive. The thinking that became part of my work today was already there. During the episode I talked about my 4R Formula, finding the right people, for the right reason, at the right time and tracking the results. I also talked about giving people enough structure to have good conversations without turning them into parrots or robots.

The terminology and the way I apply it have developed over the years, but the principle hasn't changed very much. Process should help us make better decisions about who we're talking to and why. It shouldn't make the conversation less human when we get there. And then John gave me a story that took that idea somewhere I wasn't expecting.

The time John said what he was supposed to say

Before JB Sales, John had been part of a startup that was acquired by Staples. The company was young. The leadership team was young. None of them had been through an acquisition before, so they brought in a consultant to prepare them for interviews with the incoming Staples executives. They were told the sorts of questions they'd be asked and, importantly, the answers they should give.

John was a minority shareholder. He didn't want to jeopardise the acquisition. So he followed the advice. When he was interviewed by senior Staples executive Jay Baitler, John gave him the company line. The acquisition was going to be fantastic. Everything was positive. Except that wasn't what John really thought. Inside, he was wondering whether Staples was going to chew up the business, spit it out and get rid of everyone six months later.

And John Barrows, by his own admission, is a terrible liar. Jay could tell. He came away from the interview with a negative impression of John, even telling John's CEO that of all the leadership team, John was the one he was concerned about. There's an irony in that which isn't lost on me. The man who teaches salespeople not to hide behind scripts had followed somebody else's approved script. And it stopped the other person seeing who he really was.

A year later, John was fired

John stayed after the acquisition, but he admits Jay had been right about some things. John wasn't naturally suited to a large corporate structure. He didn't enjoy politics and he didn't have much of a filter. About a year later, he was effectively fired.

After taking a couple of weeks to process what had happened, John did something that changed the way he would make decisions for the rest of his career. He contacted Jay. The man he'd been afraid of. The man who'd had concerns about him from their first meeting. The man at the top of the organisation that had just fired him. And John asked if he could have some time in his diary. Not to argue about what had happened. To learn from it.

When John arrived, Jay welcomed him in and told him something extraordinary: the fact John had reached out after everything that had happened told him more about John's character than he'd learned during the entire year they'd worked together. John had ten questions. Jay agreed to answer them candidly.

"Would you have had this conversation with me then?"

One of John's questions was whether Jay would have been willing to have this kind of conversation while John was still working for him. Jay said yes. Why wouldn't he have been? John explained that he'd been under the impression he wasn't allowed to approach him directly.

Then Jay asked John a question. What's the risk? John thought the answer was obvious. He could have been fired. He had a family. Employees relied on him. Going over people's heads to approach Jay directly felt enormously risky.

Jay asked him to imagine what would have happened if he'd done it. In the first scenario, John approached Jay and the meeting was awful. Jay reacted badly, reported him and made his life miserable. Would John have wanted to continue working for him after that? Probably not. Then John could have made the decision to leave on his own terms.

In the second scenario, John approached Jay and they had exactly the kind of open conversation they were having now. Could the previous year have been easier? Could they have done some good work together? Absolutely. So Jay asked him again: what's the risk?

John calls that conversation his MBA

That question changed the way John made decisions. Instead of allowing an imagined risk to stop him, he started asking what the genuine worst-case scenario was and whether he could live with it.

He even applied it directly to sales. If you need to go over somebody's head to reach the decision-maker, what's the worst thing that can happen? You might lose the deal. If you're prepared to lose it, perhaps you make the approach. If you aren't, find another strategy. The point isn't to become reckless. It's to understand the risk rather than being ruled by an assumption about it. John told me that conversation was basically his MBA. And then the story came full circle.

The man who fired him became his reference

Later, John had an opportunity to work for Jack Welch as part of the former GE CEO's online MBA programme. During the interview process, he was asked for references. John gave them Jay. The man who'd fired him.

When Jack Welch called Jay to ask about John, Jay's response was unequivocal: "If you don't hire John Barrows, you're an idiot." John got the opportunity.

Think about the chain of events there. An uncomfortable acquisition interview created a poor impression. A difficult year ended with John losing his job. Instead of leaving the relationship there, he went back and asked for an honest conversation about what had happened. That conversation gave him a lesson he carried throughout his career and transformed the man who'd fired him into somebody willing to advocate for him. That's quite a return on one uncomfortable conversation.

Why this conversation still counts

When I revisited this episode, I thought the obvious connection to my work today would be scripts. And it is there. I still don't want salespeople sounding like cardboard cut-outs of whoever trained them. I want them to understand the structure of a good conversation well enough to listen, respond and sound like themselves.

But John's story adds something bigger. In both parts of the episode, somebody is hiding behind something. A salesperson hides behind a script. A rep hides behind technology. A presenter hides behind the deck. A young John Barrows hides behind the company line because he's been told what he's supposed to say. Later, he hides behind an assumption that the senior executive wouldn't talk to him. Every time, the thing standing between two people is the thing preventing the better conversation from happening. And I think that's the lesson worth keeping.

We need process. We need training. We need technology. We need structure. But none of them should become somewhere to hide. Eventually, you have to talk to the person.

The Difference Between a Script and a Conversation

This conversation connects directly to Konpasu Paper No. 005: The Difference Between a Script and a Conversation. A script gives you words. A structure gives you somewhere to go. Good training helps you understand the purpose behind the structure, practise it until it becomes natural and then stop thinking about it quite so much.

Because the objective isn't perfect adherence to the script. It's to become competent enough that you can give your attention to the person in front of you. That's when the questions become better, the listening improves and the conversation starts responding to what's actually happening rather than what somebody predicted might happen when they wrote the script six months ago.