This podcast episode elucidates the significance of the mirroring technique in enhancing communication with clients in the HVAC sales domain. We delve into the psychological foundations of this method, demonstrating that by simply restating the last few words spoken by a client, we can foster a deeper connection and encourage them to disclose more information. This technique serves to alleviate the apprehensions clients may harbor regarding sales interactions, as it creates an environment of understanding and rapport. Furthermore, we provide empirical evidence from a study involving waitstaff to illustrate its efficacy in generating trust and increasing customer satisfaction. Ultimately, we emphasize that mastering this approach can significantly streamline the sales process while simultaneously enhancing client relationships.

Here we deep dive into a simple, easy to implement method to flip the switch in a customers brain from stranger to immediate trust. It is so simple yet one of the most powerful tools in your toolbox. Are you tired of hearing ‘I want to think about it’? Then this is a technique you must learn.

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The podcast delves into the nuances of residential HVAC sales, emphasizing the importance of building a reputation as an expert influencer within the market. Our discussion centers around the significance of understanding customers' needs and streamlining operational efficiencies to enhance sales performance while simultaneously reducing workload. This dual focus not only facilitates increased sales but also ensures that professionals remain at the forefront of customers' minds when HVAC solutions are required. Through insights gleaned from leading industry minds, listeners are equipped with invaluable skills and techniques designed to navigate the complexities of the sales process, fostering a deeper connection with clients and ultimately enhancing professional success.

Welcome to Close it now, an H Vac sales training podcast with Sam Wakefield.

Here we'll build your reputation in residential H Vac sales to be the expert influencer in your market.

You'll get insight into the top minds in the industry as they share their skills and hacks to help you on your journey.

This podcast isn't just about selling more.

It's about understanding your customers needs and building efficiencies behind the scenes so you can sell more but work less while being top of mind when people think H Vac.

Now let's get started with your host of the Close it now podcast.

This is Sam Wakefield.

Yo, yo, yo.

Welcome back to drivetime University.

This is the Close it now podcast.

Sam Wakefield here.

Today we are going to talk about Jedi mind tricks.

These are not the droids you seek, right?

So we're going to dive deeper into a technique that will open up when you come across the client that it seems like they're really holding their cards close to their chest.

You know, you're going through your investigation process, you've got your questionnaire out and you're asking them the questions and it's like the answers are super short.

They're giving you yes and no answers to open ended questions, which is bizarre, but people do it.

It's like, I'm here to help you.

You called me to come help you and now I'm asking you questions about what your experience is here in the house.

You can open up and tell me that because I can't help you fix it otherwise.

It's like they think that we're trying to drag this information out of them.

Who knows why?

Because the more information that they give us, the more stuff we're going to try to sell them, which is exact truth.

However, that's not the way to go about not paying a bigger price.

The way to go about it is choosing a less expensive system.

But they don't get that what people think is whatever information we try to get from them, we're going to use against them.

And that is, you know, it's completely understandable because traditional sales technique and sales strategy and you know, the used car salesman or even especially, you know, there's some shysters in the H Vac world, man, and there's some people out there that make the sale no matter what to close the deal and that lie, cheat and steal to just do it.

It's completely horrible.

And it gives the rest of us a black eye when we're trying to serve and sell from a very servant type of a focus and consultant type of a focus.

But this is a really fantastic technique to overcome it.

And I want to set the context of this training or this episod with a really cool study that I just heard about.

So there was a psychologist that was comparing the difference in.

So it's called mirroring is what we're talking about, but not exact.

And in this context, has nothing to do with tone of voice, has nothing to do with body language, has nothing to do with all of that other stuff that we've talked about in the past.

This has everything to do with just words.

In fact, it's so simple, it's almost laughable.

But there was a psychologist that wanted to study the difference in positive affirmation and mirroring and find out which one was more effective, which one people connect to.

They feel that even subconsciously, completely unintentional.

So what's the best place to study this?

With waiters at restaurants, of course.

So they had of their study group, they had half the waiters use positive affirmation when they were taking people's orders.

Oh, great.

Good choice.

Awesome, man.

That's fantastic.

Boy, that's my favorite.

I'm glad you picked that.

That type of positive affirmation throughout the visit.

And then the other group, they had them all.

They did.

The only difference was they didn't do that.

They just read the customer's order back to them, just repeat it back to them exactly the way they said it.

And the results were astounding.

The group would, of course, what we call mirroring that, read the order back to the customer.

They got a 70% bigger tip on average than the group that used positive affirmation with, oh, great choice.

That's awesome.

One of my favorites.

All of that 70% blew my mind.

Can you imagine that?

Strictly that.

And this was the same.

Some of the same people, they didn't change anything.

They just had a handful of days they did one thing, a handful of the days they did the other and got a 70% bigger tip because they used mirroring.

So people buy from people they know like and trust, and they like people like themselves.

And what's the quickest way?

Subconsciously, this is like reaching in and flipping this switch to activate that subconsciously in the brain to be like, oh, I like this person because they're saying the same things back to me that I said.

And that's you.

It's like they want to hear.

People don't really want to hear your opinion.

They want to hear their opinion come out of your mouth.

And that's exactly what this does.

And it's awesome.

And all it is is repeating back the one to three key words, the last three words that this person said or the one to three really key critical words, just repeating it back to them, staying calm, just nice and co repeat it back to them.

So this is the way to unlock the, to really uncover a lot of things.

And you know, we've talked in the past about using those clarifying questions of how so tell me more.

This is even better.

People will start to literally vomit information all over you the second you start using this mirroring technique.

So let's have an example.

What do you say?

Raise your hand if you'd like to have an example.

So you're asking about temperature in a house, right?

So you're sitting down at your visit and the question sounds something like, okay, well when some rooms are cool, are there other rooms in the house that are warmer than the rest?

Or which rooms in the house are warmer than the rest?

And they're like, yeah, not really.

And so you just repeat back not really.

And it forces.

Try this with anybody in any type of conversation and they cannot resist.

But to tell you more information, this works with your partner, this works with your kids, this works with somebody at work that you like or don't like.

It literally works with every single person.

Try this the next time you get to a family meal and sit down at the table and you just want to practice, ask somebody, would you pass this?

You know, somebody asks, hey, would you pass the salt?

Be like the salt and there's going to be a string of words.

It's not just gets assault, it's so powerful because just repeating back the last word or handful of words will completely unlock that client that is being really closed.

Their arms are folded, they're sitting there cross legged and you know, they're not wanting to give up much information in the visit.

And it doesn't have to just be in the initial investigation phase.

It could be, you know, when you're talking about how many people live in the house, the temperatures.

This is especially effective when it gets towards the end of the presentation and you start asking closing questions and especially to get them to clarify on what is holding them back and what is keeping them from moving forward right now, just restate it back to them.

You don't even have to really use a lot of inflection.

But there's two different ways that you can use it for your tonality and your tone of voice.

In fact, I'm going to do an entire episode on different types of tonality and different types of tone of voice and what each one is used for and how to accomplish certain things with each tone of voice.

Because that's really, really fun psychology to study about that.

But for now, there's really two ways that you want to use this type of question.

And by restating this back, you're not asking the question necessarily, but you are, you're restating back words.

If you go with your tonality, if you restate it back like and your voice rises, that is in the, that turns it into a question.

Whatever you say when your voice rises, it makes it a question.

See here that it makes it a question.

And so it sounds like a question.

Or if you go down with your voice, it's kind of like it makes it a question.

That was just a statement.

That's how to use the.

Take the exact same words and make it a question.

So it's like very definite.

And especially when somebody asks you for things that you don't do or your company doesn't do or they're trying the nibble on you, trying to get free stuff out of your package or that kind of thing.

You could just give them the.

No, that's.

No, I'm sorry, that's something we don't do.

And when you take your voice down that way, it's very definite and you don't offer anything else.

They know that that's a non negotiable and so they won't ask about that.

It's a very powerful way to control that type of a conversation, especially if it's a non negotiable.

So the nibble I'm kind of bouncing around today because these are all kind of intertwined techniques and just concepts that work together.

The nibble is that if you've ever sat down at the.

When you're buying a new car and right before your pen hits the paper, say, oh, that includes a free tank.

A full, full tank of gas too, right?

That's the nibble.

That very last second question to get that last little each, that last little bit out of the person selling.

And so people will try that with you all the time.

And if it's something you want to do, that's fine, but to avoid the nibble.

And probably one of the most common ones I hear is, oh, that includes a year's worth of free filters.

Right.

And so just, you know, my respons well and if I've got plenty of room in the project, sometimes I include it if I like them.

If they've really not been fun to work with, usually it's much more of a no, that's something we don't do.

Or another way to say that would be like, no, but I can give you the link to the best place online to buy them at a discount.

That's a good way to handle that one to buy it at a discount but, but more importantly, use your tone of voice, deflect it down.

And so they get this definite statement of oh, okay, that's really non negotiable for them.

But going back to mirroring to open people up, it's just so powerful to restate those final two or three words.

Especially if there's like really critical words that they're asking about and it's just mind boggling how quickly someone will open up.

And also in this process, what you'll find is this the way to shortcut the silly rapport game that people think they have to spend 20 or 30 minutes on.

You just ask the right questions and then in that questioning process, when you start restating back and just make it a habit, even if they're not somebody who's withholding information, but just make it a habit to do this in your conversation with the people with your clients, you're going to find that the rapport goes up like dramatically every single time because it's a rapport building technique without having to spend like these ridiculous amount of time talking about the weather and talking about the, you know, their bull mastiff and talking about the golf game they just played.

You know, let them talk about themself but you don't have to, you don't have to waste time because goodness knows we don't have enough time in the day to hit all the appoint and spend 30 minutes building rapport at each visit.

I mean if you're like us, there's, you know, there's some days you'll hit, you know, three, four, five, six, seven, eight calls in a day and you don't have if every, if you hit six, excuse me, six calls and you spent 30 minutes of needless rapport building each one, that's three full hours in the day that was really wasted because they know you're not there to be their friend, you're there to be friendly and be professional.

And so to accomplish this and this is a much more effective way to build rapport while you're getting the information from them that you need to work together to build the proposal that is going to work for them.

Just this mirroring technique is just Restating those words.

So, like, right now it'd be like those words.

Restating those words.

Those words.

Yeah.

So the words that I'm talking about, see how this works?

It doesn't matter what it is.

You literally can say the last one to three words of the last thing they just said and they will expound on it.

And so, I mean, just even fun stuff, like, here's a fun example.

And so we're gonna go back to the dog real quick.

Like, oh, what's your dog's name?

Oh, the dog's name is Jupiter.

Jupiter.

And then they'll tell you why they named the dog that.

And it's just super, super powerful.

And now it's one of those techniques that there's no really no practice involved and something you can implement immediate immediately and see immediately actionable results.

Because there's a lot of concepts that I love to talk about that it's literally just the matter of once you recognize something and you make the change in your brain that it instantly goes into effect and there's no learning curve involved.

And this is one of those that is super powerful.

So, yeah, that's the message for today.

It's the podcast.

It's a little bit shorter than usual, but it's a very.

And.

And rightly so.

It's very quick, powerful, easy technique to implement that's going to change everything in your rapport building.

It's going to change everything in your investigation process.

It's going to change day and night, the difference with all of that.

And then once it gets close to the end when you're asking them for the sale and they're like, and this is just a really fantastic way to handle that.

I want to think about it.

To get them expound more.

Say, you know, Mr.

They'll tell me, sam, you know, this, this project sounds great.

You know, we really like you and your company.

You know, we're just probably gonna.

We're gonna have to think about it.

And then at that point, you just be like, think about it and then be quiet.

And that's the key with any of these.

Anywhere you use this is when you restate those words.

You have to be quiet and listen.

Listening is not passive sport.

Listening is the most important and the most active thing that you could possibly do when you're visiting with a homeowner.

So we're going to talk.

I'm going to do an episode about active listening and what that really means with what we do.

But so, yeah, use that to overcome.

I want to think about it.

Technique, think about it and then shut up and let them tell you which thing that what part of it they're thinking about.

And then when you hear that then you can handle whatever comes up.

And so it's a great way to handle it.

But mirroring restate the last two or three words they just said ask it as a question and shut up and listen and they're going to open up the world to you.

So thank you for listening.

I am so glad you've joined us.

This podcast hit in so two days ago.

I love this.

This is July 5th.

Two days ago we hit a thousand list thousand plays on the podcast.

We're in nine countries around the world.

Welcome on board New Zealand.

I'm glad you thanks for listening and this pod, if you got some value from this, share it with somebody.

I was talking to one of our one of our close it now family earlier and she was telling me she implemented one of the techniques in the how to get people to respond when you're being ghosted episode and immediately got a response and then immediately got as people that go through for a couple weeks immediately got a response and also they immediately filled out their financing information.

So way to go.

I was super stoked to hear about that.

So these techniques work, guys.

These are just skills.

It's not that they're.

It's no mystery anymore how to be a top end closer in the H Vac industry.

It's something that every single one of you can do.

You just have to believe that you can and then start using the right words in order to get results you've never had.

Sometimes you have to use words you've never said.

You have to do things you've never done to get different results and this is exactly how to do that.

So thanks for listening.

I am excited to see all of the places.

I've got some humongous plans for this podcast and for the Join the Close It Now Facebook group.

Join the community.

Join the conversation.

Because these this conversation keeps going.

This is ongoing conversation.

So yeah, thanks for listening and I will talk to you guys again soon.

Thanks for listening to Close it now with Sam Wakefield.

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