Talking to customers

If 80% of communication is non-verbal, how do you get better at selling your product if you don’t talk to people? It feels like in the hype around AI, we all forgot that people communicate in a lot of other ways besides their words. This past week, I got a demo from the founder of a software we are considering for Interact (dub.co) and was pitched on a sugar free peanut sauce at the grocery store by the founder (Wynn’s Kitchen). In both cases, the people doing the pitching had the right thing to say at the right moment in the conversation.

I wasn’t giving any verbal clues about what I was thinking when they said what they said. But they knew from my expressions which objections I might have at that moment. Reading facial cues like this is something you can only learn by talking to people. And honestly I’m underselling the complexity of humans by saying it’s jut facial cues. I’m sure there are a million other non verbal clues they were picking up on.

Most of the time when I talk to business owners who are struggling with growth, the answer is to talk to more customers. They always know the path forward. Even if it takes a while.