Know Your Lines, Part 1

The curtain rises: a customer comes through your door. This is your cue. You have a line. What is it? Seriously, what’s the line? You do have one, don’t you?

You are a salesperson, and therefore you are an artist. Sales is a performance art. As such, it is subject to a plot, and you get to pull double duty as both the performer and the writer of this piece.

My son, Kevin, spent a lot of time in college acting in plays. I have a background in theater myself and one day I was having a conversation with him about the rehearsal process. He shared something about line memorization that I thought was incredibly applicable to our sales presentations.

“I wanted to get my lines memorized as soon as I could so that I could focus on the acting more. If I didn’t have my lines memorized by the time the show would come around, my performance would be nothing but standing on stage waiting for my cue, and then simply reciting the line I had just memorized.  That makes for a very wooden and dull performance. But if my fellow actors and I memorized quickly and practiced often early in the process, then we had valuable time to spend honing our technique.“

If you know your go-to sales lines inside and out before the customer comes in, you will have a clearly designed path to the sale. Memorize, and then rehearse.  Practice with a colleague or manager.  Eventually, you’ll find you are able to give a performance to wow any audience.