Verbal reversals — Kelford Labs Daily

There’s a little verbal maneuver you can use when your prospects bring up a perceived weakness with your position or your model.

Things like, “You’re more expensive than the other people we’ve talked to.”

Or, “You’re new to our industry, how can you understand our business?”

Or, “Your team is smaller than the others we’re exploring.”

Or, “You’re not based in our market, so how can you help us with it?”

The instinct when we hear a question like this is to dodge it, or explain why it’s actually not a problem.

The instinct is to defend, instead of approach.

But in all my years of crisis communication and marketing message design I’ve learned the same lesson, over and over again:

Approach, don’t avoid.

There are few things more compelling, more convincing, more credible than stepping toward a criticism, complaint, or question rather than stepping away from it.

So here’s what you do:

When someone says, “You’re more expensive than your competitors,” you don’t make a vague reference to your quality, years of experience, or ignorance of others’ pricing.

You step toward the question, and say something like, “Oh, absolutely. We made a choice years ago to make sure we could work on one client at a time, instead of having a bunch of overlapping files like you’d have to with lower prices.”

Suddenly, they’re not thinking about your price, they’re thinking about everyone else’s quality and attention.

Or when someone says, “You’re not based in our market, so how could you help us?” you don’t say, “We take a global perspective,” or “We’ll fly over for a visit to your offices,” or some other defensive line.

You say something like, “What’s fun about our work is that most of our clients are outside our market, because they’re looking for something no one else offers. They work with us because we offer something they couldn’t find anywhere else.”

Suddenly, they’re not thinking about your distance, they’re thinking your uniqueness.

The idea is to lean into the criticism or question and explain it as a valuable part of a tradeoff.

A trade you’ve made to be singular, the sole provider of something valuable to your very best clients.

When you do that, the criticism becomes a marker of quality.

The question becomes its own answer:

This is why they should work with you.

Kelford Inc. shows experts the way to always knowing what to say.