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I was sitting at my desk last week when my phone rang. I picked it up and said, "This is Ari with Unlock The Game." The woman on the other end of the phone said, "Hi, my name is Julie Jackson, I'm with XYZ company and we are a...and we offer...". As she continued to speak, I stopped her in mid-sentence and said, "Hi, Julie."

There was dead silence on the phone.

I could sense her struggling to react to my spontaneous overture at making personal, genuine contact. She was so locked into her presentation or script that she had no idea how to respond to me.

The idea of just conversing with me in her most natural way was a completely foreign concept.

(She eventually took a deep breath and we transitioned into a very pleasant conversation about the possibility of us being a "fit".)

What has happened to us?

Can't we just strike up a conversation with people we don't know and build a relationship that way?

It's ironic that most of us take it for granted that spontaneous, natural communication is the right way to relate to our friends, spouses, relatives, and others in our personal lives -- but, when it comes to selling, our language becomes, almost robotic.

Why the breakdown?

Because when we make a sales call, we want something. The people we're talking with sense this immediately. They put up their guard. Our hidden agenda and their reaction immediately destroy the trust-building process of communication.

We go into our personal relationships wanting to simply know the other person. But we go into sales situations with agendas and assumptions.

And because we've been conditioned that a sale can happen only if we control the process, we never even consider the possibility that there can be total flexibility in how we communicate and build trust.

Quick self-assessment: When you pick up the phone to make a sales call, what are you hoping will be the outcome?

Let me guess:

• Get information
• Find the decision maker
• Schedule an appointment
• Make a sale

In other words, you want something even before the person you call says "Hello."

It's time to throw out your "selling" language and unlock your natural language.

Here's how:

Be willing to challenge everything you have learned about selling up to this point. If you aren't open to questioning conventional sales thinking, you'll never have a chance to experience selling in a completely different way.

• Replace your goal-oriented agendas with trust-building agendas.
• Learn to enjoy the processing of building a new relationship.
• Build a dialogue.
• Avoid centering the conversation on you and your offerings.
• Enter the conversation without assumptions.
• Trade overconfidence for humility.

Any signs of overconfidence when you first make contact with a potential client will only set off "sales alarms." Humility (not weakness) starts the trust-building process.

Visualize the person you are speaking with as a potential friend rather than a potential client. This will help you to converse rather than "sell."

When you tap into your natural language abilities, it triggers the person you're speaking with to tap into their own natural language as well.

Like you, they will abandon their "business language" and begin communicating with you in their most natural way.

Natural language is the crucial secret to transforming the outdated, ineffective "buyer-seller" role into a trust-based relationship based on open, natural communication.