Elicit particular emotions with sound

Basically, if you make a sound you will elicit an emotional response in any other human being who can hear you. This is a survival instinct we are all programmed with and it works at a basic level - if I shout at you, you will probably recoil and a quite a sophisticated level too - the conclusion of this blog will explain more.

The Eureka moment for every good telephone sales consultant is that they don't have to keep making the same sound, they don't even have to make their own sound. Their power comes from a range of 18 particular sounds that can be blended into millions of minute variations.

In the 18th Century, we developed an ordered Agricultural economy then in the 19th Century, we moved into the towns following the industrial revolution. Then we evolved and experienced the technological revolution and we now do pretty much nothng in the 21st Century based upon our service economy. Shakespeares prediction has come true and we are all finally actors upon a stage. So let us act, let us embrace our humanity and share ourselves thoroughly with each other. Do not restrict yourself to a limited number of sounds. Expand your (sound) vocabulary and begin to relise your power to elicit an emotional response in others.

I have recently started working with a Christchurch, Dorset based supplier of promotional goods. They have a mangament dedicated to happy and fulfilled employees, a comfortable open plan environment, a white board noting daily and monthly targets, strict time/cover management and an excellent computer system to manage the whole process. I was impressed. At first, the management structure seemed to be quite rigidly hierachical but they cleverly mix sales, administration, accounts and the big cheeses together and it works. Their problem is a common one. The sellers are taking a good number of incoming enquiries and partly becasuse of the volume, are simply "taking the orders". There is the occasional flirt with cross selling and upselling but no real rapport and as we all know rapport is what turns a one off sale into a relationship where you become the trusted and preferred supplier.

You do, of course, have to win permission to build rapport and you do this by engaging using an audience specific language but I am going to say it again; it hardly matters what you say, what matters is, how you say it.

My workshop has given the boys and girls at Hotline a few new voices but I am hoping that the coaching I am doing with them over time will introduce them to a whole new world of sounds which will allow them to manage their customers with great ease so that their sales calls can be enjoyed, the customers buy for emotional reasons and come back for more time and time again.

emotions have a particular sound

I am even more convinced that the sound of a sales call really matters and have proved my radical predictions based upon voice mapping to be uncannily accurate.

In a recent workshop, a young lady came up with a new Mantra "get the customer on our side" and we had a good discussion about this. I suggest that a Mantra helps with motivation to call and keep calling and they are usually very seller centric. This was a new approach and one that got us talking about trust and emotion. We can win the trust of a buyer if they believe that we really do care for an outcome that suits them. The important thing is to say it like you mean it. Try saying "I really care about you" and you will find that there are many more ways to make it sound like you don't care than you do.

So we started to consider how emotions sound and fortunately Charles Darwin has started the process with his theory of Prosody. During his extensive study of animals, he concluded that the four core emotions are anger, fear, sadness and surprise. It is easy and very interesting to sound these out but it surprised me that only one quarter could be described as a happy emotion. Do animals have less opportunity to be happy than humans I wondered.

Wikipedia took me to Paul Ekman who has extended this research to humans. His original theory added only two more core emotions to the list - disgust and joy. This improved the ratio of happy emotions slightly but it still only left humans with one third happy emotions. Somehow that didn't feel right.

In the 1990's the list was extended by amusement, contempt, contentment, embarrassment, excitement, guilt, pride, relief, satisfaction, sensory pleasure and shame making 17 emotions in all. Now we can see eight happy emotions and so I will rather cheekily conclude that modern man does have more opportunity to be happy.

Good telephone sales consultants can deliver happiness with a good sales call. We can actually elicit a biochemical reward and that is why our motivation can always be described as true, pure and well meaning.

I know this doesn't make sense "yet" but I often say that "it hardly matters what you say, what matters is how you say it" and one day I may prove this to be true. For now, however, we rely on an audience specific language but I would venture that the way we speak accounts for slightly more than 50% of the overall effect on the potential customer. So what emotion we project is of crucial importance to the buyers experience.

Eric Berne and his theory of transactional analysis seems to be the best model so far but I have adapted his parent to "directive", his adult to "logical" and his child to "passionate" and have added positive, negative, informative and enforcing traits to the adult or logical "way that we sound".

If you make the right sound, the other human being will trust you, allow you to deliver a biochemical reward and the sale will invariably be made happily.

Three brave pioneers of verbal mapping - Sharon

Sharon's results are as follows but my conclusions should be read in accordance with my blog entitled Setting the Verbal Mapping landscape below...

Directive Pace = slow/good

Directive Tone = low/good

Directive Timing = irregular/good

Directive Attonation = down/good

So Sharon scores 100% for Directive, making this her default emotional state.

Logical Pace = fast/not so good
Logical Tone = high/not so good
Logical Timing = regular/not so good
Logical Attonation = up/not so good


and so she scores 25% for Logical


Passionate Pace = medium/not so good
Passionate Tone = high/good
Passionate Timing = irregular/not so good
Passionate Attonation = down/not so good


and 25% for Passionate giving her an overall score of 50%.


I therefore predict that Sharon converts 2.5 calls in every 10 outbound sales calls she makes.

Three brave pioneers of verbal mapping - Bill

Bill's results are as follows but my conclusions should be read in accordance with my blog entitled Setting the Verbal Mapping landscape below...

Directive Pace = fast/not so good

Directive Tone = low/good

Directive Timing = irregular/good

Directive Attonation = up/not so good

So Bill scores 50% for Directive.

Logical Pace = medium/good

Logical Tone = flat/good

Logical Timing = regular/good

Logical Attonation = flat/good

and so he scores 100% for Logical making this his default emotional state.

Passionate Pace = slow/not so good

Passioante Tone = low/not so good

Passionate Timing = rapid/good

Passioante Attonation = down/not so good

and 25% for Passionate giving him an overall score of 58%

I therefore predict that Bill converts 2.36 in every outbound sales call he makes.

Three brave pioneers of verbal mapping - Judy

Judy's results are as follows but my conclusions should be read in accordance with my blog entitled Setting the Verbal Mapping Landscape below...

Directive Pace = slow/good

Directive Tone = low/good

Directive Timing = irregular/good

Directive Attonation = down/good

So Judy scores 100% for Directive making this her default emotional state.

Logical Pace = fast/not so good

Logical Tone = flat/good

Logical Timing = regular/good

Logical Attonation = up/not so good

and so she scores 50% for Logical

Passionate Pace = medium/not so good

Passionate Tone = high/good

Passionate Timing = rapid/good

Passionate Attonation = down/not so good

and 50% for Passionate giving her an overall score of 67%.

I therefore predict that Judy converts 2.5 calls in every 10 outbound sales calls she makes.

Setting the verbal mapping landscape

A select group of telephone sales professionals have got together on LinkedIn and agreed to investigate the sound of a sales call in order to identify the optimum "sound of success".

We are hoping to find the sound that makes receiving a sales call an enjoyable experience and the process profitable for the caller.

Three pioneers have left a voice message on 01425 240 050 stating the following three phrases and the results can be seen in the diagrams embedded in future posts below...

1. Will you people please stop walking on the grass.

2. We must do this before we start doing that.

3. I am very excited about our trip to the seaside...

I have analysed the results to the best of my ability and think you will be excited by my conclusions but before you make your own conclusions, I would like you to know the background to my proposals.

I have been making sales calls happily and profitably for 23 years. There is nothing I enjoy more than a cold sales call. Engaging with another's emotional well being and identifying what they really want, often well before they have ever done it themselves is a unique joy. As far as I am aware, it's like giving birth, without the pain, so you would be right in thinking that I have found my dream job except on the occasions that I tell others what I do. Picture the scene in a pub on a Friday on Saturday night. There is always a point when couples and groups say hello and swop notes and it doesn't take long for someone to ask me what I do. I could of course make up a story about being a doctor or oil rig diver, impress my fellow revellers and avoid the problem but I am on a mission to prove to the world that telephone sales can be a beautiful thing and I wouldn't have become the man I am today if I hadn't experienced the following reaction a hundred times. "Oh you're one of them" they say, "one of your lot called me last week/month/year. I had the dinner in the oven, Coronation Street on the telly and baby in the bath and this idiot wouldn't take no for an answer". Unusually, in our "profession", we are unable to stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before us but I just see this as a fabulous opportunity to really make a difference. Our assult on the public cannot continue but fortunately a new breed of telephone sales sales consultant is emerging. Men and women who care for the interaction between buyer and seller more than they care for the money. We are wise enough to recognise that making sales calls enjoyable, manageable and sustainable is the best way to generate loyal customers who spend more and do it regularly and the bonus will be that I may be able to hold my head up high in the pub next time.

In the 1950's Eric Berne developed his theory of Transactional Analysis which is everything to human communication and the starting point for our investigation into the sound of success. Essentially, he defined that we have three ego states which I am going to call "attitudes to each other". Once you recognise this, you will find yourself constantly entertained by other people at work, socially and even at home, Transactional Analysis is all around us. The theory advocates that sentences in their raw verbal form are "transactions" and these can either be "accepted" or "crossed". You will recognise the former (a series of accepted transactions) as a "conversation" and the latter as an "argument".

While I am oversimplifying things, we may as well categorise potential customers' requirements as either "patent" which are recognised needs or "latent" which are as yet unrecognised.

You can have a simple conversation comprising accepted transactions with the former and still make the sale but you have to "cross" the transaction at least once if you are to have any chance of making the sale with the latter. Crossing the transaction is achieved by changing ego states but the danger is that when you do this, you start an argument so you have to be prepared to change back to your original ego state or you may be responsible for an "aggressive sales call". If, however, your cross is accepted, you will have made a sale to a customer with latent demand.

Enough of that for now. What I have been working on recently is how these ego states are represented on the phone, what do they sound like?

Eric Berne describes the ego states as Parent, Adult and Child and after a great deal of research during my workshops, we have defined these states as sounding Directive, Logical and Passionate respectively.

These sounds can be further defined in the following four ways...

1. In her book, Body Language at Work, Mary Hartley refers to pace, tone and timing, recognising that the average pace of a conversation is 125 words per minute and on analysis of hundreds of sales calls it is clear that a Directive sound is slower and a Passionate sound is faster.

2. Tone can be compared to the cadence of music. Cadence is labeled as more or less strong or weak, depending on the sense of finality it creates so that Directive has a low tone, Logical has a flat tone and Passionate has a high tone.

3. The famous iambic pentameter describes a particular rhythm and through testing we have established that Directive has irregular timing, Logical has regular timing and Passionate has rapid timing.

As an aside, just to lighten the mood for a minute, D. H. Lawrence points out that a "living rhythm can only be achieved when the artist resists the temptation to maintain a distance between himself and the material" and in effect he is saying that good telephone sales consultants have a natural ability to connect with potential customers but if we can define the science in what we do and I'd say we are close to doing that, we can help others make great sales calls too. Accordingly, I have been testing pace, tone and timing during sales calls but something was missing which brings us to the final point.

4. In his novel, The Return of The Native, Thomas Hardy says that "reticence represents a consciousness of superior communicative power". Wow, that really made me think. What he is saying is that if you distance yourself from your subject, the listener will more readily accept what you say and this distance is represented by an up or down turn at the end of a sentence similar to piano or forte in music. I call this attonation.

So finally, here we are, ready to analyse our brave participants statements. The outcome will be a categorisation of them as a sales call (ice) Breaker, Closer or Opener.

A Breaker will easily get what he/she wants from the call to a potential customer with patent demand which typically amounts to 10% of any target market but may struggle to identify what the potential customer actually wants and therefore miss out on that other 30% of latent demand.

A Closer is what he/she sounds like. They have no trouble crossing the transaction and closing the sale but may struggle to engage with the potential customer and build rapport unless they are working in very logical environments like IT or finance.

The opener will comfortably talk to anyone about anything and is commonly found using Audience Specific Language in telephone sales. The downside is that they are often unwilling to cross a transaction and close the sale.

In truth, we are all a combination of these three categories and you will see what strengths each of our participants have in a percentage measure which may define a clear "default emotional state" or more likely a complex "emotional personality" that can be refined to achieve the "sound of success".