Colourful Chat

I’m not referring to littering your speech with expletives, but painting pictures with your words.  Eloquence is often bashed out of sales people, with language often ‘dumbed down’, with the accepted wisdom being clever big long words alienate any audience.

I was quite chuffed to be praised by one of my prospects Friday afternoon.  We were talking about how to get what I offer on the table given their internal politics.  He mentioned it would need to go on ‘the runway’ as an idea in a certain way.  I then considered what he’d said for a second, and asked “what do we need to do to make it catch the eye on the catwalk?”.

He laughed at this and replied it was a brilliant line.  All I’d done was make an association in my mind between a runway being something models walk down, rather than planes land on and simply thought I’d be a bit colourful, hoping it would be memorable.

It made me realise rep-speech is often too conservative, which leads to it being too bland.  Without using words that make it sound like you’ve swallowed a thesaurus, think more about painting pictures with your words and phrases.