Can small talk make you money?

If you know the right kind
 
My 86-year-old father has been on a tear lately. He walks up to strangers in the supermarket and tells them, “I’m getting cremated next week!” When they drop their jaws in horror, he proudly serves up the punchline: “I’m thinking outside the box!”
 
It’s often been suggested to open a talk, a meeting, or a conversation with a joke. But not that one, for god’s sakes.
 
Still, it’s a convenient segue to the topic of this article: Small talk. At its worst, it’s an eye-glazing ritual rife with insincerity. At its best, it’s an astonishingly powerful barrier-breaker and business-builder, when you employ it properly with your clients.
 
So what is it?
 
This is interesting: Looking up “small talk” in my dictionary app just crashed it. So there’s clearly a negative bias at play here.
 
Relaunching the app gives us helpful phrases such as “polite conversation” and “unimportant.” So it sure seems that it’s useless, perhaps an archaic holdover from more formal and less time-constrained times.
 
But appearances can be deceiving.
 
The wrong stuff
 
You probably don’t need to read a lot here about small talk that doesn’t work; you’ve surely endured enough of it yourself. But let’s examine that. Why did the small talk put you off? If someone was spouting about their grandkids or the weather or traffic, it was probably boring. If they were taking a political slant, there’s a good chance they became offensive.
 
Boring. Offensive. Gee. What not to be to your client.
 
See where this is going?
 
A counterintuitive approach
 
Well, you could certainly flip the above negatives on their head and draw the conclusion that your small talk—if any—should be interesting yet inoffensive. But that will only get you less-boring, less-offensive small talk. If the point here is to break down barriers and build up business, you’ll have to do more than that.
 
Think about it. What would you like your client to do, at the very outset of the conversation? What kind of mindframe do you want them to be in? Regarded in that light, the challenge is different, and far more intriguing. Not to mention fun, if you’re the puzzle-solving type.
 
“I want them lubed up to hand me more business!” you might say. Fine. But would you ever open a conversation with a client with words to that effect? Of course not.
 
Enter your small talk.
 
The magician David Blaine once threw a deck of cards at a store window from the sidewalk. And the card he’d predicted to appear did just that… stuck to the inside of the store window! It’s a great trick and makes you wonder “How did he do that?” But if you give it more than 30 seconds’ worth of thought, you realize: “He’d prepped that outcome in advance.”
 
Ta-da! The point here is that ideal small talk is much bigger than it appears. If you’re walking into that meeting or onto that call, you already know what’s on the agenda. And you also know where you’d like to steer that conversation, opportunity-wise, before it ends. But we’ll bet you’d never considered taking a David Blaine-like approach to something as seemingly banal as small talk.
 
Stuff the rabbit into the hat
 
Now that you surely see the strategy for this endeavor, all that’s left is the tactical execution. This generally isn’t hard. Scour your previous-meeting notes for questions that went unanswered, for little opportunistic openings that never quite yielded to your touch. Then look through the morning’s news. Do a Google News search for any of the topics of interest to your client. See what crops up. Jot yourself a note or two, and you’re armed.
 
Your resulting small-talk/opener can go something like this: “Hey, did you see that story about that possible merger we’d talked about last week?” Simple as that. However the client responds—yes or no—you’re in control of the conversation, and are free to steer it that way during the ensuing meeting or call.
 
Note that that fictitious opener might not feel like classic “small talk,” but that’s okay. Note that 1) it’s probably not on the actual agenda for the meeting or call (since it covers territory you’d prefer to explore), and 2) it’s a lot more suitable to your purposes than, say, “Hey, my kid just threw up alphabet soup and you could still read the letters.”
 
Taboo or not taboo?
 
You’ve always heard that you should avoid the topics of religion and politics in polite conversation. We’ll agree with the former. But we’ll leave you with some unexpected opinions on the latter.
 
On the surface, we couldn’t agree more. We’ve seen clients of ours post rabidly political rants on supposedly-business-limited sites like LinkedIn, and it always makes us cringe. For every person you’ll win over, you’ll insult at least one more. It’s not worth the fallout. And you’ll notice that we practice what we preach here at Copel Communications. You won’t see anything that tips the scales in either direction; indeed, we’re often called upon to take up the mantle of varying causes in a professional capacity, and we do just that.
 
But let’s get back to small talk. You can sometimes plumb your client with an innocent-sounding query which gets them to open up, big-time, in your favor. Consider something like this, if the context would work for you: “I hear that the Trump administration is considering scaling back on XXXX/spending more on XXXX…” That’s all you need say. You never took a side. But your client may well not walk so fine a line. Fine. Let them spout. And take notes! It could serve you well.
 
Do you have small-talk tips or war stories to share? Feel free to respond to this post or contact us and let’s chat.

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