How Goes It?

“How goes it?”  Sounds perfunctory(done merely out of duty; superficial) and ineffectual enough, huh?

I was walking out of a dealership showroom the other day and heard these first words from the owner, with whom I had just been talking, as he approached a gentle-looking man.   Most people would have not noticed one iota, not one bit.  Me?  My ears couldn’t have perked up more.  You see, that one statement fits a pattern amongst top communicators.  The pattern?  It’s also uniquely different that other possible choices he had in the moment.  He could have said, ”good to see you,” ”how are you feeling, today?,” “What d’ya say?,” or simply shook the prospect’s hand.  What I’m trying to say here is that “How goes it?” serves a specific purpose in the context of that interaction, even though it sounds backwoods.

“How goes it?” elicits, draws out, what is on the man’s mind.  If the owner were to have said something else, he wouldn’t know were to direct the conversation.   Saying this this way gives the owner something to match and create rapport around, whether he is consciously aware of it or not.  If the customer says, “Oh, feeling good,” the owner can do any number of things to match this.  The owner could say, “That’s good,” for example, or he could amplify it by saying, “Better than yesterday?”

This is good information, because meeting the prospect where they are before taking them where we want them to go is helpful and profitable. 

In my consulting process, I would explain in more detail the different variations of this, how this approach is different, what it’s different from, how it matches a structure/pattern I’ve seen among top salespeople, the initial response that it elicits, and more ways you can use this to get to the next step of a persuasion process.

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