Contracts lost before learning to keep my mouth shut

In a meeting room somewhere in the Perth CBD, I watched the other person put down their pen. Not a good sign. And yet I didn't stop talking. I started explaining features that weren't even on the slides, and even as their eyes drifted toward the Swan River outside the window, I repeated "just one more thing" at least three times. The contract never came.

At the time, I chalked it up to bad luck. Now I know better. I dug that grave myself.

The moments when you talk too much

After more than 15 years in sales, I started noticing a pattern. The situations where I over-talked had common threads.

When the other person went silent. Silence made me uncomfortable, so I filled the gap with my own voice. I couldn't tell whether the client was thinking or had lost interest, so I'd say whatever came to mind. I'd volunteer a price discount first, or offer unnecessary add-on options. Once, during a meeting for a $12,000 annual contract, the client was quiet for maybe five seconds, and I jumped in with "If the price is a concern, we could break it up quarterly." The client tilted their head and said, "Oh, is that an option?" I later found out they had been planning to go with the annual plan all along.

Loving the product was dangerous too. I collect vintage computers, so my enthusiasm for tech products runs a bit excessive. When that enthusiasm leaked into a sales meeting, I'd find myself excitedly explaining backend architecture the client had never asked about. All they wanted to know was, "Is this easy for our team to use?"

Practising staying quiet

The decision to change didn't happen all at once. It came from something a colleague said over coffee at a café on Hay Street. "You know you talk about three times more than the client in meetings, right?" It was tossed off like a joke, but when I got home and listened back to recordings of recent meetings, it was true.

What I tried wasn't anything grand.

After asking a question, I count to five in my head. It breaks the habit of jumping in with supplementary explanations before the other person answers. At first, five seconds felt like an eternity. Now I use those five seconds to read the other person's expression.

I write down what the client said in my notes, not what I plan to say. When I look at my notes after a meeting, the client's language is right there, and I can use those exact words in the next follow-up. If a client said "efficiency" and I rephrase it as "productivity improvement," there's a subtle disconnect. It sounds like the same thing, but clients recognise their own words.

I cut down the length of my proposals too. I used to send 20-page documents and think I was being "thorough," but the feedback that came back was "hard to read." Now it's three key paragraphs, pricing, and next steps. That's it. If clients are curious, they'll ask. And information clients ask about themselves is remembered far better than information I volunteered first.

I still make mistakes

This isn't a story about becoming perfect. Just last month, I walked into a meeting consciously thinking about active listening techniques, only to lose 20 minutes because the other person brought up board games. They hit my exact weak spot.

What has changed is that I now recognise the days when I talked too much. I used to finish a meeting and fool myself into thinking "that went well today." Now, if I took up more than half the conversation, that wasn't a good meeting.

When I open my laptop at a café in the Perth CBD and write up my meeting notes, the best days are the ones where my notes contain more of the client's sentences than my own.