Transcripts

Jerry Weissman:
Buffer is a paraphrase, and a paraphrase is a very carefully stated restatement of the question, stripping all of the emotion, all of the adjectives, going right down to the nouns and verbs of the key issues.

Jerry Weissman, author of the book, In The Line Of Fire says we all get faced with tough questions from time to time so it's important to know how to do this. So, for example the tough question is…

"Where do you get off charging so darn much for your product when the guy down the street charges half the price? Where do you get off doing that?" Ok, so I buffer and say, "So, you'd like to understand why we priced the product where we have?" Now by doing the buffer I've taken off the "where do you get off", I've taken off; "so much, so high, so low." The key issue is price, why have we priced the product where we've priced it?

So, you restate the tough question as a not so tough question and then you answer it.

What most people do, when they hear the question is they start thinking of the answer? I recommend that when the question comes down the barrel you step on the brakes and instead of thinking of the answer you listen for the key issue, that one word. When the buffer is right, the person who asked the hostile question invariably nods and says, "Yeah, golly, that's what I did ask. "

You can link to Jerry's website from ours, somethingyoushouldknow.net I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.