Always make them wait. Couples love to talk, young ones especially. We’re not allowed to record them, but there are no laws on amplifying. Our waiting area is designed to project their voices, magnifying their speech and feeding it directly into my earpiece.
It’s important to get a good look at them too. The wife, Morgan, is clearly on edge. She walks around the room, studying every fold in the wall, like a dog sniffing around the perimeter of her yard. Her husband, Thad, sinks into a chair, a pile of pamphlets in his hands. He flips through them, rolling his eyes, tossing them aside. One final pamphlet catches his eye—a list of packages with a detailed breakdown. This wasn’t on the website.
Morgan seems nervous; Thad, angry. This is important to know. Morgan controls their general discourse, but Thad likely has the final say. His tone is rather gruff, insisting. When he speaks, his wife listens. When she speaks, which is often, he barely acknowledges her, refusing to lift his eyes from the pamphlets.
I make them wait another ten minutes before letting them into my office. I’ve gathered all the intel I’m likely to obtain, but the longer they wait, the more the power shifts into my hand. A simple tactic, and a rather understated one at that, but it’s effective. We have the data to prove it.
The couple is much friendlier to me than they were to each other. They shake my hand, accept some coffee, settle into the chairs across the desk from mine. Morgan begins rambling off all the information she’s learned about our process. Some of the statements are posed as questions but, really, she’s just trying to impress how much she knows. It’s clear she’s read a lot into this. I rate her understanding of our procedures in the upper range.
Thad is still focused on the pamphlet in his hand. The details in the pamphlet are a bit different than on the website. This is intentional, though there’s
