I was on a call with a sales coaching client this week, and I was asked about my biggest sales tips. I hit on several of the topics you'd expect, topics I've covered on Your Intermittent Lex at length... But I went deep on the importance of not sounding scripted.

Of course you have key points you want to hit. Of course there are features, qualities, selling points that you want to mention to every new prospect. But there's a difference between making sure you hit the key topics and behaving like a scripted robot.

Really, the key to success is being human, and we humans are typically unscripted the vast majority of the time.

Sidebar: I'm currently rehearsing for a production of the play Misery, based on the Stephen King novel and the Kathy Bates/James Caan film. The vast majority of the play features just two actors, of which I'm one. There's a lot of lines to memorize. We're not required to be "off book" until next week, but the actors involved are already working hard not to hold our scripts in our hands.

But we also don't have the script fully internalized yet, so we got a note this week from the director that certain scenes mostly sounded like we were remembering and reciting our lines, not that we were performing them.

In other words, we sounded scripted.

In a play, of course, you ARE scripted; that's how it goes. In meetings, you shouldn't be. Part of being human is that we all have the innate ability to tell when someone else is scripted.

I hate watching sales pitches where the prospect asks a question and the salesperson says something like, "Oh, I'll actually get to that (or get to that slide) in a few minutes, hang tight."

Nope!

Even if you're certain that the order you've structured your well-rehearsed pitch calls for that answer to come seven slides from now, it's time to call an audible: Your prospect asked a question; your job is to provide the answer. This is where being a human comes in. Chuck the script, and answer live.

You're improvising. But to be clear, in this case, improvising doesn't mean you need to make things up or deal with the unexpected. You should know the likely questions and topics that may arise, and be prepared to organically handle them as they arise. And if you're stumped by a question, don't panic; you simply say I don't know and promise to get back to them on that question later.

When you're scripted, you sound scripted. Your voice goes on autopilot. Your presentation gets flatter. Your listener gets bored.

Your job is to know what you want to say, but to give yourself freedom to say it all as humanly and naturally as possible. And to follow the flow of the conversation if new questions or topics arise that should naturally affect what you're talking about. Ditch the script. Just talk. You got this.

Sometimes, people are wrong. Nobody likes to be wrong.

Wrongologist Kathryn Schulz gives a great TED Talk where she asks the audience what it feels like to be wrong. People toss out answers like embarrassing, dreadful, thumbs down. And, of course... they're wrong.

Those negative sensations are what it feels like to realize you're wrong. Actually being wrong feels exactly the same as being right — because we don't know we're wrong.

Sometimes, your customers, your coworkers, and your managers are wrong, too. Telling them so is no fun.

I have a client who's asking me to dive deep into their business. And frankly, this client has a great business: The C-suite is smart, their strategy is solid. The CEO is rightly proud of what they've built. But they also want to do even better.

In our working sessions, the CEO tells me about certain approaches they use, and how well they've worked, and how they get to the decision. And, to his great credit, he continually emphasizes that he's open to hearing if I think they're wrong. And he genuinely is!

But still... Telling people they messed up — or that the thing they're proud of, or the outcome they're expecting, or the plan they have is wrong — is hard.

The trick isn't to sugarcoat it; people who need to hear a thing, need to hear it. Don't mask it. It's frustrating when someone's trying to tell you something important — and potentially hard to hear — when you can't figure out what the heck they're trying to communicate.

The solution is to be direct about the decision points or steps that were wrong on the journey to landing at the wrong place. That's a mouthful.

Let me use an example to make this clearer. Jane is explaining to her C-Suite why the company missed goals. She doesn't need to say "CFO, you were wrong; we can't make 100 widgets a day."

Rather, I prefer an approach like: "We missed our goal because we thought our current machinery could scale to making 100 widgets a day." The person needn't be labeled wrong; the actual bad decision(s) are the wrong things.

This obviously doesn't eliminate people realizing they're wrong, and we know just how that feels. Here's another example of labeling the decision as wrong, not a person or team: "We thought automating the sales process would eliminate back-and-forths with customers. It did. But it also meant that we closed fewer deals because there were no humans to hear customer objections and adjust accordingly."

Joe who made that decision — and who likely knows that the whole meeting knows he's the one who made that decision — may well get defensive. I sometimes have to fight the instinct to sugarcoat myself. But if Joe gets defensive, the response is empathy — softening the blow isn't the same as sugarcoating: "It was reasonable to assume we could process more deals if we automated sales. What we now know is that it's easier for our buyers to walk away when they're dealing with a website than with a person."

Joe's not going to love this conversation no matter what, because Joe got it wrong. Our job is to rip the Band-Aid off, and then ideally be ready with the better treatment.