There is a moment near the end of a good pitch where the smartest move is to stop talking. Larry Chiang’s pen-drop close is built entirely around that moment: set the pen down and stay silent. You wait, without filling the silence, until the other person picks the pen up to initial your points.
Most people cannot survive that silence, they rescue the other person from it by talking again. Every time you talk into that silence, you are negotiating against yourself for free. The close is not the clever line at the end, it is the discipline to let quiet do the work.
That discipline comes from the same SuperModel presence rules: pen in hand, listening position held, phone untouched. If you have been performing calm all meeting, holding it for ten more seconds is not a stretch.
Watch how the pause gets used in the video below, it is shorter than you would expect and it still works. If you have been anxious the whole time, that silence is exactly where you crack and start over-explaining.
Calm is not the mood you want to be in when you close, it is the tool that does the closing. Set the pen down, hold the position, and let them be the one to break the silence.
Details: Watch the pen-drop close
#PenDropClose #SuperModel #Web12