This is Help Wanted, the show that makes your work work for you. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, editor-in-chief

of Entrepreneur Magazine. And I'm money expert Nicole Lapin. On Tuesdays, Jason and I answer the

helpline and help callers solve their work problems. And on Thursdays, I give you one way to improve your work and build a career or company you love.

And it starts now.

Someone is upset at you, or they're acting strange, and you have no idea why.

Maybe it's a colleague who's suddenly short with you, or a client who's fixated on some

random detail, or a partner who snaps at you.

Now you're confused, frustrated, and unsure how to respond.

Today, I will show you a simple but powerful technique that defuses difficult conversations and helps you solve problems before they get

worse. But before I share it, I'm going to show you a version of it in action at a recent

sales meeting that went sideways. So as the editor-in-chief of

Entrepreneur Magazine, I often join our sales team for big client meetings. My job is basically

to set things up to talk about the brand and our audience and why we're relevant to them

and all that stuff. Just recently, we had one of those meetings. It was with a big international brand,

and there were 10 people from the brand there. And just picture it. We're all sitting around this

big conference room table. And the meetings started totally normally. Our head of sales,

entrepreneurs, head of sales, kicked it off and showed this boilerplate slide with statistics

about entrepreneurs' audience and entrepreneurs more broadly. And then a woman who works with the

brand interrupted and asked a question about one of our numbers. And our head of sales answered it.

And then she asked for clarification. And then this went back and forth a few times. She just

kept picking at this number. And eventually, at a loss, the head of sales looked at me and said,

Jason, do you have anything to add here? Because honestly, he didn't know what else to add.

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