If you are a marketing consultant or a coach, learning something about the body language of your prospect can help you close more clients.
Here’s why…
A successful salesperson will tell you the secret to closing a sale is first building rapport with potential customers.
This isn’t necessarily accomplished solely by the words you say to your prospect.
It’s the nuances, the environment, and the non-verbal communication, which turns out to be the most crucial piece of persuasion.
The way you dress and what you look like – how attractive you are or aren’t; all of this influences others.
It changes everything. Attractive people live in one world; those who are unattractive live in another.
Wealthy people live in a different world than poor people.
Perceptions are formed instantaneously whether it’s your web site or whether it’s an ad on TV, or whatever.
People are influenced without even being aware of it.
Back in the 70s, there was a powerful study done in California by Philip Zimbardo with a famous prison experiment.
Half the kids were guards and half the kids were inmates. This experiment was done right after Vietnam, which was a protest-oriented time.
People became very interested, so it caught on because it illustrated a lot of the stuff that people didn’t want to talk about, such as hidden persuaders.
Educators started studying the material and putting it into college curriculum.
Today you won’t see a lot of this stuff read about in psychology but you’ll see it in neuron-psychology or you’ll see it in consumer behavior classes.
A lot of contemporary research is in the medical field. For example, how does a doctor present options to a patient, and how does the patient or doctor decide what to do based upon how the information was presented.
Information on the art of persuasion is not quite as secret as you might think, but I will say that it’s not easy to get because it’s extremely expensive.
You either have to be in that University learning from that professor or you have to be able to afford to subscribe to the academic journals, which are really spendy.
If you do have access, it provides you with a nice edge over others who might be talking about NLP or hypnosis or old fashioned selling techniques.
Today there’s so much better stuff out there.
So the next time you are in front of a client trying to sell your services look closely at your clients body. They may be telling you something like “I’m ready to buy” sooner than you think.
