If you’re a marketing consultant or coach, learning about your prospect’s body language can help you close more clients.
This is why…
A successful salesperson will tell you that the secret to closing a sale is to first build rapport with potential customers.
This is not necessarily accomplished solely by the words you say to your prospect.
It’s the nuance, setting, and nonverbal communication that turns out to be the most crucial piece of persuasion.
The way you dress and how you look: how attractive you are or not; all this influences others.
It changes everything. Attractive people live in a world; those who are not attractive live in another.
The rich live in a different world than the poor.
Perceptions are formed instantly, whether it’s your website or an ad on TV, or whatever.
People are influenced without even being aware of it.
Back in the 1970s, there was a powerful study done in California by Philip Zimbardo with a famous prison experiment.
Half of the children were guards and half of the children were inmates. This experiment was done right after Vietnam, which was a protest-oriented time.
People got really interested, so it became popular because it illustrated a lot of the things that people didn’t want to talk about, like hidden persuaders.
Educators began studying the material and including it in the university curriculum.
Today you won’t see much of this material read in psychology, but you will see it in neuropsychology or you will see it in consumer behavior classes.
Much of contemporary research is in the field of medicine. For example, how a doctor presents options to a patient, and how the patient or doctor decides what to do based on how the information was presented.
Information on the art of persuasion is not as secret as you might think, but I will say that it is not easy to come by because it is extremely expensive.
Either you have to be at that university learning from that professor or you have to be able to afford to subscribe to the academic journals, which are really expensive.
If you have access, it gives you a good leg up on others who might be talking about NLP or hypnosis or old fashioned sales techniques.
Today there are much better things out there.
So next time you’re in front of a client trying to sell your services, take a close look at your client’s body. You may be told something like “I’m ready to buy” sooner than you think.