Nonverbal communication accounts for over half of all communication. As a salesperson, your best chance to seal the deal is during an in-person meeting. In physical meetings, all avenues of communication are on the table—presenting all of the following nonverbal signals can help you seal the deal over your competitors.
Trustworthiness, confidence, and presentation of status all heavily impact clients’ reception to sales tactics. By presenting these values through nonverbal communication, salespeople put clients’ minds at ease, showing them that their accounts will be well managed.
Eye Contact Is Key
When clients see you meet their gaze, they subconsciously understand that you are trustworthy. Holding their gaze beyond the initial meeting requires effort, however, you must focus on flowing through a conversation, occasionally leading back to direct eye contact. We will discuss ways to utilize hand gestures with conversational flow later in the post.
Eye contact can be paired with facial expressions to create some different forms of communication—a wide-eyed stare may incite more aggressive responses, while a narrow-eyed gaze may make them wary of you.
Posture Stands Paramount To Success
Strong posture creates a dominant, confident, trustworthy appearance. All of these things can increase clients’ perception of you, making you a more likely candidate to sell to them. Strong posture presents as one’s shoulders pulled back, chest out, head held high, and a relaxed, calm stance. Displaying this posture tells clients that you are a leader, someone worthy of their trust.
Beyond leadership, these physical presentations display strength, a quality which the vast majority of people follow happily. Be on the lookout for clients who do not display these characteristics. They may be more receptive to them, subconsciously, than those who do display them naturally. Stature easily trains these characteristics into many people, but not all.
Gesturing With Your Hands To Guide Clients’ attention
Gesturing allows the best salespeople to guide where the client looks at any given time, ensuring they are always looking at the best parts of a presentation, speech, or other display. Earlier, we discussed how gestures can be used to guide a client to make and break eye contact throughout a presentation, allowing you to continuously build a track record of meeting their expectations.
Establishing the consistent expectation of having your gaze meet theirs—and fulfilling it every time lets clients understand that you will continue setting and fulfilling their expectations through the entire engagement.
Forego Fidgeting
Fidgeting is a sign of discomfort, something which can tell clients, in no uncertain terms, that you are presently unhappy. Clients crave happiness—they are coming to you for more of it. If you fail to be happy yourself, how could you ever help them find more happiness? They will not expect that you can. Displaying comfort in your own skin shows them you can.
Beyond showing clients that you can offer them a solution to their problems, stability puts them in a situation outside of their own problems—empathy works for both positive and negative emotions. By helping them resonate with positive, happy sensations, you are helping improve your clients’ mental condition along with increasing your likelihood of closing a sale.
Empathy is one of the strongest sales tools in an expert salesperson’s arsenal. Humans are generally emotion-driven—those who aren’t will often pick up on your presentation and recognize it works with many clients. As long as you have the stats you need to back up your presentation, making sales will never be easier than when you employ these four tips.
Business meetings will go from a source of frustration to a flow of free cash flow once clients begin buying-in as you show them the things they crave to see.
Alexanne Stone has been a certified trainer in Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) since 1991. With 30 years of clients, certification trainings, and personal and professional growth, Alexanne's greatest joy is watching someone else step into your own greatness. Along with NLP came the in-depth study of body language. Through workshops, public speaking, podcasts, blogs and any other way she can think of, Alexanne's focus is to share this information with anyone who is open to know more about themselves and their ability to transform both personally and professionally.
A decorated U.S. Air Force Vietnam-era veteran, Alexanne lives in Reno, Nevada, with her husband Tim Tarvin.