Face-to-Face Persuasion in a Facebook Era

For all the positives technology and social media bring to our lives, there is a downside: many people become rusty and less persuasive when they’re finally forced to interact face-to-face.

Here’s how professional conversationalists, like talk-show hosts and world-class salespeople, can teach us all something about getting great information from key people.

Free-Flowing Dialogue

The best salespeople don’t even realize that they are utilizing a proven selling technique to gather information. They just know that after a very natural, free-flowing dialogue, they leave the person they were talking to feeling better about themselves and their relationship. The salesperson has also established strong rapport and gathered critical information.

But how do they do it?

Neuromarketing tells us that the key to connecting is understanding the other’s mind-set. As a salesperson, it’s more important that you understand the details of the buyer’s needs than for s/he to understand every detail of your solution.

The first step is to get your mind right. Here’s how to do just that.

Understanding Your Prospect

1. Set your intent to fully understand the person.

Begin by ensuring your prospect that they are a person you like and enjoy speaking with. Next, take a genuine interest in what makes them tick. When your intent is to understand, you will instinctively begin to ask questions. The key is the quality of the inquiry. After all, you reveal your intent by the questions you ask.

2. Find out what they are passionate about.

It’s important to understand your prospect’s passions and goals. Once you understand their goals, you need to find out how they measure their success against those goals. How are they doing in regards to the pursuit of their goals? Are they on track? If so, what has been the key to their success? If not, what’s the problem and how do they intend to fix it?

3. Make them feel understood.

People desperately want to feel understood. By focusing on another’s passions and goals, they feel understood and tend to reciprocate by trusting the one doing the understanding. When your intent is to find out someone’s goals and you are keenly interested in how they are progressing, you will engage in more persuasive conversations, conversations that are more powerful than Facebook.

Conclusion

While social media is great for prospecting and keeping your leads and clients engaged, there’s nothing quite like face-to-face persuasion. Knowing your stuff in-person, not behind the glow of a computer screen, will demonstrate that you’re truly invested in helping your prospect find a solution that’s best suited for his or her needs.

Ready to learn more techniques to persuade prospects in person? Check out our eBook, “The 12 Triggers of Persuasion,” below.