Mark Bowden on How Your Body Language Says Friend or Foe

welcome I'm Mary Paul your host for the sales mastery summit we've all heard that we communicate about 7% with our words 38% with our tone and over 55% with our body language so tell me how much time do you take to prepare how you will communicate versus what you will say today's expert has worked with world leaders and CEOs and is now focused on helping sales professionals achieve their goals by using the right body language with me today is Mark Bowden author of winning body language for sales professionals welcome mark hi how you doing very good thank you and I I must say I am ashamed to say that I have never focused on my body language when I'm preparing for an important meeting so I am prepared to learn a lot today during our interview as well as serve our viewers well you know that's okay because the reason I wrote the the books that I've written on body language was really on how you can prepare in order to present yourself in all kinds of situations especially sales fabulous fabulous well you bring an eclectic background with theater as well as business so how did you first realize that you really can help business professionals in how they communicate to be more effective well I guess it was back quite away now in the dot-com crash and I started working with companies who had bad news to give yeah and they wanted ways that they could give this news and yet people would still listen to what they had to say because of course what happens when you bring bad news to people is their mind closes down and they can't hear the instruction that you have for them and the help that you might have for them so it first started then really and theirs escalated since then and now I work you know seven days pretty much with with people all over the world helping them in how to project themselves in order to stand out win trust and profit every time they communicate okay this is very interesting can't wait to hear how you can keep Minds open that way now your most recent work has really focused on helping sales professionals both read others bodies language as well as use their own more effectively throughout the sales process so they can build trust actually create influence and even enthusiasm during the sales process so can you give us an overview of how you help with this sure of course so the first thing I need to tell you is that you have a primitive brain which in evolutionary terms if we take evolution as given is probably about 100 hundred million years old and the moment it sees somebody new or recognizes somebody old it decides whether they're a friend to you or an enemy to you or they're simply indifferent to you they don't care about you and it does that within about a 50th of a second and it does that based on what it sees in your body it looks at your nonverbal communication and it simply decides friend enemy or indifferent now we know as somebody in sales we know for sure we don't want to end up in the enemy category now because look I mean we will get seen by that primitive brain if we're in enemy category but everything we say everything we present every product or service we bring to the table will be framed in negativity no matter what we say the potential buyer will see it as an enemy product and the enemy service dealt out by an enemy supplied by an enemy company so we do want to get in friend category and I can show you in in a few moments what some of those signals are for friend but before I do is the important thing is that there's 7 billion people on the planet and therefore the default category for the mind is indifferent so the moment you come to a new potential client a new potential customer they are designed to really put you in different category and ignore you and presume you have nothing for them so we have to make a conscious effort to get into friend category with people does that make sense so far marry perfect sense perfect sense and that and hence why 55% of what we communicate is happening as you said in that first 15 seconds 50th of a second so it's dead quickly steak it's what we call a knee-jerk reaction it's an instinct we have an instinct for the people we want to buy from and we have an instinct for the people we don't wish to buy from and we have a big instinct for the idea that most people we should never be concerned with we don't need to worry about them just don't bother about them and so this is called a feeling that we have for them and the feeling about their intention towards us is that do they intend to be our friend or do they intend to be our enemy and again 55% of that feeling the data we need for that feeling is made up of what we see in the body a third of the data that we need to make up the feeling that we feel they intend towards us that's in the tone of our voice the music that our voice plays and science would tell us that only 7% of the intention or the feeling is made up from what we say so from that we could kind of go well it doesn't really in that first moment you know it doesn't really matter what you say it's how you present yourself that's important I hope that makes sense it makes perfect sense in it it seems that it's harder to differentiate from creating a feeling of indifference versus creating a feeling that yes I can be your friend and I'm a friend to have right again indifference is the default so we have to work towards friends look you'll know you don't just make anybody your friend the most of this planet the humans on it are not all your friends you know that the majority of them you just don't know and you know you haven't got time to know them so somebody comes you know knocking on the office door or down your street where you're walking into a store or somebody approaches you from all the various methods to decide you know are you gonna be a potential customer or not your mind is simply going let's just be indifferent to them and wait until our friend comes along to sell to us and so that's what the work that I do is looking towards doing is how do we move you into friend category for your customers and clients dead quick okay so we're having our first meeting with a new prospect and we want to build trust early in that relationship and obviously get put in the friend category so what are the tips and how do we accomplish that okay so look one that comes up a lot is of course smile which you're doing very well I'm working very hard to keep my smile going and and this is obvious to everybody listening and watching this you know smile is good smile is a universal signal for is good now I'm friendly now it's a good place now but here's the thing about smiling is that it's very hard to do when your mood is not in a good mood you leak you know signals of anxiety which easily get mistaken for the signals of enemy so I'm not going to try and put a lot of effort into my smile because I know if I'm having a bad day it's gonna leak across I've got to try to smile but what I want to avoid is this kind of smile which is put on here where I'm did where you can't see it in my in my eyes because the muscles here are making the crinkles here so there's a true smile which I'm doing for you now and there's the ones where the eyes drop out and I just do this so you know one of the things that I first got across in my book winning body language okay and it's in the new book winning body language for sales is that it's actually what we do with the bulk of the rest of our body that defines if we're a friend or not and I'm just gonna stand up and move back a little bit so you can see more of my body okay okay I've just tilt this camera okay and I can still hear you great right so now you can see more of it so I'm gonna just show you two things okay there's this person here and as you won't even notice exactly where I'm gesture which is unmuted open hand gestures open arms and then exactly belly button height okay okay and I keep revealing this part of my body so just make your quick assessment there's this person here and I want you to think how much can you trust menu to help you through the sales process and now all I'm going to do is drop my hands down by the side now you won't be able to see my hands now but that's okay that's just what you do assess this person's of the item here that helped you through the sales process and just think how much can you trust this person so this many or there's a mini here yeah now understand you're making an unconscious decision about how you think I feel towards you based on being this person here or this person here so just tell me now how did you just give me some ideas how did you feel about this person who has a product or a service for you today Mary well when you're using your hands where you position them you seem very relaxed confident and engaged and when you just drop your hands it seems like you'd rather be anywhere else so here's the thing the reality is I've dropped my hands down by my side but mentally I'm still in get mentally I want to do this interview with you but you can't see that in me so you get what's called a theory of mind based on my body and your theory is is that I'm disengaged now I was engaged as I was before ball so this meeting this sales meeting that we're having here now might not go so well but I want way knowing but very engaged very I thought it was great interview and I think we did very very well just you didn't see it now alternatively then to this person here when we first meet so I approached you'd we're going to sit down together we're going to talk and this is the first person you see okay instead of this person here now yeah tell me about tell me about this person what you see with this person well I wouldn't want to disturb you because you might be deep in prayer but you're definitely not in the room with me so I reckon you probably feel a little more confident about this person for sure now I'm going to move my hands up to to here so I'm giving you three levels of which I can call my hands that is somebody who you first meet this person here okay tell me a little bit about this person and how you feel that a sales process might go for you now yeah probably more high-strung right right so this person's a bit high-strung this person you don't want to but you don't think he's bothered about you and I would guess that this person here you feel is the most calm and assertive I'm actually a bit a little bit contemplated when I placed my hands like this yes but I guess you feel safe yeah with this person a little unsure about this person and a little unsure about this person here so based on that I need to spend a lot of time with you like this with my hands in what I call the truth plane okay I've crossed the world cross culture this gesture is the one considered most as being from somebody who you can trust somebody who's being honest and somebody who's telling you the truth okay so this is the gesture that I advise people to use in order to win that trust very very quickly and get into friend category instantly rather than enemy category which can easily happen here and there's other gestures that will get you into enemy category which are ones that will make you look big and and aggressive stuff like stuff like this where I've made the upper portion of my body look bigger there's others which again probably make me look smaller and less aggressive and again this looks like somebody who might not be able to serve you so well doesn't have a lot of lot of power so all these things that we make our initial decisions about who we work with and who we trust based on the body when you put your hands in that truth plane and that even as I'm talking to you now oh that's where I have my hands although you can't see them so well it affects my voice okay so all I'm going to do now is I'm just dropped my hands down by my side now it's all into my lap as I'm talking to you I want you to hear immediately how that changed my voice and changed the mood of our call together now all I'm going to do is lift my hands up to where my belly button is and they're doing open palm gestures again I think you'll probably hear how this this has already changed them they raised it up a bit yeah well that's interesting because then if body language is affecting tone then you're talking more like 90 plus percent of how you communicate absolutely so there's the words and there's the tone in the words and I can change the tone which affects the meaning based on what I do with my body if I bring my hands up here and this will get quite distracting because now they're in the frame and they're being quite rapid and they're up at the chest area which I call the passion plane okay you get very very passionate when you bring your hands up to here so this might be X more exciting for you but it might be quite distracting but notice already what it's done to my voice I take my hands out of flame there and bring them up to here my hands are still there and now you're still getting that rapid excited voice and you can't see my hands anymore again notice what happens when I drop my hands by my side and start to talk about talk to you okay yeah it doesn't have that excitement anymore so again where you place your the horizontal level that you place your hands has a huge effect on the feeling that other people have about you and therefore the feeling that they have about your product and service it comes down to the when they when they buy from you certainly had to get that initial point they're buying into you and they're buying into the intention and feeling that you have towards them they're buying into the relationship they believe they're going to have with you and they're imposing that relationship or that perceived relationship on the product and service that their relationship to the product and service so if you believe that we'll have a friendly relationship you believe that we'll have a friendly relationship with the product or the service okay makes perfect sense now mark you also coach on how to read others body language and is there anything you can do about it if you have somebody with their arms drop to the side seemingly disengaged sure so so here's the first thing I want to tell you about reading other body language is that on the whole it's very hard for us to get it right to be able to read it correctly spot-on dead a hundred percent certain okay what it is is a rough prediction okay and a very rough prediction often it's about 50/50 chance as to because look if I give you this gesture that's what you say if I give you this gesture here you'll read a whole bunch of body language books and they'll probably tell you in fact they will because I've read them all they'll tell you that this means that somebody's clothes mm-hmm well it doesn't mean that at all it could mean one of about seven things okay I could be cold we've got a couple of glands under here that when the temperature is down we'll often do this in order to keep warm we often do this in order to stay awake because the higher hands go higher our arms go the higher the heart rate and blood pressure and therefore the more we stay awake so this could be I'm trying to stay awake it could be I'm cold it could be unclosed but if I got strong eye contact with you and I'm smiling and I'm nodding my head as I'm talking it this is not likely to mean clothes no however if I'm like this and my head goes down to one side and I'm not looking at you and I'm shaking my head maybe as you talk that's a pretty good indicator but I'm not engaged with you ok so put together multiple signals solutely soem body language we call them clusters and you've got to put together multiple clusters clusters so here's the thing is that our intelligent brain our neocortex which does organizes things like language that's a lot of information for it to put together so if I'm trying to make a relationship with you and cell with you and lead you on a sales journey it takes up a lot of my brain space in order to read clusters of body language and I might still get them wrong so what I want to do instead is get a gut feeling for you a general impression and a good general impression is to go are you open or are you closed yeah are you open or are you closed now I'm looking at you Mary and I just goes to you're open yeah that's my gut feeling about you you're open yeah are you getting great eye contact with me there's something about your face that says to me you're open your eyes are open you smile that's all and and I can mirror that back in fact just as I start nodding you start nodding yeah so even over Skype here we're already doing what's called mirroring each other we have limping in big resonance going on now if your mood were to change if I started to feel I think I've lost her I think something's changed here that change if it gives me a gut feeling I go oh oh something's happened I think she's closed okay what I'm like I kind of got some absolutely if you make a what seems to be from my point of view quite a big gesture like that it might be quite small actually in your in your chair but for me it looks quite big I would maybe ask you abused as an indicator to ask you a question yeah and I might go hey Mary I just noticed that you've been shifted back a little bit when I was talking about being closed is there anything that I could just help you understand better about that or is there something that didn't quite work for you in what I was saying yeah so I indicate that I've seen the shift in you and I indicate a couple of possibilities that might have caused that shift and I indicate that I'd like to put it right now that allow you to go oh no mark let's just you know I'm I'm getting a bit tired in my seat I was just sitting back and using the backrest it allows you to do that or you can go yeah I didn't I didn't quite understand the thing about open or open or closed I'm bit worried about that and I can go well let me explain it better or I can go well don't let's just worry about that for the moment let's shift on to something else yeah more important so glad you made this point because in the past when I've been taught mirroring it's pretty much mirror back what the prospects doing so they feel like you're like them and then slowly take them to where you want to be but really what you're saying is mirror the good stuff and use the closed language as an indicator to ask questions and that's how you open them up you don't mirror the bad stuff that's perfect that's exactly it because if we take that mirroring idea to its logical end I should mirror everything that you do and if you do negatives I should start to to mirror that yeah until we both spiral that we're both closed disassociation with each other of course that's going to happen if you start giving negative body language and I copy will spiral into a negative I need us to spiral into a positive because there's so much product and service out there for you to get involved in I need for when we get together and I'm selling to you and I'm taking you on a self journey I need this to be a great experience for you I don't need it to be a negative experience for you of course there's gonna be negative areas of it that I need to help you through but I don't need to go there with you is this so there is something called empathy and there's emotional empathy which when I get involved in your emotion and I copy it and there's something called cognitive empathy which is when I recognize your feeling I accept your feeling but I don't have to do the feeling as well so I believe in sales we want to do more cognitive empathy more than actual emotional empathy which is that if you're upset I get upset as well you know something has gone wrong if you're angry at the service that essentially I sold you in the end that I get angry as well now I just need to understand you're angry yeah and move us into a more positive frame of mind so the first thing I would say about reading body language is you get a gut feeling for it are they open or are they closed you want them to be open so you need to present open body language so for example you know I would say open in my mind yeah but I think men really show this is not the kind of thing that I personally when I am very open the situation yeah right this for me is open body language the more I do this the more likely you'll mirror me because your designer we're designed to mirror each other anyway right all pacing and leading idea and mirroring idea that happens naturally anyway yeah so I'm gonna marry you and you're gonna marry me whatever happens exactly and I love the distinction of the cognitive empathy because it really gives us the ability to stay authentic with ourselves because if you're in a meeting with somebody that's got this frenetic energy and they're talking up here all the time it's exhausting if that's not who you are to have to mirror that and if you're with somebody that you're amazed that they're not in a coma it's hard to mirror that back to so if that isn't who you are you can recognize that in them without having to do the same so not only can you do that but if you were able recognize the feeling that they have and also tell them about the feeling that you'd like them to have you can shift them so I can I can mirror for a bit and I can go and I'm loving the energy that you have for this idea so far for this product so far what I want us to do is just sit back a little bit and really consider what will this do for the company what will this do for the margin for the profit margin because I want us to really look at the figures here and look in a in a really straight mathematical way at how big the margin is going to increase you know we want to get excited about it again that's fine but so it allows me to go I love the emotion that you're having and here's another one we could have as well which might be good for the sales journey that we're on because when I was when I was writing at them a winning body language for sales professionals one thing that I wanted to do was to make sure that we were taking people through quite long sales cycle sometimes I know you know that we people are listening to us now and some of them will have short sales cycle you know a few minutes could be a number of hours could be weeks could be months some of them will be on in home sales cycles could be anything up to three five years at the most extreme of those sales cycles and we know during those that that our potential clients and customers go through a whole range of emotions a whole range of situations with us and so the one thing I want to do is make sure that there was all the information there for you to be able to take people and influence and persuade them on that longer journey well it's that shorter journey through the sale okay mark is there anything that we should be paying attention to body language wise as we're analyzing our clients needs yeah for sure so it's it's certainly a case of as you're interviewing that client and getting to know them and getting to feel what they need and what they don't need they're gonna say stuff okay and then you're also going to see their body do stuff as they say it so what we saying there's what we do and sometimes we'll tell people what we think they want to hear yeah we'll tell them what what what we think they think is is smart rather than what we know deep inside is our real feeling about it so you know I might be buying some software solution from you and I might say well you know it's really about you know accounting really really want this they'd be able to work fast them better through this when I start talking to you about about accounting but you get a sense in my body but I'm not really engaged talking about that so I might want to say to you so I hear you talking about accounting really needing this and I think that's really important but is there anything else there anybody else that really needs this and and look just for a moment what about you what does this really mean to you if you were to make this purchase and you might find out it's about them really it's about a feeling that they have something to do with their status maybe that they need to make this they need to get this software in order to improve their status within the company maybe something about certainty they're uncertain about their position and they feel that this product or service it might improve that certainty so look I would say people are never buying things they're buying feelings yeah they have feelings of an emptiness some people call that pain yeah they have a feeling of pain event enos that they haven't got something and they want to move towards a good feeling yeah of some sort so they want to move from a bad feeling to a good for you because if they did nothing really whatever will ever happen you know thanks yeah no this stuff they'll talk about in terms of what that pain will be and there's the feeling that they give off around that and you should be able to see that in the body language now again I don't want to go into being able to read that body language in detail because it's too detailed is too complex but what I do want people to do is get used to having a gut feeling about is the person open or are they closed around this and then using that to ask questions and using that to pull out needs rather than a list of questions that we might have does that make sense to you yeah yeah and that's a good diagnostic to understand if they're open or closed during that journey and then how do you redirect sure exactly so if I take them down a line of questioning and I can start to see that they maybe start sick back they made any start to look off into the distance they're getting involved in other stuff they look down and the way they're shaping their head more doesn't feel engaged to me I could be wrong okay here's the thing is I could be wrong there could be a number of reasons why they're doing that but previously in my line of questioning an interview they were forward in their chair they were quite excited they've quite engaged about it so I need to go look I noticed when I started questioning around timelines on this that you let me kind of step back and for me you felt a little less engaged on wondering is its timelines really anything that we need to talk about right now and then they go oh no it it is I was actually you know I was actually thinking about other timelines or they make yeah actually it's not really it's not really an issue for me um or they might go yeah I was getting a bit distressed about that because I need immediately okay so so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna know it's what happens with the potential client or customer okay I'm going to notice differences some of them could be big some of them could be subtle either way they're gonna cause a gut reaction in me a gut feeling yeah and I'm gonna use that to dig for more verbal data and I'm never gonna go oh this means then disengaged I no need to ask they're disengaged I'm walking out the room yeah this this sale is dead okay that's a presumption I want to question if I think they've they're disengaged in this sale is dead I'm gonna go so here's the thing when I started talking about math specs of this product it felt to me like you really you know disengaged and I could be wrong if I read body language drama all the time yeah I just want to check in with you it should we move forward on this or should we leave it for for another time another day maybe check back back with you in three years time or never you know it's an option at least then even if they say hey never then I can go and you can't confirm thanks for telling me that and I can move on or I can go so who in the organization should I be talking to right now right well that's so smart not to presume that you know take it as a signal right that you need to probe because they could have wandered off to a different place mentally because you hit on something important and they went off into that land and you know mentally left the room with you which you'd want to know you know versus they're totally disengaged you just you have to ask the question right solutely when I'm not there selling what I what I do I can often see my potential clients disengage yeah and sometimes I might have solved badly in there and they've disengaged but a lot of the time they might be disengaging to think so how am I going to tell this story to my CEO and sell it up there yeah so they're watching me and they're going can I can I pitch this like Marc's pitching err yeah because you know we all end up often selling to gatekeepers first of all right there often work out how will this make you look in the organization what are they doing missing pictures of how they they look and that's great information that's great data for me if they go hey I was just imagining how I'm gonna pitch this to the leadership and then I can go well that's really important how you feeling about that at the moment because I can help you by the way tell this story and sell this you know upstairs and that causes relief in them and we're back on track again fabulous now you also talked about how you can use body language to create influence which of course is important when we're to the sales presentation part of our sales cycle so do you have tips for us there on how we can actually establish influence with our body language job so what influence means is to it from a latin word meaning to get in flow to get in in the river with okay so the most important thing about influence is it's not argument influence is not argument argument is something completely different so what we want to do in influence is to pick up on the mood of the people in the presentation pick up on the environment take that move along with it some way and then shift it persuade as we call it shift it hard so persuade means to move of hard influence means to get in the river with to go along with the flow and then persuade means to shift hard so the first thing we need to do is we go into that environment and we're there to present with there to influence is we need to join in with what's happening in the room yeah so what I need to pick up on the body language of the other people there and get involved with the mood so long as it's a good mood if it's a bad mood I need to get involved in that yeah but I need to pick up on how do they present that they're in a good mood so some organizations that I go along to they're in a good mood and they're up in the passion plane here okay there they're positive and they're up here and I'll join them here yeah and I'll start my presentation up here now I might move down to the truth plane eventually yeah I might even talk about my competitors because and go down to what I call the grotesque plane which is when I put my hands down by my side yeah because I can actually say some very good things about my competitors but if my hands are down by my side the audience is primitive brain negates those good things because they weren't presented with a good morning okay so but if if the audience for a starter of impassioned that's where I want to be with them and I also want to make sure to influence and persuade them that I give them plenty of status by giving them social status by making sure they have resource they have position and rank so I don't come in and out rank them and out status them that causes the amounts of dopamine in their brain to go up dopamine is a neurotransmitter and it makes us feel good so again I can make them feel good by raising their rank and raising their status which means for example for example if they're close by agree if I'm presenting around a boardroom and I've got some people very close to me I probably don't want to stand up and pretend so I'm going to stand up and present to you now and you'll notice that it means that my eye line is way above yours mm-hmm okay and this will be causing your primitive brain to feel overshadowed and in fact I've noticed a change in your face already well it's funny because my mind just went off thinking that's how most boardroom presentations that I've been in are set up right exactly so so we call called what's compromised okay I've got to know that if I've got my Kiedis if you're my key decision-maker okay and I've put you so close to me that when I stand to present I might want to stand okay because I might want to stand it up or what I would say yeah it might be important but if you're here I'm gonna outrank you in height you're primitive brain won't like me therefore you're going to stop sending the data that I'm giving you to your intelligent brain okay so my guess is you're not feeling so good about me so it might be better actually if I did this presentation sitting down where our eyeline is a little more level yeah it may be best actually if I want to stand up for what I'm saying it may be better actually it might stand out and I just take some distance from you okay and I show you more of my body yeah and if I'm gonna do that and I think well this is maybe not within the culture of the boardroom yeah I'll go look I tell you what a minute and I'll say I want to present to you the product that I have and I'm going to present standing up because there's a whole bunch of the product that I want to show you and it's just easier for me to be able to have a bit of freedom with it with the movement there so I'm just going to stand up to you now so that's given this distance yeah that means you can see more of my body yeah that means and I don't outrank you that makes sense yeah yeah and you're not looking down so much looking down again and I just want everybody watching to notice what happens when I present to you here you probably even noticed a different tone in my voice that happens when I notice that I'm looking down at you okay and and I want the people listening and watching this now to get a sense of how do they feel about me now they had feelings about me before yeah and about how much I could help them with body language and now I want you to get a sense of how much you feel I can help you now with with body language it's a gut feeling let me take you back to this person here who has today my line as you how did you feel that this person can help you now my guess is I've gone up in ranking right they turn of trust you trust me more now yeah and you're buying trust all the time because you probably never used this product or this service you're probably never gonna use it until the point where we depress go on it and you've already bought yes that potentially could be a demonstration but it may be such a thing that you just buy press go and that's it and at that point you find out did he work for you or not work for you everything up until that point is how much do you trust me and the stories that I might bring you of other other users of his product or service so mark I like a couple of things that you've shared with us already feed beautifully I think into a virtual sales situation with some of our viewers actually doing more work on the phone that your body language is still impacting your tone so you know still live the good body language and then via web conference or that sort of thing Skype interview like we're doing right now I always give the experts the tip don't be looking down into your camera because we're just looking up your nose then you're just modeled that that's also a very dominant position to put yourself in so you're not communicating well exactly and here's the interesting thing is that is that our environment will always change the way we behave yeah so if you tell me you say to me mark what I don't want is for the camera to look at your nose I were to keep my normal office environment to do this interview now that's what you get because what I've got is I've just moved offices so I've got a moving box yeah big tall moving box with a crate on top of it which is actually put my computer at this height to me and normally on a desk it would be way way lower exactly but this up really high because otherwise this is you would be seeing that yeah that's where this would be now it meant that you know last night what I have to do set all of this up so that I wake up this morning come to the office and know this is all set up for me to be at the correct height so actually my camera is right eye level okay oh man to try and give me the best chance of getting eye contact with you as much as possible in that level I contact that's take it take an effort on my part to set this up and I had to set it up beforehand because if I don't first thing in the morning I'll default to you know what it's fine on the desktop I'll just do the call like that you know what I got a great product I get a great service so they'll buy that thing that'd be okay they'll buy that and of course yes they might but and yes maybe if this angle is only giving me I don't know five percent advantage well if it's already giving me five percent advantage I still want it exactly in fact I still need it in fact my shareholders probably demand it from me five percent advantage for a shareholder is a huge is a huge huge thing so I must take the advantage and I must put the work in beforehand I know some people out there they even have a Skype set up you know they've got a separate computer that they might use just set up on a on a kind of a trolley stand thing and they've been around and and it's a great setup so they know it's always there so mark there is so much that we can cover for body language where can our viewers go if they really want to dive deeper so they can be more effective at 90% of our communication absolutely so go along to WW truth plain comm TR you th PLA any truth plain comm you'll be able to look at winning body language here okay and also the book that was the precursor to that winning body language for sales professionals so go along and of course you can find win body language for sales professionals at Amazon or the usual book places and you can grab them grab it there but truth plain comm is the place to fabulous now you must have some fascinating transformation stories from your clients with the impact that you can make with body language do you have a favorite story you can share sure so there's been a it's been a whole whole heap but the stories that I like the most are often stories of promotion yeah where actually people have moved often from sales to sales leadership with with this work now and and they've done that because they're able to get a more calm assertive way of being not only with their clients but with the other salespeople that they want to they want to leave so I am going I don't I can't name names and and they're and companies but but just to say my favorite stories and they there's been a number of watching clients of mine go to the yearly sales meeting this time as vice president sales not just for a region but for the whole company and stand up and make that speech in front of everybody and inspire all of those other salespeople yeah with their communication skill so there that's always for me hugely satisfying to see the leadership skill that this work can bring out if you think about how that leadership skill can help you take your clients on a sales journey I think it's pretty impressive fun fun and as people are working on really starting to pay attention to their body language where do you find that they trip up where do they get stuck as they're trying to become more effective right I think the the place is to trip up is trying to read other people's body language okay I'm getting and you know many many people are listening watching today have got involved in neuro linguistic programming I would I would think it's a great area I studied by start self extraordinary area but they get involved in trying to read I accessing cues trying to judge exactly what the mood of somebody is and by the time they've actually done it the client has gone okay I think I have how they were feeling I think that they were you know again it singer yet five minutes ago so I would say take the pressure off trying to read people and lead them yes and when you're leading them understand that we follow the clearest most consistent signal in the room so keep your body language clear and consistent and what I mean by unclear an done consistently use a lot of asymmetrical gestures and you change those up all the time you'll notice that what I'm doing is being very unclear and unn consistent now and you'll probably notice that I'm very difficult to read now and it's more difficult for you to judge the words that I'm that I'm saying and I and I look muddled and I feel muddled now notice what happens when I get clear and consistent with my body language so all I'm doing is doing gestures in the truth plain I'm keeping pretty much still and I'm going to do this you know for as long as it X with you this is going to be my default with you it'll be clear a consistent and that will mean that you can error me you can't mirror stuff that you can't copy and this it's so unconstant and unclear that you can't copy this therefore you will have to your mind will have to disappear somewhere else so we can copy something in its imagination or you'll have to get up and leave so that you're able to find somebody you can mirror so I would say you know stop trying to to read other people yeah and get a gut feeling about them instead and try and lead in the clearest most consistent way you can okay in mark to wrap up if there's one thing that you would say our viewers could do today to increase their success what would that be well of course it would be by winning body language for sales professionals but in fact let me just give you the best technique from from that so if you didn't want to go and buy it look you've got the best technique anyway and it's what I showed you before hands in the truth plane and symmetrical gestures and belly height open hands you know across all my experience with salespeople with leaders with with well politicians that I've trained that is the number one way to win trust immediately with the audience I would just go out and do that immediately now as much as possible and you will see your confidence and your ability to engage that prospect escalate phenomenally yeah so do the truth claim I would say I love it I love it thanks so much mark really I was thinking you were going to double our effectiveness at communication but really it's more ninety ninety five percent improvement so that's a pretty good return on a a forty five minute conversation I appreciate it so much my pleasure greatest thank you thank you and thanks to our viewers for tuning in and investing in your own success the sales mastery summit is here to help you never stop learning from the best take care

Channel: SalesMasteryMag

Views: 26,775

Keywords: selling skills, sales presentations, body language, Mark Bowden (Author), sales tips, sales techniques, selling techniques, sales training, sales strategy, selling strategies, mark bowden body language, mark bowden interview, mark bowden truthplane, winning body language, truthplane, body language expert mark bowden, sales psychology, the psychology of sales

Id: rXoaORxVHvQ

Length: 50min 29sec (3029 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 21 2014