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Adapt your style to win over the customer.
Written by: John BrennanArticle Overview: Use these six techniques to adjust to your customer’s style, build trust and rapport, and win them over.
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Free Download - Adapting to Technology and the Internet By John Brennan |
Adapt your style to win over the customer.
1. Focus on your customer’s interests and needs. Their interests need to be addressed immediately. Don’t try to change subjects abruptly, even if there is a significant objection. It’s better to deal with the objection truthfully than to try to skip over it. Focusing on your customer’s interests and needs builds understanding and cooperation. Address their interests to their satisfaction.
2. Pace your customer’s vocal style. Listen to your customer’s speed, tone, volume and length of message. Then without mimicking them, use a similar speed of voice, tone, volume and length of message. Pacing will build rapport and comfort with your customer.
3. Adjust your level of simplicity and complexity. Listen to your customer and ask yourself how simple or complex they seem to be talking and thinking. If they want it simple, keep it as simple and clear as possible. If your customer seems to want more complexity, go into greater depth and substance as is appropriate. Adjusting is a powerful way to build clarity, rapport and understanding.
4. Mirror your customer’s basic gestures, expressions and body lean. Try to look more similar than different from your customer. Don’t mimic them by following their every cue. Mimicking is not only insulting, but stupid. Instead, try to gradually position yourself similarly in terms of body lean (forward, upright, and backward) and look (relaxed or formal). Mirror your customer’s basic “degree” of hand gesturing. In other words, use more or less gesturing based on your customer’s patterns. And mirror the facial signals of smiling, attending or frowning based on the content of the message. You must listen carefully to mirror the right facial expressions.
5. Signal your respect and interest by nodding, agreeing, maintaining friendly eye contact, providing 3 to 5 feet of space, squaring your body with your customer, maintaining an open looking posture and leaning toward your customer (when appropriate). A ten percent forward lean when standing and a twenty percent forward lean when sitting creates greater rapport. Follow your customer’s message with agreement cues (nodding and listening sounds) within 1-2 seconds, or your rapport will be broken.
6. Mistakes to Avoid
Some customers are much harder than others to read. Don’t get discouraged. As you spend more time with your customers, you will begin to see patterns of behavior which will clarify the customer’s buying style. Similarly, take the time to learn about your own style. Monitor your behaviors, and especially, their impact on the customer. Pay attention to your intuition; that part of you that tells you what feels right. If your intuition tells you that a style behavior does not feel right, pay attention. It is better to be authentic in front of your customer, than an obvious chameleon.
Unlike other social styles models on the market, adaptive selling identifies and describes styles that customers use in their buying process. They may not exhibit the same style outside of work. While the other models are useful, adaptive selling is the only one that is based on the actual buying styles of customers.
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Article Tags: adadapting, body language, buying signals, rapport, sales, selling, selling style, trust
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I would have to agree with you, GT, that eccentric font should be used for offline marketing materials if the purpose is to build their brand with the font style. Many companies do this, but if you visit their website you won't see that same font style used for the content of the site. Probably a good thing.
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Bottom line: I do believe that certain styles appeal to women, certain styles appeal to men and if you know the distinction, have the ability to write in a particular style and choose to target one sex or the other, then go for it. But I don't think that it is a necessity in today's market.
GT :-]
Re: Validation issues
- [quote="Christine Sutherland":3805zxix]
Here is the first error:
1 Error Line 50 column 45: there is no attribute "BORDERCOLOR"
<TABLE ALIGN="centre" border="1" bordercolor=(red quote mark with 4 red dots under it)#0066600" width="584"
[/quote:3805zxix]
Hi Christine
You will need to create a style sheet file for all of the table attributes, such as border color, border width and width of the actual table. E.g.
<style type="text/css">
table.sample {
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table.sample td {
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padding: 1px;
border-style: inset;
border-color: gray;
background-color: white;
-moz-border-radius: ;
}
</style>
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<tr>
<th>Header</th>
<td>Content</td>
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Don't stress over this too much, it can help you in search engines against other websites but it won't automatically give you special powers in the search engines.
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