Body Language

One thing that I really took away from this class was the importance of body language. This does not only include mirroring each other’s body language, but also presenting yourself in a way that truly showed that you were confident on not only what you were selling, but also how confident you felt in yourself. As a customer, I look for how the salesman carries themselves and try to get an understanding for how confident they feel in themselves and how that affects what they are telling me. There is a fine line though. Sometimes I get the feeling that the salesperson is becoming very chummy with me in order to make the sale and make the sale only. That is not the type of company that I would want to deal with. When I meet with someone, I want to get the idea that they are truly trying to add value to my life, not try and just sell me something. I had an interesting encounter at my internship with this exact type of interaction. I remember calling the father of one of my old teammates and several times throughout the call, he explicitly expressed that he felt that I was just trying to sell him something. Granted this was early on so I had not honed in my skills, but it was the first hard no I had ever been told to even a meeting. I realized that I was portraying myself as a scummy salesman and not a helpful advisor. Throughout this, as I became more comfortable, I became more confident in myself and a few people actually said that they were impressed by how I came across in the sales calls. All in all, I realized that the key to making the customer feel comfortable is coming across as a confident and helpful salesman, not a scummy salesperson from the movies.