Increase Your Power By Reducing It, But Not Like This.

In class, we talked at length about three elements of attunement. The first of which was “Increase your power by reducing it.”  This essentially requires you, as the salesperson to assume that you’re not in  a position of power. This is mostly an attitude that you should adopt rather than a sales strategy that you employ while in a meeting. The goal of this is to help you put yourself in the shoes of your client. A person who assumes power is much less likely to consider the perspective of the other person, In class we even went as far as to say that you can best move people from a position of powerlessness.

This does not mean that you assume you are completely powerless in every way or that you communicate to your client that you are incompetent in an effort to decrease your power.

This clip from the office is an extreme example how NOT to increase your power by reducing it.  In this case, Deangelo constantly degrades Andy in front of the client. This is NOT how anyone should EVER go about reducing his or her power in a sales context. Rather than putting the client in the position of power, it simply made Andy look entirely incompetent. At that point, Deangelo was not only putting the client in a position of power, but he was also completely destroying the client’s view of Andy. When the client doesn’t have confidence in you as the salesperson, you can pretty much count on not making the sale. So don’t be like Deangelo. It won’t end well.