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All day long, you’ve beat the streets for any account you
can get your fingers on, but everything seems an arms’
length away. In searching for new business, you’ve pounded
your chest, smiled til your teeth ached, and shook enough
hands to make your shoulders dislocate but… nothing.
The strange thing is, your colleagues are prospering.
They’re making goal after goal and you’re out of your head
trying to figure out why. Are you missing something?
Could be that you’re ignoring subtle clues from possible
buyers. If you need a leg-up on sales, The Body
Language Handbook by Gregory Hartley and Maryann Karinch
may help.
Say you walk into a prospective client’s place of business
and you introduce yourself. He smiles (or is that a
grimace?), steps behind the counter, folds his arms and
leans in, tapping his nose.
Will he talk to you, or will he toss you out on your ear?
Hartley and Karinch say that you won’t know until you’ve
established a “baseline” with this person. What are his
normal actions? What does he do with his hands when he’s
relaxing, agitated, or explaining something? Once you know
how he acts in day-to-day situations, you can better
understand what he’s saying without words.
Culture plays a big part in body language, the authors say,
and parents are major influences: if your father smacked his
lips, for instance, the chances are that you will, too. The
gestures you’ve used for years are remembered by your
muscles, partially explaining why you do things without
thinking. Consider, also, the five “nurtured factors” that
influence body language: sophistication, self-awareness,
situational awareness, sense of others’ entitlement and what
is proper, and personal grooming.
But you still can’t quite understand your prospective
client, so pay attention to his other clues. People, for
instance, naturally use barriers in their body language, and
those barriers change according to gender. Male babies will
wrinkle their noses but men almost never do. Rubbing the
center of the face (the “grief muscle”) usually isn’t a good
sign at all. And if your prospective client is Middle
Eastern, giving him a big “thumbs up” at the end of your
visit might get you turned down flat.
As I was reading this book, my eyes closed and my head
lolled to the side. Can you guess what my body language
said?
The Body Language Handbook
does, admittedly, contain a few AHA! nuggets and some
fascinating tidbits for people-watchers, but I found it hard
to follow and somewhat repetitive. I also felt the advice
hard to employ in average conversation. Furthermore, authors
Gregory Hartley and Maryann Karinch acknowledge that you
can’t completely understand someone’s actions unless
you know him well enough to know what’s normal for that
person.
If you know him that well, I wonder, then why would you need
this book?
I think that casual people-watchers might get a kick out of
doing amateur “readings” with help from The Body Language
Handbook. Business people, though, are better off
elbowing it aside. |
