The Power of Eye Contact by Michael Ellsberg

Author:Michael Ellsberg
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins

Not Too Hot and Not Too Cold

Sales trainer Tony Alessandra, author of sales classics Non-Manipulative Selling and Collaborative Selling (www.alessandra.com), told me a story about a client of his.

ALESSANDRA: I was doing a consulting job for a name-brand big-box retailer. And this company had what they called the “Three Feet Rule.” It meant that if a customer got within three feet of an employee, the employee had to smile, make eye contact, and ask “How can I help you.”

Well, believe it or not, customers had been complaining about the eye contact part of it, actually leaving comments in the comment box. It turned out that every employee interpreted “make eye contact” differently. Some made eye contact and never broke it, drilling a hole through the customer with Superman laser eye beams. Others touched eyes for a millisecond and then never looked back.

All the employees had to be trained in proper eye contact for a salesperson.

ELLSBERG: OK, the million-dollar question. What is proper eye contact for a salesperson?

ALESSANDRA: Intermittent. You definitely want to have solid eye contact. But you should be wary of overdoing it, just as you should be wary of underdoing it.

While you might expect, in a book on eye contact, that I’d advocate making as much eye contact as possible all the time, the one thing I heard again and again from business people and sales professionals is that—in a business context particularly—you want to be just as careful of overdoing eye contact as underdoing it.

Bert Decker (www.bertdecker.com) expresses this point eloquently in You’ve Got to Be Believed to Be Heard: The Complete Book of Speaking . . . in Business and in Life!, one of the most successful and influential books on public speaking ever written. He distinguishes “involvement”—a healthy engagement with the eyes—from “intimacy” or “intimidation,” both of which are the result of too much eye contact.

He writes in his book:

Intimacy and intimidation both involve looking at another person steadily for long periods—say, ten seconds to a minute or more. In business and normal social conversations, both intimacy and intimidation make listeners feel uncomfortable. But over 90 percent of our business and social communications call for involvement. How do you achieve that “just right” level of eye connection that conveys a feeling of involvement? . . . A feeling of involvement requires about five seconds of steady eye contact. That’s about the time we take to complete a thought or sentence.1

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