Way of the Wolf: Straight Line Selling: Master the Art of Persuasion, Influence, and Success by Jordan Belfort

Author:Jordan Belfort [Belfort, Jordan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: North Star Way
Published: 2017-09-26T07:00:00+00:00

Active Listening and the Art of Matching

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Before we dive more deeply into pacing and matching, let’s discuss another important concept: active listening. This is a way of listening to someone that helps you actually build rapport with them. One of the greatest misconceptions about tonality and body language is that they only come into play while you’re the one doing the talking. In fact, how you move your body, the facial expressions you make, how you smile, and all those little grunts and groans you make as someone’s talking to you—those are all part of the technique I call active listening, and it’s a powerful way to get into a rapport with someone.

Let’s start with something as simple as nodding your head while your prospect is speaking. When you nod your head, it shows that you get what that person is saying; that you’re on the same page. The same thing goes for facial expressions, like when your prospect starts talking about something that’s very important to them. You want to look straight into their eyes, with your own eyes narrowed a bit, and with your mouth crooked to the side. Then you add an occasional nod, along with a few ahas! and yups! and I got its!

Now, if that was my body language while you were explaining your problems to me, what would you think about me? Would you think that I was really listening to you? That I truly cared?

Yes.

There are other facial expressions too—like compressing your lips and lowering your head a bit, which implies sadness, or compressing your lips and nodding your head slowly, which implies sympathy and empathy. The master of this type of body language is President Bill Clinton. Back in his prime, he was the absolute best. He’d shake at least a hundred hands a day, and he had only a split second to earn someone’s trust, and he could do it every time. It seemed that from the second when he shook your hand and you fell into his magnetic zone, you got the feeling that he really cared about you. That he felt your pain.

As for the audible cues, the ahas! and yups!, they’re more effective at maintaining rapport than actually building it. They let the prospect know that you’re still on the same page with them; that you get what they are saying. The audible cues are even more important when you’re on the phone and don’t have body language to rely on. In that case, those little grunts and groans are the only way to stay in rapport with your prospect while they’re talking.

When you’re in person, though, you can also use matching—essentially adopting the same physiology as your prospect to slide into rapport with them. Some examples of this are the position of their body, their posture, and also their breathing rate. Even how fast they blink can be matched.

Matching is an incredibly powerful tool for getting into a rapport with someone, especially when you’re in person and you can match both body language and tonality.

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