Nothing happens until somebody sells something. To make sales happen, IMMS.com Key Sales Consultant Randy Schwantz has created a comprehensive series of 43 Producer Success Lessons. Used singly or in combination, these powerful tools can help your producers build their skills and grow their sales.
Carpenters have a golden rule: 'Measure twice, cut once.' There’s a good reason for that. Wood is expensive and mistakes are costly. It’s cheaper to measure something twice, because you don’t get the opportunity to cut it twice. So it’s best to be very sure of where you’ll make your cut.
Our communication is made up of a number of components:
55% Physiology
38% Voice
7% Words
As you can see, it’s not so much what you say as how you say it that gives the greatest value to your communication. So we have to pay attention to and measure the subtleties of our clients’ communication to us.
Calibration plays a major role in this. Calibrating is similar to measuring well — it keeps you from making costly mistakes. To become a master at gaining and maintaining rapport, you have to learn to measure subtle differences in your prospects’ communication. Then you can match those differences and question their meaning.
THE CHALLENGE
Can you remember a time when you saw any of these changes in a client’s appearance?
- Eyes glazed over
- Skin tone tight
- Breathing temporarily stopped
- Lips thin
- Hand close to the mouth, with a finger across the lips
That’s calibrating — noticing small, specific bits of a person’s behavior or appearance.
The challenge is to become skillful at noticing and measuring (calibrating) these subtle changes without mapping your belief system onto your client. We’ve all gotten into trouble sometime by trying to interpret someone’s behavior without having enough information. Was the client who displayed the listed changes happy, sad, trying to decide how to make this deal work? Only the client knows — you don’t. Your task is to calibrate the fact that the client showed changes.
HOW IT WORKS
Calibration, as we said earlier, is noticing and measuring subtle changes in another’s behavior. Calibration isn’t 'reading' the other person, because reading another’s mind based on their behavior isn’t possible. The purpose of calibrating is to stay in rapport while finding out whether the message you sent is working. You say or do something, then observe the other person’s behavior. If you tell an executive that your coverage costs 40% more than the competition’s and his smile fades, his breathing slows, and the skin around his eyes tightens, you’d want to take note that something just went through their mind. You don’t know what yet.
Think about the behavior this lesson discussed earlier. Suppose a Risk Manager was displaying the same behavior — glassy eyes, tight skin, shallow breathing. The Risk Manager is visualizing something and thinking about some possibility associated with those visualizations.
Does this seem like a good time to interrupt the Risk Manager? Probably not. People’s minds are like computers, often needing time to calculate an equation and develop an answer when given input. If you interrupt, you’ll get an incomplete answer. It’ll probably also annoy the Risk Manager. That’s because you have broken rapport with them.
THE PROCESS
There is a specific process that can help you learn and use calibration to stay in rapport and gauge the effectiveness of your message. Here are the steps. It’s up to you to practice, practice, practice. It’s worth it!
- Notice differences, both large and subtle.
Large: Head tilt, talking speed, body position.
Subtle: Eye movements; expressions; slight head, hand, or body movements.
You’re looking for two things: what to do to maintain rapport and inconsistencies, such as saying yes while nodding no.
- Recognize that the message you sent may not have worked. Whatever you tried to communicate (or that you communicated by accident) had some impact on the other person.
- Question what the behavioral differences mean. This usually means asking the other person a question.
'I noticed you shook your head when I said that. What was going through your mind?'
'I sensed you might not be impressed with that idea.'
- Use the feedback to realign your communication and regain rapport.
- Return to Step 1.
FLEXIBILITY
So when you’re out of rapport, you have to be flexible enough to first recognize it, then do something about it. When you notice small changes in the other person, be flexible enough to stop what you’re doing and find out what caused the changes. Be prepared to alter your behavior to compensate.
EXERCISE
Practice calibrating. Start off simply. Notice large behavioral changes in areas such as head tilt, body position, or speed or tone of speech. Make it a point to ask the other person what happened or what they were thinking when they changed behavior.