I want to just mention this basic truism of persuasion: the power is in the presentation. The power is not in the closing.

When I was a young man, I had been in sales for a couple of years and I was excelling quickly so they made me a closer. I would be the guy that when the sales person was missing his or her mark, I would come in and try to still get the sale.

I was good at it. I did really well. But after a couple of months of doing this, I began to see some patterns emerge. It was funny because each of the people that worked for me at the time, I could tell exactly where I would have to shore up their presentation in order to close the deal because I knew what they weren’t doing well.

Further, it seemed like the same people had the same patterns and I always felt, back then, that if they would just do a better job in presenting, my job would be really easy. In fact, I probably wouldn’t be needed nearly as much, if at all.

Most of the time I was able to turn it around; sometimes I couldn’t. The bottom line is, that the power of every single sale is in the presentation, not in your ability to argue or close.

My Magical Objection Mastery series, the 24 doorways into a person’s mind, enables you to persuade before the objections come with huge success in overcoming the objections that will inevitably come up in a person’s mind. Knowing how to do that kind of framing and reframing is incredibly important and there’s nothing finer in my opinion than the Magical Objection Mastery program.

There are some incredibly important characteristics of having really convinced someone. If you’ve done that, closing in the typical sense isn’t really necessary anyway.

Imagine just for a moment that you bought something that you were really happy with and the product or service worked well for you. Identify this in your mind. One you have done this, I want you to go through this list. Did you feel trust towards the person? Are you aware now as you think back about it that you didn’t have much doubt at least about the person? Did you feel an urgency to get what they were trying to sell you?

You probably had a desire for it. I’ll bet you saw the value in the product and you were visualizing owning it and benefiting from it. Buying it was relatively easy.

Now imagine for a moment that you did that and then the person started doing some kind of old fashioned closing techniques. They said, “If I can show you a way to get this and save time, energy and money, I’m sure you would be interested in doing that now wouldn’t you?”

As you hear that statement and you’re contrasting it with the good feelings you had at that time, I’ll bet you that kind of statement doesn’t sit well with you. In fact, it’d feel pretty funny if someone tried to do it to you.

If you’ve been persuasive in what you’ve presented, if you’ve been careful to observe whether or not your prospect is with you the whole way, agreeing with you, if you’ve been continuously linking to their values and more then getting the sale will be really easy.

Until Next Time,

Kenrick E. Cleveland

In a previous blog post, I gave an overview of VAK (Unraveling VAK) and it’s use in persuasion and gaining rapport. I also went into more detail about the ‘V’ in VAK in ‘Seeing the Light‘. Obviously, with a title like ‘Getting Touchy Feely, I’ve moved on to the ‘K’.

To gain rapport we have to learn how people construct and make their reality. And we have to learn how they interact with that reality. For kinesthetic oriented people, that interaction is through touch and feel.

The way you know that you’re interacting with a kinesthetic or feeling oriented person is that they tend to grasp for the way in which things are going to come across. They’ll want to bend with you and walk, step by step. They’ll often want to stick with things and grasp a hold of the kinds of things you’re going over with them. Sometimes they’ll even strain and work hard to tackle the task at hand. This is what kinesthetic oriented people do and sometimes they’ll even touch their arm or their leg and rub it while they talk. They’re kind of getting in touch with the way they feel about what’s going on. They also sometimes talk about balance and merging together and catching up.

Bill Clinton is a perfect example of a kinesthetic person. One pretty famous quote of his, which was turned into parody by his notorious predilections, was ‘I feel your pain.’ That’s the epitome of kinesthesia.

If a visual person speaks pretty quick and they’re zipping right along and an auditory person speaks a little slower and sometimes in a very sing-songy voice or in a flat monotone that you can easily detect they’re doing, then a kinesthetic person, in contrast, often speaks much slower and they struggle for the next thought.

Kinesthetic people obviously use kinesthetic words. These cover the tactile sense of feeling-hot, cold, firm, a firm touch, vibration-as well as the emotional sense of feeling-love, happiness, joy, anger.

Another thing kinesthetic oriented people do is they love to stand close so that they can reach out and touch. You can touch them on the shoulder, you can give them a hug, all within the realm of being respectful of course, but you can be right in their face. They love it. They’re not using their pictures like the visually oriented person is (at least consciously) so they don’t need to be able to see them.

That’s another major difference between the three groups that will help you to identify them. One of the biggest ways though, for me, is that they, struggle . . . for their words. . .

In contrast to visual people who look up, and auditory people look side-to-side or level, kinesthetic oriented people will look down, in general.

Along these lines, but as sort of a side note, a few weeks ago I read a story online about a junior high school student in Virginia who had been cited for two infractions by his school for hugging a friend. Why? His school has a ‘no physical contact’ policy. This includes no handshakes, no high fives, no pats on the back, no hand holding-no touching of any sort.

My initial thought was, wow, that’s really strange. Then I thought of the kinesthetic kids who might be going to that school and what a disservice is being done to them. I mean, I understand the need for clear boundaries, but no physical contact whatsoever between friends? Seems like a dangerous road to travel down.

Coming soon: Auditory Adventures.

Until Next Time,

Kenrick E. Cleveland

In a previous article, I discussed the basics of the VAK (visual, auditory and kinesthetic) representational system and it’s value in gaining rapport with an affluent clientel . In this article, I’m going to go more in depth with visual language.

What happens when a person is using visual words (bright, vibrant, shining, ‘I see what you’re saying’)? They’re remembering and processing information visually in their mind. If you hear them do it a lot, it may be their dominant sensory system and the one they’re most conscious of.

What kind of behaviors might we expect from someone who’s using predominantly visual words? People who are visual tend to speak a lot with their hands. They generally talk faster as if they’re trying to tell you all of the thousand words that a picture is worth.

Put a picture in your mind and you’re trying to describe it to me you may really get off on a roll here with your words, you’re trying like crazy to describe it and you’re talking, like sometimes people they talk really fast, even talking a little higher. The pictures are flipping through their mind at high speed and they’re trying to give you all the information that they’re seeing and they can’t quite keep up with it even.

Read that last paragraph out loud really fast and you’ve got an idea of how a visually oriented person may describe this to you.

There are a few other things that you’ll notice. They may often breathe higher in their chest. You may also notice that they need distance between you as they speak. They don’t like to stand real close to people, not too close, because what happens is you will be in their picture if you stand too close.

Try this: if you think someone is very visually oriented when you’re talking to them, just move so you’re standing really close to them and see if they don’t get uncomfortable.

You can also do some other interesting things. If you notice them looking off into space at particular areas while they talk, you could point to that space and slide it around. In other words, point to the space and then move it to some other space and watch them get confused.

Just play around a little bit with it. You’re not going to hurt anybody doing that. It’s not like you’re going to cause trauma, or anything, contrary to what others might lead you to believe. But it will start to help you understand what happens when someone is highly visually oriented.

These kinds of people can be very powerfully persuaded. When you find them, you’ll learn to love what you can do with them.

When gaining rapport it is valuable to understand the representational system that the prospect is using, but as we will discover in future articles, there’s a shortcut. For now, just see if you can identify five visually oriented people this week and notice how they speak and gesticulate.

This is only the tiniest fraction of powerful persuasion basics. To get really deep, contact Kim and ask her to tell you all about the Persuasion Factor.

Until Next Time,

Kenrick E. Cleveland