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

HAVE YOU EVER MET SOMEONE whom you found truly repulsive? Someone who, by their mere presence, made you feel so uncomfortable and so off-kilter that if you had still been in grade school, you’d have asked your desk partner to give you a cootie shot?

For all you non–East Coasters, a cootie shot is a make-believe injection given to you by a friend, to protect you from catching another kid’s cooties. Common symptoms of cooties include wearing flood pants, picking your nose and eating it, a love of fossils, being chosen last for sports teams, making discombobulated arm movements while speaking, and a general grossness that announces itself from at least fifty yards away. (As an aside, it’s strongly recommended that children who don’t suffer from cooties treat those who do with the utmost compassion, because there’s a 99 percent chance that they’ll end up working for one of them when they’re older.)

Whatever the case, I’m sure that, at some point in your life, you’ve all crossed paths with someone who triggered that type of visceral negative response in you. What I’d like you to do right now is think back to that very moment when you first laid eyes on that person and that gut-wrenching feeling first washed over you. You’re almost certain to find that it was not the person’s words or tonality that gave you the heebie-jeebies; rather, it was their body language. There was something about the way they looked or acted or moved their body or shook your hand or failed to make eye contact or stood too close to you that set off the alarm bell that rocked you to your core.

The bottom line is that nonverbal communication is ten times more powerful than verbal communication, and it hits you with the force of a cannonball to the gut. Things like thoughts and feelings and intentions are all communicated in the way that you move your body: by your management of space and time, your posture, appearance, gestures, the way you make facial expressions and eye contact, even the way you smell.

All of that gets processed in a microsecond when you are speaking to someone in person and they lay eyes on you for the first time. It’s not so much that effective body language will close the deal for you. What I’m saying is ineffective body language will blow the deal for you. It stops you or doesn’t allow you to get into a rapport with someone else; they are repelled by what they see.

When a person lays eyes on you for the first time, in that 1/24th of a second that their judgment indicator goes up and down, they see your face and how you move and they make a judgment. In essence, they rip you apart, process you in their brain, then put you back together and you are judged.

Either you are being judged as a person who is sharp, on the ball, someone they want to do business with, or you’re being judged as someone they do not want to do business with, which is to say: someone who repels them, someone who they perceive to not be an expert or to not be sharp or enthusiastic. All those things that you need to get in tight rapport.

Here’s a story to illustrate how repulsive negative body language can be. It happened at a seminar I gave in Sydney, Australia, one of my favorite cities in the world. I had just gone through the whole section on body language in detail, delved into all the particulars of eye contact, how you shake hands, how close you stand to somebody.

I was on that last issue of how close you stand for fifteen minutes, calling people on stage and allowing them to experience for themselves how awful it feels when someone invades your space bubble. So everyone is getting it, everyone is right in tune.

I take a short break, and as soon as I walk off the stage, some wacky Australian comes running up to me, with his thick accent, saying, “Yo, mate, mate, mate!” He gets right in my face, and I’m thinking, “Oh my god.” The guy continues to invade my space, all the while saying, “I got this thing, I got this thing, mate, mate, mate.” As I am tuning out and covering my face to stop the spit that’s being rained down on me, this guy is trying to explain his revolutionary invention called the Express Loo.

Express Loo? Turns out it’s a porta-potty for five-year-olds, and he wants to demonstrate, right then and there, how you use this little wooden thing. Anyway, long story short, he ends up corralling not just me but my Australian manager, my seminar promoter, and everyone else in earshot. In every case, he runs up to the person and gets right in their face. And every person walks away with the same exact feeling, which is: “I don’t know about his product, but I would never do business with this guy in a million years.”

The bottom line is this: body language is not going to get you the sale, but the wrong body language will destroy the opportunity to make a sale.