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

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. But it can also be extremely effective over the phone too, if you focus on matching not just someone’s tonality, but also their rate of speech and the type of words they use, including any slang.

And before you think I’m saying something creepy about copying someone, let’s review again. You’re not copying, you’re matching them; there’s a big difference. Copying someone is called mirroring, meaning that you actually try to mirror your prospect’s physical actions in real time, as they’re doing them. If they scratch their nose, then you scratch your nose, and if they cross their legs and lean back in their seat, then you cross your legs and lean back in your seat. Now, that is creepy, and it’s also obvious, which is something I’m not a fan of at all.

But I am a fan of matching, which means that if your prospect leans back in their seat, then you lean back in your seat too, but you do it slowly, casually, after a five- or ten-second lag. In the end, it all goes back to likability—meaning that people want to do business with people who are basically like them—not different. You start that process by entering a prospect’s world where they are, which sets you up to slide into rapport. Then you want to pace them, pace them, and then lead them in the direction that you want them to go. This is a really powerful tool when you use it right.

Remember, there’s pace, pace, lead . . . and then there’s Pace! Pace! Freaking Lead! That’s the way I teach it: ninja-style, on steroids. What I mean by this is that they don’t see it coming. Don’t forget that pacing is one of those things in life that needs to be done exactly right, or else it won’t work. But when you actually do get it right, then watch out! Not only will it help get you into a super-tight rapport with someone, it will also help you change his or her emotional state from a negative one to a positive one and increase the level of certainty.

One story I like to tell about this is the time my son, Carter, came home from soccer practice absolutely furious about this kid on his team who was a major ball hog. That night, my fiancée said, “Carter is really, really upset. Why don’t you go downstairs and see if you can calm him down?”

Here’s what I didn’t do: I didn’t walk downstairs, acting all soft and sympathetic, like I was trying to calm him down. I didn’t drop my tone and say, “Listen, buddy, I know you’re really upset right now, but you shouldn’t let someone get to you like that. It’s not good for you.”

Why? Because then he’d have gotten even madder. He’d have been like, “Don’t get upset? What do you mean don’t get upset? The kid’s a damn ball hog! I hate him! Everyone hates him! He should be thrown off the team!” And then I’d say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa! Calm down, buddy. It’s no big deal. Relax for a second.” At which point he’d get even madder. He’d be like, “Bullshit! It is a big deal! I’m not gonna calm down!”

By trying to enter his world in a calm state, when he’s in an aggravated one, I’d only have aggravated him more. So, instead, I matched him. I walked in acting as pissed off and angry as he was. In fact, I acted even angrier. I said, my voice booming, “What the hell is going on, Carter? I know that bastard of a kid is a ball hog! We’ve got to do something about it right now! Should we call the coach and get him thrown off the team?”