Here's how you can adapt your communication style to effectively engage potential clients.

Talk to prospects, not past them! Adapt your communication for success: Read the Room: Gauge their style (formal? informal?) through body language and speech. Mirror & Match: Subtly mimic their style (within reason) to build rapport. Benefits Over Features: Focus on how your offering solves their problems. Ask Smart Questions: Uncover challenges and priorities to personalize your pitch. Speak Their Language: Ditch jargon if they seem unfamiliar. Use clear, benefit-oriented language. Become a communication chameleon and watch your closing rates soar!

Active listening is doing perspective taking and truly understanding the clients problems. If and only if you have the right solution brainstorm creatively with your client to customize the solution to optimize. If you need to augment your solution with other products, bring these into the discussion. Then you are a consultant and not a salesperson. Solve their challenges, improve there efficiencies and you have a client for life.

Understand your clients individually, they are all very different and have very different needs. Adapt your communication with them to suit their own style and keep in regular contact with updates and further questions and show interest in their business.

Find a way to speak the prospect’s language. If we need help, we want to receive it from someone who is showing clear understanding of the issues we’re encountering, has previous experience resolving them and is providing a pathway to a solution in a language that we can understand. Encourage prospects to ask as many questions as they need without feeling incompetent, but try to control the situation by answering most of them before they are even asked. Simplicity and knowledge go a long way.

Sometimes making a connection is more important than closing a client - as many clients can stem from that connection. This is where “reading the room” comes in place. Regardless of the conversation style that a client prefers, presenting yourself as a resource instead of “hard sale” will always be appreciated from my personal experience.

Adapt your solution to fit the unique challenges of your client. Take the extra time to truly immerse yourself in their world and brainstorm strategies together to become their partner in success. This sets you apart from the salespeople as a consultant partner they want to work with every time.

Be deliberate in your communication. Remember everyone views from a different lens so make sure you verify you both understand each other before progressing. If you are both on same page with perspective, goals, metrics, etc then you can meet or exceed their expectations. Make sure to not leave any stone unturned so you have only pleasant surprises.

Questions are a great way to show prospect your experience and expertise in their industry. By asking the questions that are commonly encountered in similar organizations, it’s easy to demonstrate “been there, done that” attitude which prospects tend to find reassuring. Questions also show sincere interest in their business, issues they encounter and help you see in which other way you could be a valuable resource to the prospect - even if they are not a fit for you at that moment.

Ingenuity will help you break through the noise. Iterate on everything from your email subject lines to the ways in which you show up to meetings: make yourself more than just a vendor/seller, but a real person with all of the quirks and subtleties that make you YOU. This comes with a massive disclaimer to "read the room" and be sure you're respectful of the person on the receiving end, but you win by being memorable!