How to instantly connect with anyone

The primary function of the amygdala in the human brain is to alert us to threats to our survival. Whenever a person goes into a retail environment where there is an expectation that they will be sold to. Be it a car dealership, jewelry store, or a cell phone dealer, their fight or flight response is automatically triggered. It is the job of the salesperson to neutralize that fight or flight response as quickly as possible by building a rock-solid connection and making the prospect feel safe and cared for. Tall order huh? Not necessarily if you know the right things to do. Today I am going to give you 5 keys to building an instant and lasting connection with anyone. Let’s go on a journey and discover what those things are.

Make a strong first impression

On the phone, you have about 4 seconds and in person, you have a quarter second before your prospect chews you up and spits you out and makes an initial judgment about you whether they want to work with you or not. Like it or not we do judge a book by its cover regardless of what your mom or teachers in school might have said. Its that initial judgment about the way you look, the way you carry yourself, what you wear, and the first words out of your mouth that will create the first images in your prospects mind about who you are as a person and if they want to work with you. Guess what? If you screw it up it takes about 7 other contacts to change a negative first impression. I don’t know about you but I have never been given 7 opportunities to make up for a bad first impression.

Now sales at its core is a transfer of emotion. That emotion is a certainty. Certainty about you as an individual. Certainty about the product or service. Certainty about the quality of the company you are representing.

Now when it comes to you as the salesperson you have to demonstrate 3 things to your prospects in the first few seconds of the encounter.

The first is you must be perceived as sharp as a tack. You need to know what’s going on. You have to be perceived and act like someone who can help the prospect out.

The second is you are enthusiastic as hell. I don’t mean bouncing off the walls. I mean you have bottled up enthusiasm and you are excited about what you are selling.

The third is you are an expert in your field. You are the person that people come to when they have questions.

Now you don’t achieve this by running up to the person and telling them hey I’m sharp, I’m enthusiastic, and I’m an expert. No, that scares people. You do it through your body language, how you present yourself and what you say.

Match and mirror

Words don’t always work, do they? Matching and mirroring are what build rapport. You have a conscious mind and a subconscious mind. The subconscious is more powerful. It’s what allows your heart to beat 100,000 times a day without thinking about it. If you can influence your subconscious mind you can change anything. Most people try to create rapport by using words. What percentage of our communication are words? 7% which means that you are leaving out 93% of your skills. Which is why most don’t get rapport with a large number of people. You can get instantly connected to someone by mirroring their tone of voice while talking over the phone. If your prospect has a loud commanding voice and you have a soft mouse voice then the prospect is not going to feel connected to you at all. In fact, they will be looking for every excuse imaginable to get off the call with you. Matching the words someone uses is another way to gain instant rapport. If a prospect talks about a “magnificent” opportunity and you talk about it as a “fantastic” opportunity you have broken rapport. If you mirror their words, they will feel heard and they will feel understood. The two words may sound the same to you but they are totally different from your prospect.

A fun exercise to see matching and mirroring in action is to go to a bar and people watch. Try noticing a couple talking. If they are in deep rapport, they will begin to match each other’s body language. If one leans in the other will lean in. If one leans away the other leans away.

Use their name

The sweetest sound to anyone ears is the sound of their own name. That is unless it’s followed by your middle name and it's coming from your mom. Then it’s a feeling of terror because you screwed up. Nothing will make a person feel more cared about than if you remember their name and repeat it often. That doesn’t mean you need to say it every sentence. It means using it enough throughout the conversation to emphasize that you are paying attention and hearing your prospect.

Turn off your inner voice

People tend to have around an 8-second attention span and it's probably shorter than that today because everyone is sucked into their phones and receiving instant gratification all day long. Listening is also hard because were often consumed with ourselves. It is really hard to walk into a conversation without my agenda being written on my forehead and your agenda written on yours. 

I’m going to give you my top 3 tips to be a better listener.

1.     Listen to learn not to be polite

Often whether realizing it or not, people listen to each other out of generosity not out of curiosity. Listening is good but the intent has to be curiosity, not generosity. True dialogue does not happen when we pretend to listen, and it certainly can’t happen if we are not listening at all. Every day ask yourself, what am I going to be curious about? How many things am I dead wrong about? Both questions effectively open your ears. It is about having a beginner’s mindset walking into a conversation.

2.     Quiet your agenda

While you can’t control someone else’s listening habits you can control your own, and that involves quieting your own mind. Turn off those agendas and really listen to what someone else is trying to say. We need information that is disconfirming, not confirming. If we ever finish a conversation and learned nothing surprisingly, we weren’t really listening.

3.     Repeat back what you heard.

A number of problems interfere with people’s ability to understand accurately what another person is trying to communicate. Am I anticipating what the other person is about to say? Do I agree or disagree with what’s being said? Maybe I am agreeing too quickly and upon reflection I find myself disagreeing later. Put simply there’s more opportunity to misunderstand that there is to actually understand. Implement a process called active listening. The basic concept is repeating back to the speaker what you heard.

Seek out a deeper understanding

There is an inverse relationship between someone's action threshold and their pain threshold. Meaning without any other variables presents the higher someone’s pain is the lower their action threshold is. The lower someone’s pain is the higher their action threshold is. In reality, we all have different levels of action thresholds. Some are easy to sell to and some are difficult to sell to.

What the action threshold represents is the level of certainty that a prospect needs to be at before they buy. High certainty equals low action threshold. Low certainty equals high action threshold. We usually measure the thresholds from 1-10.

The pain threshold is when someone is feeling pain in their lives about something. Money, business, relationships. People with a high enough level of pain will begin to seek out ways to eliminate that pain.

If you can identify someone's pain you can lower their action threshold.

It is critical to uncover where the pain is. We do this by digging deep into the three levels of pain. Which are 1. Surface pain 2. Business/Financial pain 3. Personal pain. The surface pain is usually the generalized reason for the appointment in the first place. Business/Financial pain is how the problem is affecting the business as a whole. Personal pain is how the problem is affecting you as an individual and your family.

Once you have identified the pain and brought it to the surface you will be able to lower the action threshold. Boom you are able to take a really tough buyer and turn them into an easy buyer with a low action threshold.