Use Eye Contact Effectively in Sales
When used properly, eye contact can help you establish fast rapport, build trust, and close more sales. But if used inappropriately, eye contact can serve as a turnoff for your prospects, resulting in fewer closed sales. Here are some excellent guidelines to help ensure that you use eye contact properly, especially in sales presentations and face-to-face communication with prospects.
Steps
- Be natural. If you try, you can think back to a time when you had an in-person conversation with someone who made you uncomfortable. It might have been something as simple as a gaze that was too intense, or perhaps they were standing too close to you. More than likely, you wanted to get out of that conversation as quickly as possible, and had no desire to engage in conversation with them again. What was missing in their communication and body language was a sense of being calm, relaxed and natural.
- Don’t stare. Remember, eye contact is a natural occurrence between two people who are engaged in conversation. Making eye contact does not mean staring at the other person. It is natural to make eye contact sporadically, as opposed to looking into your prospect’s eyes throughout the entire encounter.
- Remember to smile. Unless it’s a serious or dramatic part of your conversation, you should smile while making eye contact. A natural smile will help you to keep your eye contact authentic and appropriate.
Tips
- Even actors must actually put themselves at ease in order to appear relaxed and “natural.”
- In addition to using proper eye contact, it makes sense to incorporate appropriate audiovisual support in your sales presentations.
- Notice how you naturally use eye contact in conversations with non-business associates (people with whom you feel very comfortable) and apply these same mannerisms in your conversations with prospects.
- Eye contact is also important during key moments in a conversation, including: when you are making your sales pitch or call to action, when you are listening to the prospect tell you their issues or needs, and when you are wanting to gain their trust.
- When you are being natural, you will find that eye contact is not something you have to think about or practice – it just comes easily.
- Being natural is as easy as just relaxing and being yourself. This is not something that can be faked!
Warnings
- When you focus on pushing eye contact to create more of it, the other person can actually feel as though you are invading their personal space, which is most unpleasant!
