In sales and marketing, first impressions count. At the beginning of any relationship, your initial behaviour creates
an impression.
This impression will be the stimulus that motivates or in many cases, de-motivates your prospect
into action.
When you launch into your initial meeting with a new prospect, do you project an image of a person who has integrity, a sense of urgency, commitment and passion? Have you established credibility up front? In other words, do you create the impression that you “really know your stuff”?
For those of you who may be struggling in the sales profession, there is a good chance that you lack the fundamental understanding of the importance of creating that first positive impression.
It’s a given that targeted prospects don’t want to establish a relationship with someone they view negatively. The more your behaviour and actions are similar to those of your prospect, the quicker you’ll establish an emotional bond. This takes quick personal observation, and deductions right up front. If possible, how about doing some quick research on the “type” of person you’ll be presenting to before that initial meeting?
First impressions, and the way we manage our impressions, is a well-researched area of social psychology, and we are not about to delve deeply into the subject here.
To keep it simple, there are four key concepts about impressions:
1. Impressions are created instantly. Immediately, you come face-to-face with your prospect, their impression management system kicks into overdrive. During the next three to five minutes, they will start looking and listening for cues that will enable them to form an opinion of you.
Unfortunately, during this process, they’ll grab a few pieces of information and then, influenced by their stereotypes, prejudices and emotional biases – not to mention cognitive laziness – they’ll fill in the gaps to draw a “mental picture” of the type of person they are interacting with. In psychology, we call this “implicate personality theory.” In other words, we tend to elaborate our impression of others based on traits we think go together. For example, John is handsome, tall (and fat or muscular); Anne is attractive, intelligent (likeable or not likeable); or Mike is outward-going and presenting well (very experienced or inexperienced).
So when you are making that first sales call or rolling out that new marketing campaign, your prospects are immediately forming an impression, irrespective of whether it’s biased or accurate, a snap judgement or a thoughtful construction – there is a tendency to rush judgements of other people.
2. First impressions die hard. This is driven by a process called the “halo effect.” Here, if your prospect judges you highly on one quality, that judgement tends to influence his/her judgement on other similar qualities.
As an example, if your prospect perceives you as highly knowledgeable about your product or service, then they may perceive you to be also intelligent, creative, a leader and to be well planned etc.
Of course, this also works in the negative. If you were late for the meeting, you may give the impression to your prospect that you are poor at planning, organising, have no urgency and are an inconsiderate person.
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