4 Ways to Woo New Clients

First a few quick updates…

November is going to be a massive month! I’m kicking some things into high gear and that means a bunch of freebies coming your way {think of it like a Halloween Grab Bag O’ Treats you get to indulge in for the next 30 days – and without all the weight gain and cavities! }

• In two weeks I’m releasing the complete 100% revamped… rewritten… updated and awesomified version of my freelance product (based on the original Turbo Charged Consulting) and to celebrate I’ll be shelling out some kick ass videos and blog posts on the secrets and foundations of my consulting success.
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  Look out for strategic money-maker posts on exactly where to find hungry clients… laser-focused workshop posts on the components of your sales funnel like autoresponder emails… and the big one everyone’s been asking me for:
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  How I went from nearly broke and borderline homeless to making $100,000 in a single month… all in less than 12 months’ time!
  
• 11/11 is a special day for me. Yeah, I have a thing for numbers… {and cupcakes! } I’m planning a fun surprise for y’all on that serendipitous day so look out for that! (And no, it’s not to sell you something. I’ve got a whole other fun plan for that!)
• My 30th birthday is on 11/22. Can you believe it? ME. THIRTY. I have a very heart-felt, special announcement I’ll be making to you via video that day and I would be honored for you to be here and share it with me.
• Lastly, I’ve been invited to be interviewed on Sheila Gale’s upcoming star-studded teleseries: Your Life Is Your Message on January 4th. It’s part of a 12-week FREE series where you’ll hear from Doreen Virtue, Gregg Braden, Joe Vitale, Marci Shimoff, Arielle Ford and plenty others! So run over to this page here {do it now before you forget! It’ll open in a separate window} to get free access. The live calls are starting now and will continue into January. Definitely don’t miss these!

Okay now with updates out of the way…

Here are 4 ways you can woo new clients!

I’ll be sharing WHERE you can find new clients in about a week. I’ll teach you exactly what to say or do to open up the dialogue both online and offline in person (and without cold calling!). However in this article I want to share some tried and true tactics you can use anywhere, at any point, to woo clients (or some sexy gal or fella!) so they become your greatest fans.

These tactics are based on neuroscience, our evolutionary biology and ancient mechanisms that are largely subconscious. Also some of these are from Wyatt Woodsmall’s superb Neuro-Linguistic Programming training I attended two weeks ago. These will work in virtually any situation for any reason. Call it persuasion. Call it influence. The point is these are powerful and should be used with integrity and positive purpose.

And know that I mean this sincerely and with all the love in my heart: use any of this to hurt or manipulate someone and my hitman Bruno will be hunting ME to keep me from doing away with you.
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Woo Tactic #1: Jedi Posturing

During any in-person meeting you have with a client, subtly match or mirror their physiology and breathing. If they’re sitting beside you, match how they’re sitting, leaning, the placement of their hands and legs, the pace of their breathing and the tilt of their head. Obviously if they’re fidgeting a lot or sitting in a way you can’t match (a woman isn’t going to sit with her legs set apart as a man might), just match what makes sense. When they move, wait about five seconds, fidget to readjust yourself naturally to match their new posture.

This should be subtle and unless someone knows to look for it, most people won’t notice what you’re doing. If you’re across from them, mirror them as their opposite. If they cross their left leg over their right, cross your right leg over your left and so on.This actually fires mirror neurons in the other person’s brain and creates a feeling of comfort and “huh… i really like you.” As Wyatt so aptly put it during our training, “People tend to think they’re okay, and the more like them you are… they tend to think well you must be okay too.”

Now I learned that week that the simplest and most subtle exercises and tactics were the most bafflingly effective. Things can get so Twilight-Zone-weird that they had to give it a clinical name in NLP. They call it SWS: Scary Weird Shit. Here’s why…

During one exercise one individual closed her eyes, relaxed, and imagined her most pleasurable experience in recent history. Then her partner (the Programmer) moved into rapport with her by perfectly matching her posture, breathing, facial expression, head tilt… everything down to tension around the mouth or forehead, placement of fingers and feet. A third person (the Meta Person) observed and helped the Programmer more accurately match everything possible.

I was shocked as I moved into rapport with my partner that I started getting images of leaves falling… nature… running water and the feel of incredible relaxation and sweetness. It felt like night time and a vast expanse of a forest with water.

Turned out my partner was imagining being in a hot springs out in the forest with her boyfriend when he proposed to her and finally everything felt right and solid in her life. WTF!

Same happened as we rotated… she exactly guessed that her partner was imagining something to do with children (which I as Meta that round, NOT being in rapport with the subject, could not gather or guess AT ALL), joy and a cherished, beautiful experience. Her partner was imagining giving birth to her first son (after two girls) and being so happy that her husband now had a boy to pass on his lineage.

I’ve also noticed that when I spend a lot of time with someone, like my business partner Angela, we start to naturally and unconsciously mirror and match each others’ posture when sitting or standing… even when we’re at opposite ends of a seminar room! Give it a go and see what happens.

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Woo Tactic #2: Your Outcome is THEIR Outcome

If you’re a freelancer or coach you have likely discussed your client’s business or personal goals as part of your prospecting process or as a natural part of working with them. Here’s a great tactic for aligning yourself and your services with their chief outcome from the get-go so that working with you is a natural extension of the conversation:

Work the following questions into a conversation with someone at a networking party… or in a free consultation… or hey on the airplane or at dinner.

1. What is your primary objective or outcome right now? (If you’re specifically interested in their marketing, or their website, or you’re talking about their love life… add that specific qualifier at the end of the question.)
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   Make sure they state it in the positive. If they say “to get out of debt,” have them relanguage it as “get into positive cash flow.”
   
2. How will you know you’ve achieved this outcome? What does success look like for you? This is called an evidence procedure. You can’t measure or identify achievement of an outcome if you don’t know what that achievement could look like.
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   If they need prompting, ask them what they would see when they’ve achieved this. A certain number in their bank account? A number of customers? What would they feel? Would they hear certain comments or praise? We’re looking for tangible, quantifiable or at least identifiable evidence.
3. Do you feel that you have control and command over your outcome? For example, if their outcome is to have a better relationship with their mother… and their evidence procedure is that their mother is kinder to them, laughs more, doesn’t pick fights… they don’t have control over that.
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   So then gently encourage them to come up with evidence they can control – like perhaps they see themselves laughing more with their mother… her quips don’t affect them and they hear themselves sharing their life stories and experiences with her.
4. What do you imagine is the first step toward achieving this outcome? Here’s where you start aligning yourself and your services with their outcome. Hear what first step they imagine and agree with it, then if appropriate, share your own thoughts and experience on how they can further tackle their outcome. And this leads us to…

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Woo Tactic #3: Yes, absolutely… and

Have you ever encountered someone who was impossible to say no to and have it stick? {That is, besides those sickeningly sexy gals with black hair and green eyes }

Well you can be impossible to say no to as well. And all it requires is replacing a single word in your vocabulary. Everytime you want to say “but,” replace it with “AND.”

For example, let’s say you’re trying to land a gig and your client is voicing his objections. Agree with him (because his belief in his objections is always valid and true regardless whether the objection itself is false). And then when you state the opposite (your solution), instead of saying something like “Yes, I understand what you’re saying, but if you look at it like this you’ll see…” Say this:

“Yes, I understand what you’re saying and when we look at it like this we’ll see that…”

It’s a subtle difference AND it changes everything.

For the brain, when we hear the word “but,” it automatically creates an opposing relationship between what came before it and what comes after. We subconsciously notice that when someone agrees with us, then says “but,” what follows after must then be disagreeing with us. No bueno.

When we use the word “and” instead, the brain registers it as “in addition to” and there’s no opposition to be battled or taken down.

I saw this first hand during Wyatt’s training when my partner had to leave the room and was told that I was going to ask for a job and he had to turn me down. Under no circumstance was he to say yes. While he was out of the room I was told that whenever he voiced an objection and said no, I was to say, “Yes I completely understand and I think you should give me the job.” Or “Yes I understand and you should hire me. Will you hire me?”

You’d be shocked how hard it was for these people to say no! Several in the room who promised to say no broke down and ended up saying yes to their partners! Bow to the power of AND.

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Woo Tactic #4: Chuck Logic to the Vultures… cuz it’s dead

Have you ever tried to use logic to win a client? Or an argument against your wife? Yeah doesn’t work does it! Here’s why:

People will only do something if it:

1. Looks right
2. Sounds right
3. Feels right

This is the secret to all communication. Period. Because you will never change the way a person thinks. Thinking is optional. It’s conscious. You have to go for what is subconscious because 99.9% of what’s going on in the brain and biology of a person is subconscious. And the way to do that is to change the pictures or movie someone has in her head… the way she talks to herself and the tonality she uses. Change the way she feels in her body.

We copywriters have a feel for the power of this. Without consciously realizing it, we’re taught to create stories for our readers – to paint a picture of that wonderful future they’ll have when they buy what we’re offering… and to camp out in their worst nightmare and make it abundantly clear that we are their only way out of that mess.

So the next time someone baffles you or confuses or upsets you, instead of asking “Why are you doing that?” or anything similar… consider asking them, “What does that look like?” Once they answer, you can say, “Well what if it looked like this?” Now you’ve asserted your point of view and preference without trying to change the way they think. Instead you’ve presented a new picture. You can also substitute look for ‘feel’ or ‘sound.’

“Why?” can be a very dangerous question because it requires logic. Stick to WHAT.

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I’ll leave you with a bonus. It’s not so much a tactic as a principle for living and contributing… Again, Wyatt shared this bit of brilliance with us at the NLP conference and I deeply thank him for it:

The Essence of a Thought Leader

How we can transfer knowledge to another:

First we must assimilate what we learn. And to do that we must connect it to our experience – make it tangible. This way we don’t have to remember the information because we’ve contextualized it into the story of our life. When this occurs, what we have learned becomes understanding.

When we add to that understanding a variety and of experiences that add context, connections and contradictions to that understanding… we arrive at wisdom.