Change Your Body Language

• Gaurav Rastogi
• 26 Oct. 2016

Body language makes all the difference. If you’re reintroducing yourself to your clients, you need to be comfortable displaying a new body language with your clients.

A singular feat. Flash back to 2007 and the launch of the iPhone. Steve Jobs has just done his thing, launching the iPhone in his iconic style while taking the audience through a storytelling journey that went through humor, drama, tension and magic, and then he calls over a few industry CEOs to talk about the iPhone from their perspective. Google's Eric Schmidt, Yahoo’s Jerry Yang, and Cingular Telecom’s Stan Sigman came to talk. The last gentleman could have not been more different from the speakers before him. Steve was wearing his black turtleneck and jeans, and had his charming style that’s at once spontaneous (seeming), smart, and enthusiastic. The Cingular CEO was anything but these, as he walked in in a suit, kept his hands in his pockets as he spoke, and read out from cue cards all the way (see photo montage below). Stan Sigman's seven minute talk has been written about as being ‘singularly boring’, with one commentator writing “”...Stan Sigman...demonstrates how truly bad a CEO can blow a presentation by pulling out 4 x5 cards and reading the worst canned speech of all time — whoever at Cingular let this guy on the stage should be fired.” (Great analysis here)

We’re discussing how your company needs to reintroduce itself to your clients frequently to avoid being put into the “friend-zone” that might prevent access to new business opportunities. There are six steps, discussed in my post here, and we’re on the sixth step. You can read the previous steps here, here, here, here, and here.

Companies have body language too

Some companies come across as unintentionally aggressive, with long disclaimer notes at the bottom of the email, lawyers redlining every line in the contract negotiations, and executives coming in late into client meetings. These are seen as power displays by the customers, and most of the times these ‘non-verbal’ cues speak louder than words or pretty mission statements.

If you company website is hard to navigate, customers can think that you have something to hide. If your buildings are un-nessesarily showy, clients can conclude that you’re vain.

Even a Brick Wants to Be Something

In the late-90s, India had just started doing software work for global clients, and the image of the country was that of a third-world country with snake charmers and elephant riders. I began my sales career in this era, and we found that the best way to allay these fears was to take clients over to our new campus in Bangalore’s Electronics City. Once the clients signed into the security desk at the campus and walked past the metal detector door-frame, they were walking into a portal into a completely new world. The campus was beautiful and perfect, almost resort like. Each leaf tended, the granite floors all shiny, and the buildings were elegant and inviting. Perfection in practice! It was immediately clear that this is a company that pays attention to quality. One of my client told me after a tour of the campus on a golf-cart, that “I don’t need to meet your people or review your code to know that you are proud of your work and you pay attention to quality”. This is body language.

Imputed Quality

That great seer of our age, Steve Jobs, also had a few things to say about how people inter quality. Read this article. Since it’s already written so well, I'll just quote directly from the article. It uses Mike Markkula’s note on "The Apple Marketing Philosophy" that stressed three points. The first was empathy, an intimate connection with the feelings of the customer: "We will truly understand their needs better than any other company." The second was focus: "In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities." The third and equally important principle, awkwardly named, was impute. It emphasized that people form an opinion about a company or product based on the signals that it conveys. "People DO judge a book by its cover," he wrote.

"We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software, etc; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; it we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.”

That third piece, “impute", is body language.

What is your new body language?

As you’re thinking about reintroducing yourself to your clients, here are a few corporate body language markers that you should adjust to suit your new story.

• - Clothes your execs wear: Are you formal/casual, are you friendly/nonchalant, hacker-hoody/suit


• - Communication channels: Are you connecting in ways your client wants to connect? Is your website mobile-first? Are your emails readable on the phone? Are you sending boring tweets? Are your presentations look-a-like with your competitors?


• - Responsiveness: Do you send thank-you notes after a day, or never? Do you respond to client emails with a monosyllable or long form? Do you sit in silence in response to a customer email (because, ahem, your internal team Is debating how to respond and it might take a few days to get consensus)?

You might need to call in an external coach to help you with this.

"A good coach can hold up a mirror and tell you who’s the fairest of them all."

If you’re doing this yourself, there’s a risk that you’re only looking for the expected, and are willing to ignore cues that disagree with your hypothesis.

Talk with your clients.

How do they see you, what opinions they had formed of you before they signed on, and what opinions have they changed over time? This isn’t the usual customer satisfaction survey, and it’s best to be open-ended with the questioning, and receptive to the inputs. If you still can, go to prospects that didn’t convert and ask why they were turned off.

Once you have a list of your current body language, map out what needs to change for customers to naturally infer your new story. Even before they hear your words, they will pay attention to your company’s overall posturing and presence. Be intentional with this change.