200: Virtual Selling - How To Communicate Trust To The Buyer When Online

<p>When we meet people for the first time, we put them through a number of filters.  The easiest one is visual. How do they dress? What hairstyle do they have? Are they tall or short, fat or slim, beautiful, average looking or plain ugly?  The next filter is voice.  Where are they between having a deep baritone or a lilting soprano voice?  How fluently do they speak?  Do they have an accent?  Accents are interesting, because they indicate where they grew up. We can then fit them into our preconceived notions about what people are like from that place.  In some cultures, we can also work out their education level from their accent and then transpose our presumptions about how intelligent they are.  If you ever want a demonstration of this, just search for audio of Donald Trump having been over dubbed with a pseudo Oxbridge accent.  He often claims he is a stable genius, but he actually sounds much more intelligent when you hear him with that dubbed posh accent.  The remaining filter is the content of what they are saying and this comes last, after all of these other biases and prejudices have had a field day.</p> <p>When we are online we have to pay attention to a lot of factors which determine our first impression.  This is tricky, because the quality of the audio on most of these online platforms is very poor.  Additionally, we can be trapped in a little box on screen, which negates a lot of our body language and appearance.  You may have heard that body language is the biggest proportion of our first impression with others.  Fake news!  The original study in the 1960s by Professor Albert Mehrabian split the first impression into this breakdown:  55% appearance and body language, 33% tone of voice and 7% your words.</p> <p>While a lot of self-proclaimed “experts” quote these statistics, they neglect to include Mehrabian’s important caveat.  He said these splits only apply when we are not congruent.  By this he meant, when the words coming out of our mouth, don’t match up with the expression on our face, our body