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The words that you use with customers and prospects are your strongest and most important tool despite what some “experts” say.

Albert Mehrabrian of UCLA wrote a couple of books in the early 1970’s that addressed the issue of body language in communication. The idea that 7% of interpersonal communication is verbal and the other 93% is nonverbal is said to come from the research he did and published in these books. The reality is that people have radically misinterpreted his research and have erroneously applied it. Despite his efforts to correct the misinterpretations there are still many “professional” speakers, consultants and trainers who cite his research to point out that our words only account for 7% of our interpersonal communication. What a bunch of nonsense.

Here’s the common sense test:

1. If words were only 7% of communication then we really would never have to learn a foreign language; we could just watch someone’s body language and understand 93% of what they were saying.
2. If words were only 7% of communication then we would only understand 7% of the content from radio, books, magazines, websites and newspapers.
3. Telephones would only be 7% effective if we couldn’t see the other party’s body language.
4. Airline pilots, taxi drivers, police and fire departments would only be able to understand 7% of the instructions given to them over their mobile radios.

You get the idea. To think that we get only 7% of understanding from the actual words we use is totally ridiculous as is shown above. Do yourself a favor and pay attention to all the words that you use when selling. Your words do in fact communicate the vast majority of your message and your body language only modifies that message.

Tags: language

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