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A recurrent theme of my articles and in my coaching practice is that many advisors do not emphasize the right skills to persuade prospects to become clients. They focus on increasing their technical expertise, and they ignore two factors of equal or greater importance – non-verbal communication and empathy.
Let’s look at new research that backs this up.
The study
A recent study supports this assessment. Its authors, Robin Peterson, Ph.D., and James Leonhardt, Ph.D., are professors of marketing in the College of Business at New Mexico State University. They divided 192 MBA students into groups. The students were randomly assigned to one of four training conditions: nonverbal communication, empathy, both nonverbal communication and empathy or general presentation skills.
The groups were then told to prepare and present a case analysis on issues confronting a public company. The goal was to persuade the audience to accept their recommendations. Each team then presented their assessment to a faculty evaluator who had done their own analysis of the issues. The faculty evaluators were not informed about the purpose of the study. They were told to rank the presentations using items that measured various dimensions of persuasion capabilities.
The training
The nonverbal communication training included instruction on how to use body signals, like body angle, face, arms, hands and legs. Empathy training included coaching on self-awareness and “cognitive and affective similarity with others.” The combined nonverbal communication and empathy training included all of the elements from both the nonverbal and empathy training. The general presentation group served as the control condition and did not offer specific training in either empathy or nonverbal communication.
The participating students were also asked to evaluate how their training prepared them to present their case.
The core finding
The results of the study demonstrated that training in either nonverbal communication or empathy was associated with higher persuasive capabilities as evaluated by the faculty members. However, students who received training in both nonverbal communication and empathy were rated significantly higher in their persuasive capabilities. On the participants’ evaluations, this training also ranked as having the most perceived value.
Students who received training in general presentation skills ranked the least persuasive on the faculty evaluations.
This is one of the first studies to measure the effect of training in both nonverbal skills and empathy.
