Virtual Events and Love Languages.
This week my full-time job hosted it’s yearly conference for real estate agents. Because of COVID, we had to do the event virtually this year. We knew that no matter how hard we tried it would not be the same. As we sat down at a Mexican restaurant re-capping the event, we knew something was missing this year.
About a half hour later we realized moved to the topic of relationships and Love languages. I do not know if anyone else at the table connected the two topics. While many of us sat at the table taking the online assessment to see what our relationship love languages were, it dawned on me. That is what we were missing.
Gary Chapman’s book The 5 Love Languages became a bestseller for good reason. It gave people a easier to understand path to better relationships through understanding.
In the book, Chapman says there are five ways a person can show affection. They are words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service and physical touch. Each of us have out own preferred methods to both give and received affection from others.
The great thing about these is that they give us a template to let a customer feel like we care about them. We should, as much as possible, try to embrace each of these ways to show affection whenever possible with out products and services. Sure, all the content we have always produced was still there. We still had a bunch of new clients sign up at the end and praise from the people who attended. But even with all the positive social media posts, we knew we were missing something.
Being in-person gives you the ability to speak two love languages that virtual events do not allow. If the event is only hosted online, you are not able to give people personal touch or quality time.
Yes, you can try to take a moment to acknowledge people in order to give them quality time, but it is not the same as being one on one, shutting out all distractions, and giving a person your complete focus.
Our event was a massive success, but we know that there are people with two major love languages we were not able to fully engage the way we normally would.
As a salesperson or sales manager, it pays to keep these five things in mind. The more “languages” you can speak the more cared for a customer will feel.
Be sure to do the little things like sending the extra thank-you email (receiving gifts). Be confident enough to give them a good handshake and a pat on the shoulder (personal touch). Go out of your way to make sure you are not disturbed on your sales calls (quality time). Be sure to connect them directly to the people who can help solve their problems, even if it is someone outside your company (acts of service. Or simply tell them how much you have enjoyed spending time with them (words of affirmation.) You can do most of these things regardless of what kind of business you work in.
By going out of your way to make sure you speak each of these languages you can increase your customer conversion rate.