Being aware of what customers and clients are really feeling, and knowing how to react effectively, can transform a good salesperson into a great one. The best salespeople are experts at reading body language.

Here’s why this is a crucial sales skill: When you are interacting with a prospective client, you are both communicating on two levels – one verbal, one nonverbal. And while the verbal interchange is obviously important, it may not be the most important when negotiations get tricky or subtle personality complications arise.

During any kind of sales presentation, the most informative body language signals to monitor are your prospect’s engagement and disengagement behaviors. The former indicate interest, receptivity, or agreement with what you are saying. The latter show resistance, defensiveness, disagreement, and even hostility. All of these signals are revealed in a combination of eye activities, facial expressions, head movements, hand and arm gestures, torso positions, and leg and feet movement.

While it may sound like an impossible task to spot these nonverbal signals while keeping track of a complicated verbal negotiation with someone you may never have met before, remember that you’ve been reading and reacting unconsciously to body language cues all your life. What’s different now is that you’ll be taking conscious note of these signals, using them to gauge how things are going, and then making appropriate adjustment to ensure the best possible outcome.

So to begin with:

1. Watch the eyes

Having presented your prospect with two written options, you observe that his gaze lingers longer on one than on the other. If, in addition, you see his eyes open wide or his pupils dilate, you know for certain that he has a much greater interest in this option.

In general, people tend to look longer and with more frequency at people or objects they are drawn to. A person may be trying to appear uninterested, but his eyes will keep returning to the object that attracts him most.

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Forbes / Leadership