Farès Chmait, Executive CoachIn today’s fast-paced world of shorter attention spans, a seamless inbound/outbound sales strategy alone is not enough. Salespeople must prioritize genuine engagement over templated, mechanical, shorter interactions. When you have a high EQ, you can captivate the attention of potential customers by addressing the mind (rational thought), the heart (trust and credibility factor), and the wallet (ROI).
Farès Chmait is a renowned expert in emotional intelligence, negotiation, true shared leadership dynamics, and effective communication. Over the past three decades, he has transformed sales training methods and shared his insights on making sales pitches more engaging and intriguing with approximately 10,000 individuals annually across Canada, Europe, and the U.S.
Throughout his career, Chmait has observed that many salespeople focus solely on money in transactions while neglecting logic and trust—two aspects that underpin any successful deal. They often treat potential customers as mere sales targets rather than individuals with specific wants and needs. (Let’s remember that people buy for their reasons and not yours.) They rush to unsuccessful conclusions without truly listening. By fostering genuine connections and understanding, salespeople can significantly enhance their conversion rates.
The ability to build emotional connections distinguishes the best salespeople from the rest.
“Capturing every nuance and detail of communication is the key to excelling in the art of negotiation and persuasion. In my coaching sessions, I teach the art of ‘listening beyond the spoken word.’”
Chmait gives this example: A potential customer says, ‘I am not sure I can decide today.’ The salesperson hears and focuses on the word ‘today’ and would likely answer, ‘When would be a good time to discuss it?’ But Chmait points out that the key thing your target said is ‘I am not sure.’ So, the emotionally intelligent response should be, ‘What are you not sure about? What is missing to enable you to decide today or in the near future?’
“Listening beyond the spoken word is just one tool that successful sales influencers need to develop,” he says, and his coaching approaches equip them with the tools necessary to deepen connections and make every interaction count. “It can mean the difference between a record quarter and a missed target,” Chmait observes.
Mastering the Art of Persuasion
Customers today are better informed, demanding, critical, and disloyal. The way to break through their resistance, Chmait counsels, is to make them a shared leader in your process, to involve them in pacing and leading rather than over-commanding the sales cycle yourself.
His training methods empower executives and sales professionals to identify and leverage their strengths while addressing their weaknesses and limitations. This requires honest introspection: Are you fearful of rejection? Impatient? The ultimate objective is to teach them how to self-regulate emotions and stay focused even when under pressure.
Cultivating empathy and supportiveness in executives facilitates the transformation from telling to selling and makes them stand out from the rest
Regulating mood swings and overwhelming emotions is pivotal in sales and negotiation. A lost temper or an emotional outburst can make one vulnerable and affect critical outcomes. Chmait advocates for self-regulation by maintaining composure and using this in negotiations to achieve favorable and sustainable outcomes.
A common pitfall in sales is focusing on being ‘interesting’ to the client rather than being ‘interested’ in them. Chmait’s approach involves seeking to understand the why behind their needs, desires, and motivations. This shift inculcates better listening and engagement, resulting in a deeper connection with the customer.
Sessions begin with understanding the importance of open communication to increase engagement—on a deeper level— between managers and team members and between salespeople and their customers. Understanding the deep structure of language plays a key part. Chmait believes it’s essential to ‘use words that change minds’ while avoiding arguments that arise when someone simply wants to be right. He teaches a strategy he calls mental judo, where you put ego aside and redirect conversation through questioning instead of confrontation. This thoughtful approach enables his participants to uncover the root causes of objections and address them efficiently.
“Cultivating empathy and supportiveness in executives facilitates the transformation from narrating to selling and makes them stand out from the rest,” says Chmait. “At the end of training, they have exponentially higher confidence in their ability to succeed and convert leads into sales.”
The Three-Part Arc to Success
Chmait’s coaching centers around three different tenets:
Communicate Differently™ is about learning crystal-clear communication styles to avoid being misunderstood. Chmait explains scientifically why misunderstandings occur and how to avoid language pitfalls. Communicate Differently™ emphasizes the importance of being interested, adopting appropriate communication strategies for various situations, and fostering mutual understanding. Work Differently™ coaching teaches how to do the right things at the right time, streamline processes to save time, and put in place practical methods to rally teams around shared goals.
Live Differently™ involves gaining mastery over moods and emotions, understanding distinct communication styles, work ethics, and lifestyles. Live Differently™ is founded on the conviction that one can overcome any limiting beliefs (for example, discouragement or self-sabotage) via the use of ‘emotional antioxidants.’
“These three streams of development will teach you to overcome conventional sales barriers and foster a mindset of limitless potential,” says Chmait. He believes that balancing empathy with strategic thinking improves client engagement. “The ability to listen effectively distinguishes seasoned professionals from their counterparts who solely focus on executing tasks as instructed.”
A Standout Instance of Success
Chmait has achieved notable client success stories that highlight his expertise in the sales training space. In one instance, he was coaching a group of Quebec-based furniture sales professionals. After asking for a volunteer to engage in a mock sales pitch, a young man was tasked with making a sales pitch for a massage chair. The man proceeded to highlight the product’s engineering and design qualities. In the subsequent debrief, Chmait pointed out that he failed to address what truly mattered to the chair’s potential audience: its benefit in solving a problem—in this case, to reduce stress (a common adversary everyone faces). This made the pitch more appealing and highlighted the product’s immediate benefits in a way that resonated with customers. By using empathy and connection, you can transform a simple sales pitch into an engaging, memorable experience.
Transforming Sales Leadership
“It is a common human tendency to believe we are inherently limited and cannot go beyond certain boundaries, especially when we get a response such as ‘No’ or ‘I want to think about it,’” says Chmait. He focuses on transforming the internal paradigms of his participants first, before they are able to change the external world. Personal transformation helps alter one’s reality and influence the world around them, where they discover flexibility and autonomy in their choices and unlock new potential. Chmait coins this phenomenon as the ‘matrix of mind,’ which consists of our deeply ingrained, limiting beliefs. He aims to reshape these limiting beliefs and empower individuals to reach their full potential.
His seminars are replete with actionable insights and strategies anchored in the virtues of patience and an understanding of human behavior. Chmait encourages a more profound sense of purpose and fulfillment in work by illustrating how every task contributes to a greater goal, regardless of size. He envisions making these sessions more succinct and impactful to prioritize the requirements and aspirations of both parties involved and make every interaction worthwhile.
Chmait goes beyond strategies and draws upon elements that enrich human lives and bind them together. His approach to sales training infuses every transactional interchange with unprecedented depth and significance, reshaping how people engage in sales for the better.
