When a marketing consultant meets with a potential client, does it matter who sits and where? The male-to-male or male-to-female and female-to-female seating arrangements are very important.

Here’s why this is so important …

Let’s first talk about the most important aspect of sitting, which is this:

If you are working with a right-handed person rather than a left-handed person, you will want to go to their right.

The reason is that it activates their left brain more when they look at you. Your left brain is a little more logical, it’s a little more linear, and you can convince yourself through logic and rational thinking.

The right brain is a kind of storehouse for emotional memory, autobiography, feelings, all that sort of thing.

And all of that is great, but you really don’t want to trigger all those emotional feelings and all of that when you meet someone at a sales presentation because if you do, you will probably trigger bad feelings and bad memories. .

Most people’s most powerful emotions are negative, and that’s a shame, but it really is. So the first thing you should do, no matter who you are, is try to turn to the right, if you are right-handed.

If you are dealing with men, it is probably best not to be too close. Men want to have about 6 feet between them.

So if you have a choice between a small table and a large booth, you have to go for the large booth.

If you have a choice between a booth and a table about 4,5,6 feet where people are further apart from each other, you want to do that.

If you are at a small table, men will be very uncomfortable. Men are very adversarial, so if you can do your presentation at a right angle, in other words, the man is in position A and you are on his right at 3:00, that’s ideal.

So you’re at a 90 degree angle and your justification is so you can show him your portfolio or your PowerPoint presentation or whatever you want to show him.

You don’t want to be too close to him, but you don’t want to be directly on the other side of the chessboard either, because men are very confrontational.

Women, on the other hand, are like creatures of relationships. They want to be directly in front of each other and talk and look at each other. They have enormous and prolonged eye contact; they like to be much closer than men.

A woman can be 4 feet in front of another woman or 3 1/2 feet in front of another woman if she likes it and there is no problem with that.

Head-to-head works best.

Interestingly for women they can also be side-by-side, very close, and can successfully have a sale made from a side-by-side presentation. However, you can’t do that with a boy; It will not work.

By the way, this is a partial dependence on contact.

If you’re in a sports arena, if you’re at a baseball game and you’re sitting next to a guy, you can talk business and close the deal, no problem.

But if you get a chance to be in a different place, like I could be further away from this guy, I can’t do that at the ballpark. If I go to the Cubs game, I sit in the seat next to him and we can do business right there because we’re guys and we know it’s cool and we don’t purposely sit next to each other.

We are not too close to each other. But women can intentionally sit next to each other and actually do business that way, almost as easily as they do face-to-face.

As a marketing consultant, you want to create the most responsive environment possible when giving a presentation. Get to a meeting early so you can strategically plan where to sit and set yourself up for success.