The Psychology of Selling

Some interesting thoughts on selling vs buying and how we arrange to influence the proposition.

Selling Versus Buying  By Frank Sarr  in CustomerThink

The Premise: The “psychology of purchase” dictates that a person’s drive to buy is heightened in direct proportion to their perceived personal need for something. A buyer also reacts much more readily to specifics than to generalities. By bringing a prospect’s deeply-felt concerns to the surface, the seller can help them see the concrete, specific benefits of a product or service.

Selling the Product vs. Selling the Prospect

It has been said that people don’t buy life insurance; they’re sold life insurance. This is true in almost all sales environments including the sales of life insurance. The buy/sell dynamic typically works this way: 1) the prospect mentions a need, 2) the sales person pounces on it and 3) makes an all-out effort to convince the prospect that their solution is the only thing that can address that need.

Whether the “need” is sales training, management development, supervisory training, or something else, the seller’s immediate response is to explain to the prospect why this is a problem they should attend to, with the close being something like: “Don’t you feel it’s important to address this issue?”

Thus, the salesperson immediately attempts to “sell” both the problem and the solution. If we applied Pareto’s 80/20 rule to this scenario, the seller would probably be doing 80% of the talking and 20% of the listening. While this approach might engage the prospect, instead of promoting a sale it tends to promote an image of a fast-talking, foot-in-the-door “salesperson” rather than someone interested in understanding what their problem really is before coming up with a solution.

What the seller should be doing is engaging the prospect on an empathetic and emotional level so that the buyer can not only recognize the problem, but can also personalize it as a need.  This internal perception is what gives the prospect the incentive to commit to the solution that the seller is proposing—in other words, to become a buyer.  .... "