Chapter Four: The Psychology of the Sale

This is part of a series of posts from my forthcoming book "The Art of Telesales". All material is copyrighted and all rights reserved. Please see "Telesales" under "Post Categories" for more in the series.


Chapter Four: The Psychology of the Sale

Too Good to be True

Has anyone ever offered you something that just seemed too good to be true? What did you do? If you are like most people you probably assumed that it WAS too good to be true and refused to have anything to do with it. This is because when they offered it to you, they failed to understand and follow the basic principles behind the psychology of the sale.



You see the thing with people, humans, is that we have only really, in evolutionary terms, just come down from the trees. Technology beyond the everyday Joe’s understanding we may have in spades, but we still have a primeval inbuilt sense that alerts us to any potential danger and we tend to follow this because it was not too long ago that if we did not heed its warning, we may well have ended up getting eaten if we were unlucky.

This inbuilt warning system constantly checks everything around us for any signs of danger. It has learned to identify anything that is new as potentially hazardous. Incidentally, this is the main reason why most people dislike change. However, we live in an advanced society now and our inner warning system sometimes holds us back when in reality we would be better going forward.


“No thank you, you might be a hungry lion!”

So what has all this got to do with sales and specifically telesales? The answer is that it has everything to do with sales but even more so with telesales. When you speak to a complete stranger on the telephone, their inner warning system is automatically in a heightened state of awareness because they do not know who you are or what you want with them. If you do not learn to manage this then all you will ever experience is a bunch of “no thank yous”. What these really are is each person’s inbuilt warning system telling them that something about your call does not seem right so let’s have nothing to do with it, thank you very much.

The problem is that most people will never tell you this and so you come away from the call none the wiser. They may say any number of things to you, (these are covered in the section on objections), but they will not tell you the truth which is that inside they have been put into fight or flight mode and so they are choosing the latter. In reality, all that happened was that the sales person neglected to reassure the prospect’s inner defence mechanism that there was no threat.


The first seven seconds

You may have heard it said that people make up their mind about you on the telephone in about seven seconds. I do not claim any empirical knowledge of this; however, it is abundantly clear that the reason behind it is the inner defence system. If we can reassure this that we pose no threat then we stand a very good chance of getting our full presentation out, which in turn, gives us the best possible chance of securing a sale.


Face to Face Sales Versus Telesales

The advantage that the face to face sales person has is that, at this stage of the process, they are only usually asking for an appointment with the potential customer. The person on the other end of the telephone, even if they have some doubts, is likely to agree to a face to face meeting if they have interest in the product because they can take advantage of the time in between the call and the meeting to research your company and check out you and the competition. Then, any doubts they still, have can be ironed out in the meeting itself.

As a telesales person, you do not have this advantage. If the prospect has any doubt at all they will have none of you. The advantage you do have though is that you have far better numbers in terms of potential chances to secure a sale than a field sales person, but that is another story.


The Sales Pyramid

So, before we learn how to handle the prospect’s defensiveness, and indeed the whole psychology of the sale, let us first look at the sales pyramid. Fig. 1 is the sales pyramid which is a model of the perfect sales call. We will return to the sales pyramid again so please take time to understand it in its simplest form.

Image to be added soon!

Fig. 1


In Fig. 1, we can see that where the Y and the X axis intersect, i.e. at the beginning of the call, there is no impulse to buy. This is obvious to almost anyone. We further see that, in the perfect model, as time progresses, the impulse to buy greatly increases until it reaches its zenith. This would be the time to close the sale, but we shall come to that later. Beyond that point, the impulse to buy starts to wane. This is one reason that many sales calls fail. If you do not close when you get the buying signals, essentially you have missed your chance and it becomes increasingly difficult to get a positive result.

That the impulse to buy subsides is not a bad thing, though. In actual fact we depend on it doing so, assuming we have closed the sale before hand, so that we may consolidate the sale properly. At this point, if you do not understand terms such as ‘consolidate the sale’, do not worry, they will be explained in due course. Simply be content with knowing that the impulse to buy will naturally rise and fall over the duration of the call.

Next let us look at what things must happen for the graph to behave in the ideal manner:


Steps to the Sale

There are certain steps that you must take in order to ensure that the prospect allows you to pitch to them. It is by understanding and following these steps that we learn to reassure the potential customer’s inner defence mechanisms that we are actually trying to help and not harm them.

We will deal with each step in turn but in brief they are:

• Rapport
o We must establish a rapport with the prospect.
• Reason
o We must establish a clear and valid reason for the call
• Credibility
o We must establish the credibility of ourselves and our company to the prospect

Another way of saying this is to say that we must establish:

i. who we are,
ii. what we want, and
iii. why the prospect should deal with us.

Ideally, if you have been given a pitch to work with, these should be part of it already, but if they are not then please ensure that you make them so.

I think at this point it is time to discuss something that is, unfortunately, a prevalent practice among many companies that employ telesales professions. That is the practice of misleading the potential client. Examples of this come in all sorts of guises but examples include being told to infer that you are calling on behalf of some official agency such as the government or the local council or any of the emergency services. In addition, you may be told to pretend that you are carrying out some form of survey or customer satisfaction to lull the potential customer into a false sense of security. Indeed, there are as many of these types of ‘blind’ as there are people to think them up.

Let me make one thing absolutely and perfectly clear. Not only do they not work, but they are actually counter productive to the sales process. Why? For exactly the same reasons I have just gone into depths explaining; namely the prospect’s inbuilt defences. Yes, you did hear that correctly, this is the exact reason that these ploys do NOT work. That may sound strange to you, especially if you currently work in a job that asks you to do one of these things. It is also true to say that it is the reason that companies ask you to say these things in the first place. They ask you to say them precisely because they are afraid that people will not want to speak to you if you tell them the truth about who you really are.

I have worked in positions where this was the case and in every one I found that I invariably sold far more than my colleagues that used the lies when I did not. Now, please, do not let me come across here as some holier than thou ‘you must always tell the truth’ type of sales person because I absolutely am not. To be brutally honest I used as much salesman’s licence as the next man. I say that these lies do not work because I have tested them time and time again against the truth and every single time found that, in the long run, you sell more and feel better about yourself by NOT misleading potential clients.


Please note that this chapter is incomplete. The remainder will be added in due course.