More Psychology of Selling

[Note: This is part of a chapter from my forthcoming book “The Art of Telesales”.]

That the customer is always right has become a modern day cliché. In his seminal work, “How To Win Friends And Influence People”, Dale Carnegie stated that if you want to get people on your side you must never argue with them. This is especially so for a salesperson, but why is this? Surely the whole idea is to persuade the prospect to your way of thinking, isn’t it?

The answer is that, as salespeople, we are not trying to get people to think that we are right and that they are wrong. If this was the case we would never get a sale. The times when we do prove a potential customer wrong, we will invariably NOT get the sale. They will resent us for highlighting their folly. If this is the case, then what is our role? ...



Our role as sales people is to present our product or service in such a way that the prospect can not, reasonably, say no to us. That is all there is to it, really. We must be guides and ushers at best – or at least that is how we must be seen to be.

I remember once, when I was fairly new in sales, I was out on a corporate night out. At the time I was selling alternative supply maintenance agreements on telephone switchboards. I happened to get talking to a rather attractive lady that was not part of our company but happened to be at the same venue as us. The subject turned to what we did for a living. I mentioned what I did and she exclaimed, in delight, that she was a sales trainer for her company. Jumping at the chance to learn, I offered to give her my pitch so that she could give me some pointers. She readily agreed.

During my pitch, it turned out that she also happened to be the person in her company that made decisions regarding their switchboard. Anyway, it was not long before I had her ready to be signed up as a customer. She was just about to give me her work number so that we could sort the paperwork out the following Monday morning, when she suddenly said "Oh, weren’t you going to give me your pitch, by the way?” To which I replied, “I just did!”

That was the exact moment where our blossoming relationship and my chance at a sale ended. It seemed that she was not impressed at all by my revealing that our whole conversation had been a sales pitch. It took me a long time to work out why, but the reason is simply that it showed her up to be foolish and naïve and also not a very good sales trainer, to boot!

The moral of this story is that, contrary to popular opinion, real salespeople are not wide boy Jack-the-lad types who can beat everyone in sight with their skill at rhetoric. What we are is highly skilled manipulators. If people can see your technique then you are not delivering it correctly.

How does this transfer into an actual sales situation, then? Well, the most important place is in objection covers. If someone raises an objection, what is the first thing you should do? Do you spend the next few sentences explaining exactly why they are wrong? NO! All that would happen is that the prospect will go into ‘fight or flight’ mode. They will either end up hanging up on us or getting into a verbal brawl. Both ways we lose out, in sales terms anyway. Be constantly on guard for this. Our task is to deliver our pitch in a way so as never to prompt the ‘fight or flight’ response in our potential client.

So, given an objection, therefore, what you do, first and foremost, is this:

Agree with the objection!

I do not care whether they have just come out with the most ridiculous statement ever, (we will go into how to deal with that later). Your line is simply and almost invariably:

“I appreciate that…”

Notice how, in terms of martial arts philosophy, we are like water; we are pliable, yielding, soft and playful even, yet when the time is right we can unleash devastating power. This is the art of sales at its very core. Remember the old saying, ‘no one expects the inquisition’? That was what gave it such power; the fact that no one expected it. We must be just like this – no one expects a good salesperson because all they ever see are the bad ones. When they do come across a good one, they do not even know it because all the customer thinks is that they merely spoke to a really friendly and helpful person who helped them buy what they wanted. The prospect never knew what hit them. It is probably true to say that the greatest salespeople are like cats toying with their prey, for only when they are absolutely certain that there is no more fight left in the quarry, will they go in for the kill.

The real question, though, is how we turn them round after agreeing with them. The answer to this is revealed in my book, "The Art of Telesales".