Notes on Selling - One

by Greg Woodley

This is the first in a series of articles regarding the sales process. The ideas for this article come from The psychology of Persuasion - Robert Caldini.

Firstly, in order to fully comprehend the process of persuasion (and sales), we need to understand some basic concepts, or principles, of persuasion. These concepts will provide the foundation for persuasion. I will cover each in more detail over the coming weeks.

#1 LAW OF RECIPROCITY -- when someone gives you something of perceived value, you immediately respond with the desire to give something back. (Notice the law does NOT say that someone will automatically reciprocate when given something. It says they will desire to give something back.)

#2 LAW OF CONTRAST -- when two items are relatively different from each other, we will see them as more different if placed near together in time or space.

#3 LAW OF FRIENDS -- when someone asks you to do something and you perceive that person to have your best interests in mind, and/or you would like them to have your best interests in mind, you are strongly motivated to fulfil the request. People will do almost anything that is asked of them by a friend. Clearly, as a persuader, you MUST BE PERCEIVED AS A FRIEND if you are to be successful in the persuasion process.

#4 LAW OF EXPECTANCY -- when someone whom you believe or respect expects you to perform a task or produce a certain result, you will tend to fulfil their expectation whether positive or negative.

#5 LAW OF ASSOCIATION -- we tend to like products, services or ideas that are endorsed by other people we like or respect. If we like the people connected with a product, we tend to have positive associations in our minds of the products they endorse. Regardless of product quality, because of the endorsement, we often will buy a product the first time based on celebrity endorsement. (The second time around is another story and will be dealt with later.)

#6 LAW OF CONSISTENCY -- when an individual announces in writing or verbally that he is taking a position on any issue or point of view, they will strongly tend to defend that belief regardless of whether the belief is accurate even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

#7 LAW OF SCARCITY -- when a person perceives that something they might want is limited in quantity, the person perceives that the value of what they might want is greater than if it were available in abundance.

#8 LAW OF CONFORMITY -- most people tend to agree to proposals, products or services that will be perceived as acceptable by the majority of other people or a majority of an individual's peer group

#9 LAW OF POWER -- people have power over other people to the degree that they are perceived as having greater authority, strength or expertise

Some of these, if not all, would be very familiar to you. What may surprise you over the coming weeks is the magnitude of the effect they have on us.

Did you know that ...."BECAUSE".... is a very powerful word?

An experiment by Harvard social psychologist Ellen Langer.

A well known principle of human behaviour says that when we ask someone to do us a favour we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do.

Langer demonstrated this unsurprising fact by asking a small favour of people waiting in line to use a library-copying machine:

Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I'm in a rush?

The effectiveness of this request-plus-reason was nearly total: 94 percent of those asked let her skip ahead of them in line.

Compare this success rate to the results when she made the request only?

Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine?

Under those circumstances, only 60 percent of those asked complied.
At first glance, it appears that the crucial difference between the two requests was the additional information provided by the words "because I'm in a rush."

But a third type of request tried by Langer showed that this was not the case.

It seems that it was not the whole series of words, but the first one, "because," that made the difference.

Instead of including a real reason for compliance, Langer's third type of request used the word "because" and then, adding nothing new, merely restated the obvious:

Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to make some copies?

The result was that once again nearly all (93 percent) agreed, even though no real reason, no new information, was added to justify their compliance.

Now why would BECAUSE prove to be such a powerful word ?

Well, do you remember when you were a child and like most children at some stage you would have become obsessed with the question "Why?",

"but why mummy?" and repeated the question endlessly. Now mum probably answered for a while, until she had had enough, at which point she probably said " OH ! Just BECAUSE ...."

Greg Woodley is an NLP Master Practitioner who has spent over 20 years in Sales. Greg is also a successful life coach and corporate leadership trainer. He can be contacted via phone on +61-4627-6582 or
gregwoodley@aol.com