Plenty of sales gurus online will teach you ready-made, off-the-shelf sales scripts — a few slick turns of phrase to win a customer over on the spot. But faced with all the different sorts of customers out there, anyone relying only on lines learned by rote is bound to run out of road before long. The truth is that successful selling is about more than saying the right thing at the right moment; what matters more is reading a customer's overall state of mind, and from there working out where to take the next step. At the end of the day, selling is simply the process of meeting a consumer's needs through the product you are introducing. Below, we have pulled together four psychology-backed selling techniques that earn their keep across retail floors, product sales and storefront selling alike.
1. The give-and-take of reciprocity
Whenever we and our friends walk into a personal-care shop, whether it is hand cream or lip balm, the moment we spot a tester we are bound to try a little on. But have you ever wondered why, even though running them is far from cheap, shop shelves are still crammed with these testers? Part of the answer lies in the principle of reciprocity. Reciprocity is the innate human tendency to repay others in kind — whoever is good to me, I will be good to them. Under ordinary circumstances this trait helps us keep up our relationships with the people around us, and it is good for our social wellbeing. In the same way, used correctly it can help you build a lasting relationship with your customers. If you put real effort into customer relationship management (CRM) and attend conscientiously to your customers' difficulties, they are sure to repay you with higher spending and word-of-mouth recommendations.
2. Putting the liking effect into practice
If we can get customers to like our product, we are in fact already halfway to a successful sale. We can win customers over by putting the liking effect into practice through a range of strategies. One of these is to bring in a celebrity spokesperson, a strategy connected to a psychological phenomenon we have mentioned before, the halo effect — if that celebrity's positive image has won the public's hearts, then the public will also take a more positive view of the brands and products associated with that famous name, lifting the public's goodwill towards the brand along the way. The tech giant Apple is said to have used the halo effect in its sales strategy to boost consumers' goodwill towards its whole product line, increasing sales by close to forty per cent in a single financial year [1].
3. Projecting an image of authority
On top of this, cultivating an image of authority also helps drive sales. Suppose your mobile phone has broken and you are wandering through a phone shop intending to swap it for a new handset. You then notice two salespeople: salesperson A's name badge shows only a name and no job title, while salesperson B's badge shows, alongside their name, the job title Product Specialist. On this point alone, it is fair to say that many people would be more willing to listen to salesperson B's pitch. This too is the work of authority: even if A and B have exactly the same grasp of the product, the title of Specialist lends a good deal of extra "weight" to what the salesperson says, and the consumer is naturally more willing to buy.
So readers who want to master selling might do well to weave authority more creatively into every detail of your product, breaking out of the conventional frame, so as to build a brand image that is indispensable and commands respect within the trade.
4. Scarcity
As the saying goes, "rarity makes a thing precious." Humans have an innate craving for scarce things. Whether it is gold, silver and jewels, designer sports cars, or even something as abstract as time, anything can be a scarce commodity. For many people, the degree of scarcity becomes part of an object's very value. In fact, as far back as the 1970s a good deal of psychological research found that an item's rarity significantly shapes how people perceive it. Researchers found that even for one and the same item, as long as participants were told the item was very scarce, they would consider it more attractive and of better quality — and if it was food, they even judged it more delicious [2]. The same holds true in selling. Walking through the streets and side alleys, we all see plenty of shops hanging up banners reading "Final X Days — Everything Must Go," which is tantamount to telling the consumer there is a once-in-a-century bargain to be had in the shop, and that they simply must seize these last few days to help the boss break even.
But of course, carrying it off is no easy feat. Look at how many shops keep their banners up all year round yet still sit empty inside, and you will realise that applying scarcity successfully is not so simple — it involves no small number of concepts from economics and psychology. Readers keen to dig deeper into scarcity may refer to Eisend & Söllner (2015).
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References
[1] https://spinsucks.com/communication/the-halo-effect-in-marketing/
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