259 Three Simple Persuasion Techniques (proven by science)

You are listening to the art of sales. Everyone sells every day, and this is your source for conversational, real-world sales and prospecting methods that you are comfortable using and that get results. You'll help people buy instead of pushing them into being sold. Here's your host, Art Suppcher. I attribute pretty much everything I've accomplished to being curious. That's because for my entire career, I've always proactively sought out information that can help me and others be more effective at communication and sales. So my regular routine still involves scouring the internet and reading countless hard copy publications and books, articles, listening to audio and video, looking for sales and an influence and persuasion, negotiation, and other types of information that can help us in sales. Like came across Vanessa Van Edwards and her site ScienceOfPeople.com, which I recommend, she's an author and behavioral investigator. And her bio says she's a professional people watcher, speaking, researching, and cracking the code of interesting human behavior for audiences around the world. I guess I do the same thing for sales. Well, I pulled a few interesting persuasion ideas from some of her great articles, which are backed by science. And I've adapted them a bit for sales. And I'm going to share these with you right now. So I've got three of them. Number one is start with a bang. One study that she cited tried to figure out how to increase room service tips for waiters in hotels, everything is sales, right? They found there was a super easy thing waiters could do to increase their tips. All they had to do was start with a positive comments. That's not too difficult, right? When hotel guests opened their door, waiters said, good morning and gave a positive weather forecast for the day. Just that one positive comment increased their tips by 27%. So how can this help you? Well, never start a call by talking about bad weather or bad traffic or how busy you are always begin with a positive comment or anecdote, great weather, fun weekend, plans for the next weekend, favorite sports team winning a game. This gets you off on the right foot and frames the rest of the conversation in a positive light. Next, don't self sabotage. And one of the biggest self sabotage mistakes is speaking negatively about a competitor. Research has found something called spontaneous trait transference. They found that whenever you say bad things about someone else, people can't help but put those same traits on you. The brain can't help but associate your gossip with you. Even if logically, we know you're talking about another person. So if you say your competitor has a little quality or unreliable, they have downtime, or potential client can't help but associate those things with you. No matter what, when it comes to gossip, always say no comment or I really don't know for sure about them, but I can tell you what we do. And finally, number three, use awesome labels. When you assign someone a positive label, like having high intelligence or being a good person, that actually causes them to want to live up to that label in one study about fundraising. Researchers told average donors that they were in fact among the highest donors. And then guess what happened? Those donors then did in fact donate above average. We live up to or want to live up to our positive labels. So when you're talking with a customer or potential customer, give them genuinely good labels. Never be fake or manipulative or lie. So be sure you're sticking to positive truths. So you could say things like, well, you're one of my favorite customers or you're such a pleasure to do business with. And in that way, they will actually want to be one of your best customers and try even harder to be a pleasure to do business with. And of course, everything I just mentioned here applies to any communication we have with anyone because after all, life is sales, right? All right. Hey, you know what time it is. You ran into will be iron. Never will. You'll never feel what this is. The art of the sales. The quote of the day. That's right. It's time for the quote of the day. Today's quote comes from the famous philosopher and country music star, Willie Nelson. And Willie said, once you replace negative thoughts with positive ones, you'll start having positive results. So I'm often asked, art, how do I start with your material? How do I get involved with your sales process? What's the best and easiest way to do that? Well, I have my seven step sales process in a free book that I would like to send you. It goes through every step of the successful sales and prospecting call. But it is a real paper, turn the pages book that we will send you. If you're in the US, all we ask is that you help with the shipping, which is $4.95, which actually doesn't even cover our shipping. But I'll send that to you. And there is an international option as well on the ordering page, which is at free salesbook.com. Free salesbook.com. So there, fill that out and we will send you that free book. So again, free salesbook.com. Thank you so much for investing your valuable sales time with me today. Until next time, go out and make it your best sales day ever. I'm Art Subcheck. ♪ I'm gonna make this ♪