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The Psychology of the Sales Cycle – Prospecting

Dictionary.com defines a prospect as “a potential or likely customer.” By extension, prospecting is the act of searching for potential or likely customers in hopes of setting up an initial meeting.How salespeople go about prospecting varies by industry, product or service, and personality. Here are just a few ways in which salespeople tackle prospecting: Cold calls – Getting on the phone and asking to speak to a decision maker.Mailings – We all get marketing fliers and brochures in the mail where businesses hope we’ll respond.Email blasts – It’s easy to find email addresses to build a database. This approach is more effective than mailings because you can send the same message to hundreds or thousands at a time with little effort or cost.Door hangers – Bypass the mailbox and go door-to-door leaving marketing material.Door-to-Door – It used to be the case that salespeople simply knocked on doors to meet people and sell their wares. This is a very time consuming and expensive approach!Internet – You can search by various criteria to see who or what businesses in a geographic area fit your customer profile with a goal of target marketing.Conventions – Going to some event where you set up a booth and interact with customers.The list could go on and on and I’m sure you’re thinking of a way or two to prospect that I’ve not touched on. Creative prospecting means doing something to stand out from the crowd, something that makes people take note and listen to you when they’re not paying attention to others.The focus of this article is not to cover the different ways of looking for customers. The purpose is to talk about the principles of influence that will give you the best chance to stand out using whatever approach is best for you. You have one overriding goal when you’re prospecting – to get an initial meeting with a potential decision maker. When you’re requesting time with someone, did you know they’re listening to their favorite radio station? That’s right, they’re tuned on to WIIFM – What’s In It For Me? In other words, with all the other salespeople who would like their business why should they meet with you? First and foremost, and this can’t be emphasized enough, you have to believe in your company and product. Will doing business with you make the prospect better off in the long run? If you don’t believe it will, if you doubt your company or product, prospects will sniff you out like an animal smells fear. It’s a survival instinct. For the sake of this series I’m going to assume you have that belief in your company, product and your potential to help the customer.Knowing the prospect is uncertain about whether or not to give you consideration, the three principles that come into play most prominently when prospecting are consensus, authority and scarcity.It’s natural for the vast majority of people to feel comfortable going along with the crowd. That’s the principle of consensus at work. It’s natural because we look to others when we’re not 100% certain of the course of action we should take. Just remember the old adage, “There’s safety in numbers.”In your marketing material, emails, phone calls, etc., can you tap into this principle by talking about all customers you already serve? The more you have, the more that consensus comes into play. Allstate Insurance did this effectively many years ago when its spokesman Dennis Haysbert stood in the Rose Bowl and said 100,000 people would watch a game there on Saturday. He went on to say Allstate filled the stadium ten times with the number of people who made the switch last year. When more than one million customers switch insurance companies you can bet many viewers called an Allstate agent or went online to compare! If you don’t have a huge number, or even of you do, it’s always more effective when you can point out customers or clients who are just like the prospect you’re talking to. After all, dealing with a restaurant owner can be very different than dealing with a grocery store owner, or hotel manager for example. When talking to one of those business owners, if you can refer to other restaurants, grocery stores or hotels you do business with, the prospect will feel more comfortable and you’ll gain much more credibility.Speaking of credibility, the other principle of influence that comes into play is authority. When people are unsure what to do, quite often they want to defer to an expert, someone they view as having superior knowledge or wisdom. This can be conveyed through your title, years in business or years of experience, awards you’ve won, degrees you’ve earned, credentials and designations. Any opportunity to get this information in front of a prospect conveys you have expertise. It’s a strong reason for them to consider meeting with you as opposed to someone who lacks expertise or has not conveyed their expertise. The last principle that could come into play is scarcity. It’s a natural response to want things more when we believe we can’t get them anywhere else. Does your company, product or service have something unique or a combination of features that make it unique? This is important because you want the prospect to see he/she can’t get something exactly like what you’re offering anywhere else. If so, and you point it out so they understand what they might lose by not considering you, that might be enough for them to give you that initial meeting.So the three principles to thoughtfully consider as you approach potential clients during the prospecting phase of the sales cycle are: consensus, authority and scarcity. Engage any or all of these ethically and correctly and you should land more initial meetings with prospects.Next time we’ll look at the initial meeting with a prospect and how to leverage that opportunity using the principles of influence.Brian Ahearn, CMCT® Chief Influence Officer influencePEOPLE Helping You Learn to Hear “Yes”.

The Psychology of the Sales Cycle – Overview

Selling, like most endeavors you want to succeed at in life, requires a disciplined process, sharp skills, and good planning. Just as there are specific sales skills that need to be honed through continuous learning and practice there are parts of the sales cycle that require attention and planning. Sharpening your sales skills and refining your sales process are great ways to ensure success over the long haul.I will be devoting a series of nine posts to exploring the sales cycle, looking at which principles of influence are most appropriate to focus on at different points in the cycle. My goal for this series is to help you understand how to get the most “bang for the buck” when you’re selling.Let’s start with the sales cycle. Other sales trainers may combine some of these steps and in some businesses the cycle might look a little different. I see the typical sales cycle as an 8-step process, which includes the following sequence: Prospecting – Looking for new potential customers or clients.Initial Meeting – The first contact with a prospect.Qualification – Fact finding sessions primarily designed to assess whether or not you can – or want to – do business with the prospect.Presentation – Presenting your service or demonstrating your product to the prospect to show him or her how it meets some need they have.Objections – Dealing with reasons the prospect might bring up that indicate a hesitancy to move forward.Negotiating – Potentially altering pricing, terms and/or other aspects of your product or service in order to reach a final agreement.Closing – Getting the prospect to agree to do business with you and your organization.Referrals – Getting the names of people or organizations you can approach using the client’s name as a lead-in.The six principles of influence, as popularized by Robert Cialdini, we’ll look at in conjunction with the sales cycle are: Liking – We prefer to do business with people we know and like.Reciprocity – We feel obligated to give back to those who first give to us.Consensus – We look to others to see how we should behave in certain situations.Authority – We often defer to those with superior knowledge or wisdom (i.e., experts) when making decisions.Consistency – We feel internal psychological pressure and external social pressure to be consistent in what we say and do.Scarcity – We desire things more when we believe they are rare or diminishing.Another psychological concept that will come into play throughout the series is the contrast phenomenon. This isn’t a principle of influence but is a psychological concept that works in conjunction with the principles of influence at different times. Contrast, sometimes known as “compare and contrast,” alerts us to the reality that two things will appear “more” different depending on what was presented first.I encourage you to stay tuned because if you do, your ability to sell, and getting to yes, will be much easier when you add the science of influence into your sales approach. Next week we’ll start with prospecting.Brian Ahearn, CMCT® Chief Influence Officer influencePEOPLE Helping You Learn to Hear “Yes”.

Influencers from Around the World – Three Lessons from Arnold

This month our “Influencers from Around the World” post comes from Marco Germani. Marco is a native of Italy, originally hailing from Rome. He’s been a fan of influence for decades and wrote a book on the subject in Italian. The father of two youngsters, he now gets to apply his influence skills outside of his business pursuits. I’m sure you’ll enjoy his post on lessons he’s learned from Arnold Schwarzenegger.Brian Ahearn, CMCT® Chief Influence Officer influencePEOPLE Helping You Learn to Hear “Yes”.Three Lessons from ArnoldI have recently given a second go at the spectacular Arnold Schwarzenegger’s biography, Total Recall – The Truly Unbelievable Story of My Life, which didn’t fail to impress and inspire me, as it already did last year when I first read it. You may or may not  like the man, but it is undeniable that what Arnold has accomplished in his life thus far is nothing short of incredible. Arnold was a legendary bodybuilding champion, a record-breaking Hollywood action movie actor, and an accomplished real-estate investor who made his first million from this business. If all that wasn’t enough, he was also the “Governator” of California.I thought Arnold’s story would fit well in this blog because in order to accomplish all that he has, Arnold had to develop the capacity to influence millions of people.I’ll try to extrapolate a short, actionable lesson from each phase of his career, which enabled him to accomplish such extraordinary things and maybe each of us will become a better influencer because of it.Lesson 1: Focus on your strengthSince he was a teen, Arnold had a clear vision in his mind: Go to the USA and become famous. He had no idea how to accomplish this, not even the field of endeavor. He then started his quest, his search for his unique talent, which would bring him fame and fortune.  As he realized that nature had gifted him with a body built to grow and become incredibly muscular, he put all of his heart and soul into a single project; becoming the most muscular man on earth and winning all the existing body building competitions around the world. It didn’t matter if it meant endless hours in the gym lifting huge weights, it didn’t even matter if sometimes it meant fainting or vomiting in the gym out of exhaustion. All that counted was getting to the top. And he made it! Not only that; he set new standards for his sport and made bodybuilding famous to around the world, becoming the international ambassador for the sport. He worked on the mental aspect of competition (the “Pumping Iron” documentary is a great testimonial of this), he even went to ballet classes to perfect his posing; in other words, he did whatever it took to become outstanding and make his dream come true. Thanks to bodybuilding, Arnold finally got to the USA. He was penniless, with no other skills under his belt, but ready to pursue his second lifetime goal: to make it big in Hollywood.Lesson 2: Persistence in spite of obstaclesWhen Arnold, already a celebrity in the bodybuilding circuit and on his way to financial independence thanks to real estate investments in Santa Monica, started to pursue his acting career he had all the odds against him. He spoke English with a thick Austrian accent, he had below average acting skills, no particular artistic talent and he was even told his name was too long to fit on movie posters! Thanks to his body, he managed to get a part in a B-movie called “Hercules” in New York where he first had to be dubbed due to poor English pronunciation. The movie itself was never released due to production financial issues but is now a cult movie because of Arnold’s fame. In spite of this, he did not get discouraged, he kept the vision clear, he simply ignored everybody else around him advising him to open a gym and to let go this impossible dream to become a world-famous actor. He patiently waited several years, turning down dozens of parts, even as a leading actor, in movies which would have not benefited his career in the long run. His big movie break was “Conan the Barbarian.” Arnold knew this movie would be a game-changer and, once again, he put his heart and soul in preparation for this part, taking care of every single detail. In the first scene of the movie, he was actually bitten by a real wolf and had to have a dozen stiches on his leg, but this didn’t discourage him a bit to give his best and make this movie into a cult classic, which he did. The rest is history. Conan brought Arnold into the firmament and just a few years later, with movies like “The Terminator,” “Total Recall” and “True Lies,” he was paid as much as $25 million per movie, becoming the highest paid action movie star in Hollywood…as he originally planned.Lesson 3: Expand your expertiseAfter becoming a Hollywood superstar Arnold was ready for a new challenge and decide to enter politics. Though married to a Kennedy family member, Maria Shriver, he was never afraid to express his liking for the Republican Party. He got close to the Bush family and openly supported them. When he saw the opportunity to run for governor of California, he understood he had to massively expand his knowledge and expertise in order to become credible and have a serious chance to win. Almost anyone who spent his life in body building and acting probably would have be intimidated by the massive amount of information, in many different subjects an aspirant governor must assimilate. That was not the case for Arnold. He established the “Arnold University” instead. He gathered notable experts in each of the fields he needed to learn such as economic, public health, the environment, etc. He worked long hours taking notes and learning everything he needed to learn. When it was time to debate on national television with seasoned and shrewd politicians, ready to attack his weak points with no mercy, he used humor as his best defense, having a set of punch lines written by professional comedy authors and memorized in endless preparation sessions. His motto was, “It is just reps, reps, reps,” in bodybuilding and in life. That is what made a farm boy from a small village in Austria the Governor of the richest state of America.Of course Arnold had his lows as well – like his divorce from Maria due to a secret child he had with an housekeeper 20 years ago or admitting using steroids in his competition days – but he was not afraid to expose these in either of his books. However, his life remains a shining example of what a human being is capable of, when ready to pay the price. Arnold was able to touch many lives and influence many people along the way, for which he deserves, in my opinion, the highest recognition as a master influencer! And who knows what he will accomplish more in the next 20 years…Marco