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Do you agree that people buy from people like them?
To be more like your prospects, you need to pay attention to questions. That means the questions you ask prospects and how the prospects respond to those questions.
When you think about professionals adept at questions, you might naturally think of psychiatrists.
The late great sales expert David Sandler, in his book The Sandler Rules: 49 Timeless Selling Principles and How to Apply Them, said that: “Selling is a Broadway play performed by a psychiatrist.”
That psychiatrist quote has stuck with me. My advice to improve your persuasiveness is to study experts like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Best-selling author Tony Morris of North London in the UK agrees (for Morris, selling might be a West End play performed by a psychologist).
Morris is an international sales speaker, best-selling author of five books and managing director of an international sales training company. Morris and his team have helped develop over 30,000 sales professionals, across 62 industries, to perform at the top of their game by using psychology.
“When I studied Carl Jung’s behavior matrix, which were embodied in Psychologische Typen (1921; Psychological Types, 1923), I learned that people’s behavior was classified as one of four types: Fire, Extravert, Harmonious and Analyst,” says Morris.
He shares buyer psychology insights such as this on his podcast, “Confessions of a Serial Seller.” Morris has interviewed the top 100 sales performers from around the world to learn what they do differently to give themselves an unfair advantage over their competitors.
To gain a sales advantage, Morris has learned how to identify a person’s behavioral type, what frustrates them and how to sell to them.
His two biggest indicators are as follows:
1. The questions they ask
2. How they respond to your questions
“I felt these two factors enabled me to identify their behavior quickly and adapt to it,” says Morris. “I must clarify, this doesn’t mean to act insincere, it means to show the prospect the part of my behavior they need to see. Therefore, I believe the most successful sales professionals are chameleons.”
Being a chameleon does not mean being manipulative, but rather practicing the Golden Rule of treating others as you would like to be treated.
“This ties in with a well-known saying in sales, ‘people buy from people,’” says Morris. “This I absolutely agree with, as we buy with emotion and then we use logic to justify our decision. However, I feel it’s missing two words at the end of the saying. I believe it’s ‘people buy from people like them.’ This reinforces my point, that people gravitate towards people like themselves and are more comfortable dealing with people that have very similar behavior traits as they do.”
Morris reasons the same way as Tony Alessandra, CEO of Assessments 24x7 LLC, who I have helped with book editing. Alessandra is a prolific author with 30 books translated into over 50 foreign language editions, including the newly revised, best-selling The NEW Art of Managing People: Collaborative Selling and The Platinum Rule.
“The alternative to the Golden Rule is much more productive,” says Alessandra, a former university professor with a PhD in marketing. “I call it the Platinum Rule: ‘Treat others the way they want to be treated.’ Ah hah! What a difference. The Platinum Rule accommodates the feelings of others. The focus of relationships shifts from ‘this is what I want, so I'll give everyone the same thing’ to ‘Let me first understand what they want and then I'll give it to them.’”
