Understanding the sales process is the key to successfully unlocking the potential of sales professionals you work with at your business. Whether your sales team is internal or external, if you want greater sales success you’ll want to understand sales psychology better as a business owner to ensure more sales and a refined sales pitch that makes your business an even greater success. Sales psychology is all about studying psychological tactics and tips that can influence a potential customer and their buying behaviour.
Marketing campaigns should be driven by sales psychology tips and advice to ensure effective sales strategies are implemented. This helps you connect with your target audience in a more meaningful way to boost sales and connect with your future customers.
Psychology is the study of human behavior, so sales psychology studies your customer’s body language, behaviour and buying patterns to increase sales effectiveness. One of the key principles of sales psychology is that there is no one size fits all for all target audiences. What works for one type of customer won’t work for all, which is why you need a varied approach. Successful salespeople understand human psychology and adjust their pitch according to the people they’re dealing with.
Understanding the psychology of your key target audience for any given marketing campaign is the key to driving further sales. There are such things as buying styles, and people will broadly stick to these according to what they value. You should always consider the following buying styles:
- impulse buyers vs planned buys
- deal vs brand seekers
- influencer marketing vs word of mouth through friends and family
- swayed by emotions vs swayed by reasoning
- traditional habits vs trend followers
Know where your target audience sits on these scales and you’ll have a greater chance of your sales/marketing message reaching them. But you also need to know how to sell…
Table of Contents
5 Basic Principles Of Selling
Sales is a complex field, and it’s why successful sales professionals command such high salaries. But as complex as it is, sales can be broken down into 5 key principles that work every time, so long as the product and marketing campaign also aligns with the target audience’s buying patterns and behaviours. Those key principles are:
- Building rapport
- Focusing on the consumer
- Cost-value relationship
- Building credibility
- Being generous
Building Rapport
Knowing your target market is important but knowing your individual customers is even better. There’s a reason the local independent barbers weathers financial storm after financial storm, and it’s because they know their customers and build a relationship with them. The more you nurture relationships with customers, get to know their needs and build trust, the more successful marketing efforts will be in the future as you increase sales for new products or services.
This is rooted in one of the key psychological principles of being human: the need too be seen and understood. The need to not just feel like another number. Building rapport with a prospective customer could be the difference between closing a sale and watching them walk away.
It might just seem like an extra touch, but getting to know a customer can put you at a huge advantage over competitors offering similar products and services. If you help your customers feel connected to you and your brand, they’re much more likely to buy with you.
Focusing On The Consumer
Whenever you’re trying to connect your product with a future customer you have to remember that it’s never really about the product at all – it’s all about the end consumer. You have to focus on their needs first, and then highlight how your product or service addresses them.
Let’s say your selling a cordless vacuum cleaner. Which message is going to be better received by future customers:
- Our cordless vacuum charges in 2 hours, provides you with 1 hour of cleaning, and is incredibly lightweight.
- Tired of lugging heavy vacuums around your home? Sick of playing limbo with your cord? Then our cordless, fast-charging, lightweight vacuum is perfect for you.
The first option puts your product first. But the second option puts the consumer first – it focusses on their problems and provides a solution. It directly tells customers how their needs will be met.
Consumers generally see product-focussed praise singing as disingenuous. But if you know your consumer’s needs, then you can highlight how their problems can be solved with your product, and this connects them much more to your product. Sales calls will be far more successful if you focus on customers first.
Cost-Value Relationship
Different target audiences have different emotional responses to the price of items. It might sound odd, but for some buyers a positive emotional response can be felt towards a higher price tag because it shows that the item is high value or luxurious and therefore something they desire. Similarly, a person could feel better about a lower price tag, because they value bargains over luxury.
The important thing for you as a business is creating a product or service that aligns with your target audience and what they’re willing to pay, but one that also aligns with the price – producing a low quality, budget offering and then charging a high price won’t be received well by anybody.
You have to make sure that the price you set aligns with the perceived value according to your target customers. You should know whether your customers prefer a bargain or a luxury item, and ensure you provide them with an offering that matches their expectations. This will increase sales and trust in your brand at the same time because you’ll show that what you say you offer, you clearly offer.
Building Credibility
Off the back of building that trust by giving customers what they expect, you have to continue to build your credibility in the eyes of your customer. By being knowledgeable and speaking with confidence, you can continue to build trust with would-be customers and help close more sales as they’ll trust your expertise in your area.
To build credibility it’s also a good idea to get testimonials from experts in the field. This is especially true if you’re a new business but one that is offering a technical product or service that solves new problems (or old problems in new ways). Until you’re seen as an expert in the field you can rely on the testimonials of established individuals to help build your credibility.
Being Generous
One of the best changes you can make to your sales approach is to be generous. If you focus simply on the psychology of selling the first time, you’ll miss out on where the real value lies: returning customers. By being more generous as a business, you encourage repeat purchases and returning customers.
You could be more generous in a variety of ways:
- spend time with a client – dinner, drinks
- adding personalised gifts to each purchase
- offering % off services when customers return
Whatever you decide to do, make sure that if you’re generous with your time, money, or services it aligns with your business. You want to ensure that whatever you offer also meets your clients expectations.
If you’re a digital marketing agency trying to land a new client then having a meeting over dinner that you pay for would be fairly standard procedure. But if you bought a handmade product from an individual seller online, a dinner to thank you for your purchase would be quite strange.
You should also be careful not to undermine what your product or service is worth and eat too much into your profit margin. Don’t undo the hard work of closing a sale by being too generous.
Get it right though, and by giving things away you can actually gain far more sales over time by turning one time purchasers into loyal customers.
The Golden Rule Of Selling
It’s an obvious thing to say, but so easily forgotten when you’re caught up in trying to get as many sales as possible: “treat the customer the way you would want to be treated”.
That one rule is the cornerstone of sales psychology because you know what your customers want better than anybody else, because you know what you’d want. It’s what makes psychology such an interesting subject because humans know humans better than anyone – so if your instinct is that a certain approach will work better with one potential customer over another, then you’ll usually be right.
Sales professionals need only put themselves in their customer’s shoes to get a better idea of how the product or service they’re selling fits into their lives. This will tell you all you need to know about the best sales approach.
Put the customer first and prioritise making them feel seen and understood. People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. Prioritise getting to know them and their needs by putting yourself in their shoes and you’ll already have a competitive edge over your competitors who aren’t engaging with their target market in the same way.
The Psychology Of Sales: Final Thoughts
The key to successful sales is understanding sales psychology. By knowing what type of person you’re selling to, you can adapt your sales pitch accordingly and increase the likelihood of success. Remember to stick to the 5 key principles of sales psychology and remember the golden rule to put yourself in their shoes.
If you want to influence buyer decisions then understanding a person’s psychological responses to different deals, value, credibility and rapport is key to directly impacting your sales performance. Creating an emotional connection between your business and customers is key. Potential buyers will become loyal customers if they feel connected to your products and services.
Master your sales process and you’ll enjoy a much easier time of making your business the success it can be.
