How To Boost Your Sales With 2 Simple Tricks
The day you realize that almost all interaction is sales you are at the brink of something great. To open this insight slightly up: we sell our ideas, ideologies, views, and even feelings hundreds of times per day – even to ourselves. In business sales skills are the ones which often raise a mediocre expert or a leader above others. And by sales skills I don’t mean the plain ability to sell snow to Eskimos, but rather the understanding that everything has value, this value is concentrated energy and this energy has the ability to convert into miraculous things. This insight is something so big and profound, that I recommend to stop and think about it for a while now:
Sales generate value = value is energy = energy converts to miraculous things
Sales = energy = miraculous things
Sales generate miraculous things
To get into more of a concrete level and to give you some tools, it is good to know that the basic mechanics behind one-to-one sales are not that complicated. All you basically need to have is:
- a proper product, service or opinion,
- nice personality, and
- some knowledge of the way the human mind in average works.
In this blog post I scratch the surface of the 3rd bullet, I.e. tell you about the two most important moments when doing a sales contact.
The Peak-End Rule
Daniel Kahneman and Barbara Fredrickson studied the human mind in the 90’s and came up with the concept of Peak-end rule. Wikipedia’s definition is the following:
“The peak–end rule is a psychological heuristic in which people judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak (i.e., its most intense point) and at its end, rather than based on the total sum or average of every moment of the experience.”
In sales this means that we should be focusing on two parts of the sales process: the beginning and the end.
The Peak
The beginning of a sales contact is crucial and you should try to make it as your peak moment. According to brain studies we humans scan threats in our environment 5 times a second. If we feel threatened we are cautious, and our brains are in run-or-fight mode which usually is bad for the business. So the beginning should be all about making sure that the person you are selling to is not feeling threatened. Try to avoid a situation where you are identified as a “telemarketer” – rather try to brand yourself as a friend or a helper. After you have been able to assure that you are not a threat of any kind, you can do the easy part I.e. ask questions and share your expertise. And while talking, it is important to remember that in the end it is never about you, it is always all about the customer!
The End
When it is time to end the sales meeting the second important phase starts. According to The Peak-End Rule people judge the overall experience by the last moments of the meeting. This is where you should again use all of your charm to make the customer feel good. If in doubt, it is safe rather to be too nice than not nice enough. Studies show that even if people notice that your compliments are “sales talk”, the talk still works. Weird indeed, but as a tribal species we are pretty needy for acceptance, and don’t mind too much about how we get it. Also, if possible, end the meeting with a warm handshake or if possible, with a hug. That will greatly increase the bonding between individuals because of the oxytocin released.
“All’s Well that Ends Well.”
In short, people love happy endings, and this most people know to be true by the nature. With this in your mind I assure that you are able to boost your sales to the new maximum. Just focus on creating happy endings!
There are tons of great sales tips and tricks to boost your results, but we’ll get to those more in depth in the future postings. I hope that this post gave you some tools and ideas to boost your sales, and you will be able to pursuit your dreams in the future ever better!