Since the legendary Brian Tracey book on the Psychology of Selling erupted into the world of marketing back in the mid-1980s, most of us now know that psychology falls into the 80/20 rule in sales.

Before you get disheartened, thinking you’re not in the top 20% club who successfully use the psychology of selling to make 80% of the money, remember that they all started in the bottom 20%. 

As T. Harv Eker well said, “Every master was once a disaster.”

There is a plethora of proven techniques, strategies, and ideas that explore the importance of being present and watchful regarding your client or customer. The first thing to remember is that 80% of success in sales is neither technical nor physical. Rather, it is all about emotions and perceptions. 

That is the holy grail of selling, namely, discerning the needs of your customer.

Everyone is in fact, born with psychological selling capability. It’s called the Emotional Intelligence Quotient or EQ. The new world of work is beginning to apply greater value to developing EQ skills in the selling arena.

You will be able to monitor your efficacy as you hone your people skills because your CRM (Customer Relations Management) component will start delivering the results you seek. You will recognize the bottom-line value of networking and appreciate just how much you can learn about someone from solid platforms like LinkedIn.

Read on if you want to move into the optimum 80% group and become a sales master yourself.

What is Psychological Selling?

In a sentence, psychological selling underscores your responsibility to understand your team, your leads, and your clients to the end of guiding them to the outcomes that best meet their unique needs. 

While science and technology change over time, people, by nature, remain the same. Humans are all compelled by the same psychological mechanisms concerning why we buy, when we do so, and from whom. 

The advantage of understanding psychology in selling is that the focus shifts away from the salesperson to the client or prospective customer.

Psychological selling is about the health and development of your EQ. It won’t be the seller with the highest IQ that will bring in the 80% you want, but it will be the person with the healthiest EQ who will turn more leads into prospects. Healthy EQ involves understanding others and being present for them in real-time.

Is Psychological Selling Ethical?

As with most tools, psychological selling practices are open to abuse. The use of the EQ approach in a balanced equilibrium integrates integrity and honesty. When EQ is out of whack, it becomes egoic and that personality disintegration manifests in manipulative, dishonest, and misleading behaviour styles.

Understand that your client or prospect, like all of us, has innate intuition, which will detect anything phony. In the end, manipulators lose more than they gain, and no one enjoys spending their valuable time with such persons.

So, is psychological selling ethical? That’s entirely up to the way you employ it, and who you are.

What is Cognitive Bias?

Cognition references the mental and existential processes involved in the way we gain knowledge and factors in the way we comprehend things. 

Biases are both learned and innate. We develop biases either for or against things, or people or beliefs. We categorise, based on experience and memories. There are said to be some 12 biases, but for now, let’s look at two of them, which can sabotage your business operation.

1.  Unconscious Bias – is the trickiest concerning psychological selling because we remain largely unaware they exist in us. Being mindful that everyone around you and everyone you sell to have them, is how you develop your EQ. As you do, you will more often evoke empathy and respect differences. You work to understand what affects another person’s sense of belonging and you adapt.

2.  Confirmation Bias – obviously seeks that which confirms what we already hold to. As blind and unpleasant it may be, humans love to be right.

Building Better Connections with Psychological Selling

Many might have to detach from old-school thinking handed down by previous sales gurus who operated in a different time. They focused on “sales techniques” and a blind self-belief. Today’s customers are smart, and they can smell tried, tested, and now tired techniques a mile away. 

EQ-focused psychological selling is transformational, and here’s why:

Old Techniques	New Outreach
Hone your sales pitch	Start meaningful conversations
Focus on closing	Focus on finding common ground
Rejection is normal	Drop the sales pressure and rejection won’t happen
Chase people till they reply	Never chase a potential client, offer to help
Overcome objections & move on	Try to understand the psychology behind objections
Defend yourself and your product	You’ve already lost if you’ve become defensive

Here’s the golden standard on psychological selling in a sentence: “Your job when networking is not to download a lifetime of experience but, instead, to tell a powerful story that educates and inspires action.” – Matthew Pollard

Consider Your Options

To assist you with B2B relationships and a healthy psychological selling focus, it’s a good idea to partner with a company that has great systems management platforms in place and ready to deploy. They should be able to provide you with software and assist with both implementation and set up so that your whole team work to the same standards. 

Here are four tools where developing EQ advances the new psychological selling:

• Webinars – as shown back in the 2017 State of Digital Marketing report, webinars are one of the top revenue drivers for B2B marketers. Creating a webinar funnel is an automated tool that converts your leads neatly into registered customers. People love watching over reading, ask Jamie Oliver! Webinars show people what they want to know.
• CRM – is essentially your sales mate that accompanies you and your prospective customer along the sales journey. Relationship management has everything to do with the new psychology of selling to the needs of the buyer.
• LinkedIn – their research shows that ‘Eight out of every 10 buyers are vetting you on LinkedIn before deciding whether to respond to you.’ LinkedIn builds consistency in relationships and works for you even when you’re sleeping.
• Networking – becomes a totally different mechanism without the endless old ‘hard-sell’ talks delivered to a tired, jaded audience. Stop the hustle, stop the sales pitch and see the difference!

To be sure, psychological selling takes the pressure off the seller and the customer. Both benefit from a mutually advantageous and very real relationship. Both feel understood and respected.

Chat with us and let us detail the dedicated support that you can expect with a real CRM specialist We will assist you with the tools and systems you need to support your business and your team.