Everyone Sells Something

 

by Dan Ramsey

In truth, everyone is a seller. Everyone has knowledge, a product, or a service that he or she offers to others and, in many cases, attempts to persuade others to acquire. Need some examples?

• A job interview
• A marriage proposal
• A friendly smile to another driver, asking to allow you into his traffic lane
• “If you do your chores, you can go to the football game.”
• “I think you'll like that movie. The star is gorgeous!”
• “Can you be here by ten? I need to leave by eleven.”

Sales is persuasion. Everyone sells something every day, and often many times a day. The techniques that you use to inform and persuade others are extensively developed in professional salespeople, but everyone can use them.

Persuasion 101

persuasion is the skill of guiding people toward making a decision. Whether you are a real estate salesperson, a retail clerk, or a rather nervous suitor, persuasion can help you get your message across and, possibly, accepted by another — a transaction. You can persuade others by appealing to their reasoning, their emotions, or both. Besides verbal persuasion, there are other ways to help get your point across.

Appeal to Reason Reason is a description or explanation. It's the facts. When buying a product or service, purchasers want to know what it is, how it works, and what benefits they will derive. You, as a customer, want to know this. Your customers do, too. Depending on what you are selling — a simple product, a complex service, or a concept — you can appeal to others by using various types of reasoning, such as logic, rhetoric, and proof. Following are some examples to illustrate.

• Logic: “You want something that will clean stubborn stains on enamel and XYZ has been proven in scientific tests to clean enamel easier and better than any other stain cleaner.”
• Rhetoric: “XYZ is the best stain fighter available.”
• Proof: “Let's test XYZ on this stubborn stain.”

These simple examples offer three ways that you can appeal to a person's reasoning to help you convince them of the validity of your facts. You probably recognize these phrasings from the thousands of ads that bombard you daily. That's because advertising, too, uses persuasion.
The crafts of persuasion and reasoning are a lifelong study. If you are interested in a technical sales career, consider taking college-level courses in these topics or self-studying books that can give you more insight into the powers of reasoning and persuasion.
 

Appeal to Emotion Emotion is a strong human feeling, such as love, hate, anger, fear, and compassion. Salespeople and other persuaders often use emotional appeals to help make a sale. Should they? That depends on what is being sold. Selling real estate, for example, involves the buyer's reasoning, of course, but it also is an emotional purchase. So it's appropriate to use emotional appeals to help sell a home. It isn't an appropriate tactic for selling industrial control valves.
Emotional appeals are frequently used in advertising, religion, propaganda, and sex. For example:

• “Imagine living in the nicest home on the block.”
• “Find full acceptance at our church.”
• “Immigrants are taking over our jobs.”
• “Buy me a drink?”

Many consumers still consider appeals to their emotions as primary elements in their decisions to buy. However, a growing number of educated consumers expect salespeople to only use emotional appeals when they are appropriate to the product or service, and they will stop buying if the appeal is inappropriate.

Aids to Persuasion The art of persuasion is highly developed and utilizes a variety of tools to make the sale. Voice control is one of the most important to the seller. The voice can be used to help persuade customers with reason as well as with emotion. Voice is a primary tool in telephone sales, Body language, too, is invaluable as a persuasive sales tool.

You'll also need to understand common personality types and how to persuade them. The variety of customers and other people you will encounter in your sales career

Whatever type of customer you serve and whatever type of sales job you have, the art of appropriate persuasion will be one of your greatest sales tools.