Sales and Psychology

In his 1984 book Influence, Cialdini reveals the results of his undercover research with sales professionals to discover the weapons people use to influence others. These weapons are:

Reciprocation - People often return a favour.
Commitment and Consistency - When someone commits themselves publicly to an action, they are more likely to see it through.
Social Proof - People do things they see other people doing.
Authority - People will often obey authority figures.
Liking - People are easily persuaded by people that they like.
Scarcity - If something is rare, people tend to want it more than if there is plenty of it.

This is a good book to read first, because it really underpins the more sales-specific books that you'll find.

As I read this book, I often stopped to think how true it was, and how often these methods are used today. It's useful to know the things covered in this book, so that you can both use the techniques yourself and to notice when other people are using them on you!

Each chapter ends with suggestions as to how you can guard against falling victim to each of these methods.

You'll find a fuller review here at NLPSchedule.com.

You can buy the book here:

You might be surprised to see this book mentioned on a Sales Psychology page, but it's a classic investigation as to why people will part with so much money on what seem to be fairly obvious cons! If you have a legitimate business, just think how much easier it will be to sell when you consider the underlying motivations of your customers.

This book is a fascinating read, detailing confidence tricks from 20th century America and the ways in which what were effectively sales techniques were used. You can still see a lot of these techniques today in more legitimate marketing.

Essentially, the book boils down to the fact that you can't cheat an honest man, but as luck would have it there aren't that many honest men!

This book is very entertaining as well as telling us a lot about how people are influenced. I enjoyed it a lot.

This is another classic book, originally written a few decades ago and now in its seventh edition to bring it up to date.

Arguably the most important thing in sales is the close - getting the customer to sign on the line which is dotted, as they say! This book takes a close look at the ethical techniques that you can use to bring people naturally to the close.

There are lots of sections on how to handle various situations, and the book is nicely divided up so that you can pick and choose which parts you read. I'd be surprised if you didn't learn something valuable from reading this book.

If you ignore the big font, the hype and the bluster, this is actually a pretty useful book. Of course it won't really close every deal, and these aren't really scripts so much as lines of attack that you can use to counter the objections that you meet when talking to customers.

I've found that although the lines themselves need to be reworked for your own personality and situation, the ideas that they open up are very useful. There are sections on handling price objections, delaying tactics and all the usual things you meet every day.

If you're writing marketing text for a brochure or website, it's useful to look through this book as a list of objections a customer might have as they read, so that you can tackle them as you write.

Everyone working in sales has got to see this film, it's a classic! Here's a YouTube clip of my favourite scene, the motivational speech. Coffee is for closers!