We all know by now that Sales can learn a lot from the field of psychology, but it is worthwhile from time-to-time to have a refresher on some of the more surprising findings coming out of university psych departments.

Here I’ve summarized a few such findings particularly relevant for Sales. A word of warning: it wouldn’t be a psych study if the findings weren’t a bit quirky!

Finding #1: Customers are more likely to say “yes” if you give them coffee and speak into their right ear

• Explanation: An Australian study finds that consuming even a moderate amount of caffeine makes individuals “more likely to agree with persuasive arguments.” Additional research conducted in Italian discotheques finds that people are twice as likely to give a stranger a cigarette if the request is made into the right rather than the left ear (which allows the request to be processed via the “preferred,” left hemisphere of the brain).
• Implication for Sales: Train your reps to suggest a refill and to choose their chair carefully before sitting down at the negotiation table. Then have them use our Controlled Negotiation Roadmap to seal the deal.

Finding #2: People spend most of their time in meetings sharing information everyone already knows         Read More »

I love summer reading lists – they give me ideas and it’s fun to see what other people want to learn more about. With that said, below is a reading list of books somewhat related to Sales. This is a personal selection and I’m hoping that everybody will chime in with their own ideas below.

Though it’s nice if the book has some relevance to business, that isn’t necessarily the most important thing. In fact, I find it’s often things that are only tangentially related to Sales that provide the most stimulus for me.

First, I’m going to recommend some older books. These seem especially relevant because of the current economic environment in which we cannot rely on continued private sector growth and where sales organizations have to work hard to get customers over their fears.

1)      Everybody in Sales and Marketing needs to have read “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” by Robert B. Cialdini. This is one of the best-known books examining how we make decisions and how we prioritize different kinds of information. It has some obvious implications for how to position and leverage the sales process, but it’s also a great read. And once you’ve read Influence, you can skip the mountain of related books such as Nudge or Predictably Irrational, all of which, to greater or lesser degrees, are based on the idea that we are all systematically prone to making the same mistakes over and over when it comes to making decisions.

2)      Similarly important is “Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind” by Al Ries and Jack Trout. While the stories and anecdotes are beginning to show their age, this is probably the single best book on Marketing that I have ever read. It ties in nicely with the Cialdini book because the authors leverage many of the same behavioral insights, though theirs were substantially derived through practice rather than formal analysis; and the book is none the worse for it.

Moving on to some newer books, here are a couple that recently stood out for me – and please use the comments section to add yours below.     Read More »