Beyond Persuasion
To The Power Of Inducement
By: Bob Picha
Of the hundreds of professional salespeople I have known, Ed is the closest to moving beyond persuasion to using INDUCEMENT in the selling process.
When I first met Ed, he was already a seasoned professional. He looked the part….well dressed….well groomed….and a master at using humor in the first few seconds of talking with a prospect. This immediately relieved the primary tension and lowered the contact energy.
Several years after my first contact with Ed, I had the privilege of watching him do his magic at work, interviewing a potential customer. Ed even made the prospect feel comfortable with my role as an observer. Ed’s organization was involved in selling dreams…. dream vacations. That was the dream of feeling rich and acting rich…even if you weren’t actually rich. This is a real trend in marketing now….selling the experience.
In the interview I observed, Ed was the last person the prospect would see in the sales process. Earlier, another salesperson took the prospect on a physical tour of the vacation property, and sold the dream… the dream vacations. This was classical persuasion at work, because it was selling the salesperson’s dream to someone else. There was a time in the sales process when the prospect became a customer… they bought the dream… but they did not own it.
That’s when Ed did his magic. He met the customer in his office. I watched in amazement as he helped the customer create their own dream…buy it… and own it. Ed made it look easy. He was using inductive selling. He made everyone relax and enjoy the process. It was as though he was using the customer’s energy, not his own. He was clicking. Some people call it in-sync or harmonizing.
As good as Ed was, it amazed me how voracious his appetite was for any new knowledge about himself, how to improve, and how to understand people better. He was a master at how to reach and communicate with people, build trust, and get at the truth about what they wanted and hoped for… it was really true talk. Maybe you know of a True Sales Professional (TSP) like Ed, who has moved beyond persuasion to “inductive selling”. This is what our TSP development program is all about… cloning Ed. He added value to everyone’s life.
The study of inducement is not new. The study of inducement as a way of moving minds is also not new. In 1928 William Moulton Marston, a psychologist at Columbia University, defined “inducement” as one of four primary emotions that drive behavior. In his book, “Emotions of Normal People”, he cites the dictionary definition of inducement as… “to lead to”.
He also talks about the friendliness and strong alliances with people created in this mode of behavior. He says, in fact, that it requires a perfect alliance between the “inducer” and the person being “induced”.
How do you attain a perfect alliance?
Marston” quote explains a perfect alliance…” The power of inducement in evoking alliance from the induced person lies entirely in the extent to which the inducer is able to serve the other person’s interest”. The key to inducement is energizing the induced person in a certain way, and then using that energy to move their mind and behavior into action on their behalf.
Inductive selling actually requires less personal energy. There is a path to more sales by using less contact energy.Do you understand your self enough to know your contact energy… what you are projecting to other people.
If you want to understand other people better, understand yourself better… first. — V. Howard
To discover “what makes you tick”.
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