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When you understand your target customer and their decision-making, you can give them the service they want throughout the sales process.
Human conduct has a substantial impact on the purchasing process. Knowing sales psychology and equipping your sales team with data will help.
Purchasing decisions are not only made with brains and logic. B2B sales involve interpersonal relationships, sympathy, fears, and gut feelings.
Sellers Must Understand Sales Psychology
Will you purchase a product from someone you like or someone you don’t but gives good arguments about the product? Difficult, both must be right, say most though likeability and benefits matters.
B2B sales require empathy and charisma. If you don’t gain a B2B customer’s confidence, they may not buy from you. Your prospect wants to be understood and entertained.
If you end every conversation with numbers, nobody will exclaim, “Amazing! Now purchase!” In B2B sales, exceptional service matters. You must assist customers even after they’ve bought your product.
Sales Psychology’s 4 Pillars
1. Reliability – Show care for your customers’ concerns. Whether prospects discover you through marketing, a direct message, mail, or phone, act quickly and learn as much as possible about them.
Individuality matters! Calling without backup looks unprofessional. When you’re called unexpectedly, empathy and the appropriate questions are key.
Reliability requires good organizing skills. Some sales engagement tools will help you keep up with every customer or prospect.
2. Build sympathy – Nonverbal communication reveals more than we realize. Gestures and facial expressions also count. You can influence a customer’s decision with the right words, a strong voice, and an open body posture.
Now, we also do digital sales, video calls, and webinars. How do you convince your conversation partners in a direct exchange, on the phone, or in a video call?
There are telltale signs like restless movements, slumped posture, wandering looks, and frequent changes in sitting position that can indicate boredom.
Your prospect deserves your full attention.
3. Positive language patterns – Language influences thought. Speaking negatively about competitors and using difficult and negatively connoted words or phrases paints a negative picture in your prospect’s mind—which is not the goal.
Here are some positive B2B words: new chance, goals, potential, and challenges
The right words can accomplish much. Your voice also affects the listener. The sound of your voice on the phone accounts for 75% of overall perception, a key factor in your success.
Additionally, don’t mask your voice or speak ‘too high.’ The right pitch (of your voice) creates a good mood.
4. Strengthen your appearance – Personality and charisma show others who you are or how you want to be seen. This can also help B2B sales.
Depending on your target audience and product, personal branding can help you build expert status. Interested parties will approach you if the community views you as an expert.
Expertise and character are more important than product or service. B2B customers want a problem-solving solution.
Selling With DISC Assessment
DISC stands for Dominant (red), Influencing (yellow), Steady (green), and Cautious (blue). You must know these personality types to assess contacts, prospects, target audiences, and close deals.
Let us examine how a person’s personality type can boost sales.
Selling Tips as per Psychology
American social psychologist, Robert Cialdini’s principles apply to B2B sales. Cialdini knew prospects are convinced by people they found nice. Similarities are especially helpful in B2B sales, so build on them.
We’ll now modify the other principles.
1. The Power of FOMO – FOMO is based on scarcity. Scarcity triggers our most basic instinct. Some doubters will be convinced if you say your product will soon be unavailable or another product will be free for a few weeks.
Set an expiration date.
2. Strategize social proof – People sometimes buy when others have bought and recommended a product or service. Cialdini’s social proof principle states that people tend to model their behavior after that of others.
However, B2B customers need to see positive customer testimonials or success stories.
Send a hesitant prospect a success story from a similar customer.
3. When appropriate, offer discounts – How can B2B sales benefit? Offer a discount, free trial, or test account extension. Your prospects will want to reciprocate. The selling begins here.
Offer discounts, trials, or samples.
4. Show your expertise – If you’re self-confident and have a good reputation (from webinars or social media), this will help you sell. Dressing professionally can also show your expertise.
So, become an expert.
5. NLP for sales – Anchoring, priming, and mirroring are related terms. Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) can benefit B2B sales.
Anchoring means associating a word or phrase with emotions. The anchoring effect can be used in B2B price negotiations. Mention a higher price, then medium and low. The prospect will choose the medium or low (real) price.
Mirroring involves discreetly mimicking your counterpart’s gestures, facial expressions, and words. If the prospect likes certain words, use them too. This makes your counterpart feel more comfortable and understood because having something in common is good.
(Positive) Priming is a social psychology term that refers to the first impression or words you use with a prospect.
Ex: If you ask, “Am I bothering you?” or “I’d like to talk about an annoying topic,” your counterpart may associate your product and you with something negative and “bothering” and “annoying.”
With positive priming, you link your product to something positive in the prospect’s mind. This fits “positive speech patterns” Use them to increase sales success.
Building Resilient Sales Teams and Sales Strategies Intelligently
In addition to prospecting, today’s sales teams are focusing on closing deals and training salespeople. Over 60% of sales teams have realized that more obstacles exist now than before, and company demands are expanding.
Today, data is the modern sales instinct.
Marketers’ solutions are secondary to the prospect’s problem. When a marketer proposes solutions that match the prospect’s demands, the prospect is more responsive to the presentation.
Sales intelligence leverages power. Marketers had to approach prospects blindfolded before sales intelligence: Hyper-contextuality and up-to-date information boost sales efficiency.
Accessing relevant data is straightforward, but quality, dynamic data that helps make judgments depending on the decision-makers of the organizations you’re approaching takes more effort.
Sales intelligence tools track millions of data points and provide 360-degree insights about prospects through digital intentions and ROI maps, helping marketers craft the perfect pitch for the most precise stakeholder.
It’s easy to obtain leads but hard to nurture through the sales funnel’s intricate cycle. Sales intelligence can complement sales psychology. Its predictive analytics capabilities can help you manage and promote your marketing strategies.
Sales intelligence tools can give you an edge by subtly repurposing your offerings in a very strategic way that meets the prospect’s business needs.
For example, the Rolodex from Draup for Sales provides information about decision makers in an organization, including deal size influence, budget control, personality inference, skills map, patents (if any), and if they’ve been talked about in the news recently.
All this data can assist you in crafting custom sales solutions for your prospects.
Its internal indices, like the opportunity index, forecast and quantifies high-probability sales and marketing prospects, decreasing efforts on low-probability leads.
