The Psychology of Selling: Increase Your Sales Faster and Easier Than You Ever Thought Possible pdfdrive com

Uncovering Basic Needs
The key to conducting a basic needs analysis is to question skillfully and listen
carefully. The very best salespeople dominate the listening and let the customer
dominate the talking. The more you ask questions and listen patiently and
attentively to the answers, the more the customer will open up and talk to you.

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People think about themselves most of the time. All day long, no matter what
is going on, people are thinking about their own problems and concerns. What is
most important to each person is on the top of his mind. When you ask questions
and listen carefully, you trigger these thoughts and concerns. They then come up
in the conversation.
The Freudian Slip
In psychoanalysis, this is called a Freudian slip. Psychologists have found that
if you allow a person to talk about himself freely, eventually he will slip. He will
blurt out what he is really thinking about at the moment. The job of the
psychologist is to create the kind of environment where the patient feels
comfortable expressing himself openly and honestly.
In a way, you are a traveling sales psychologist. Your goal is also to create a
comfortable environment with your personality. You ask good questions and
then listen closely to the answers. You lean forward, nod, smile, and make no
effort to interrupt.
Use Open-Ended Questions
The best questions to ask to open up a conversation and get more information
from a prospect are called open-ended questions. These are questions that begin
with a pronoun or adverb, words such as what, where, when, how, who, why, and
which. These questions cannot be answered with a simple yes or no. They
require a more expanded answer, which gives you a greater opportunity to
understand the true needs of the prospect that can be satisfied by your product or
service.
There is a rule that “telling is not selling.” Only questioning is selling. It takes
no creativity to talk about your product or service. It takes a good deal of
thought, however, to phrase your information in the form of a series of questions
from the general to the particular.
Today, people do not want to be sold. They may want to buy, but they don’t
want to feel that they are being sold. The moment a prospect feels that he is
being pushed to make a buying decision, he shuts down and loses interest.

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