# Sales explained

One-on-one sales is by far the most intense, relational niche of marketing.

- Effective salespeople have *very* extraverted [personalities](personality.md).
- Sales staff stay motivated from the psychological numbers game:
  - If 100 calls create a lead, every call is another step to that lead.
- The amount of rejection necessary to thrive in sales requires an extremely high sense of confidence.

Sales is also known as pipeline marketing:

1. Generate leads through connections, advertising, and various other sources.
2. Sift through leads to create prospects who might get the product.
3. Routinely engage with the prospects until they become your client or customer.
4. Treat your clients exceptionally well to maintain your reputation.
5. Create more leads and prospects through referral marketing.

## Aggressive tactics

Sales staff have *awful* reputations from overly aggressive tactics. For example:

Normally, an elite real estate training program like this from tried-and-true experts is worth over ten thousand dollars, but today only you can get the entire training for not $10,000, not $1,000, not even $300! Today only you can get it all for only $183! And, to sweeten the offer, if you call within the next 15 minutes you will also get a free set of Ginsu Knives! A $500 value for free! How will you spend your millions? You're minutes away from breaking free of the grind, and on your way to living the dream: all you need to do is call us at 555-555-555. Call now. There are only five spots left! Our expert advisers are taking calls right now!

A. Exclusivity - "elite real estate training program"

- An appearance of a unique and prestigious product make customers more likely to participate and spend more on a brand

B. Authority/Power - "tried-and-true experts"

- Sellers use various techniques to make you believe they have cornered the market on information

C. Comparison - "not $10,000, not $1,000, not even $300"

- Salespeople embellish differences by placing them side-by-side with something else that implies a drastic change or providing numbers

D. Urgency - "Today only you can get"

- The more time a customer has to deliberate, the less likely they'll make a purchase

E. Specificity - "get it all for only $183"

- Specific numbers imply extensive thought behind the number and no room for negotiation

F. Free - "A $500 value for free"

- Adding a free bonus gives an illusion of a product's extra value (over-delivering)
- Implies people should give back something in return

G. Pleasure Sensation - "How will you spend your millions?"

- Invokes the customer's pleasure sensation to feel it before buying it

H. Pain Relief - "breaking free of the grind, and you're on your way"

- Creates or embellishes pain to make the product feel like a relief from pain

I. Scarcity - "...only five spots left"

- Combination of Urgency and Exclusivity
- Artificially increases demand by limiting time or quantity

J. Social Proof - "expert advisers are taking calls right now"

- Gives psychological confirmation that customers will experience excellent service

K. Confidence - (the general tone)

- Gives a general image that this person has a reason for their confidence, meaning they may have a legitimate product

Besides straddling [ethical](morality.md) boundaries, high-pressure sales also exploit the fact that people only reject a product after saying "no" three times.

One quick way to generate attention is through wash subscribing:

1. Use many fake names with fake contact information inside a subscription system.
2. Send out the marketing material to all the fake information, which makes it look wildly [popular](trends.md).
3. Advertise to people that your subscription is wildly popular.
4. If you can acquire enough actual subscribers, you've created a legitimately popular product.

## Ethical sales

The correct way to sell involves most [rules of influence](power-influence.md), but with less pressure that [respects boundaries](power-influence.md).

- The key to effective sales is to explain how the product is useful with 4-5 different variations, then paradoxically express that it's utterly simple to use.
  - Illustrating a point should never use a tone that implies condescension.
  - Tell a story where you're ignorant, or maybe where someone else is ignorant, but *never* where the lead is ignorant.
- When the customer says "no", only give one more attempt before backing away from the matter.
  - People saying "not today" or "not yet" are simply saying "no", and it's not wrong to force certainty (e.g., have them sign a paper declining the offer).
- When the customer says "yes", don't push the matter.
  - Most upsells can turn away a client who wanted a simple experience.

Often, [lying](people-lying.md) builds leads.

- Making false or unenforceable promises often provokes someone to [sign the contract](people-contracts.md) that makes the sale.
- Fabricating a crowd who raves about a product often creates enough [artificial social pressure](people-image-distortion.md) to generate a legitimate crowd.

The [personalities](personality.md) of sales staff (i.e., high Extroversion) mean they typically need to learn [the art of listening](language-speaking.md).

- Good salespeople can (and do) repeat back precise words someone said, within the context they said it.
  - Repeat back their questions, then praise them for making good questions.
- Most sales staff are so busy talking that they don't even read the signals that *someone wants to buy*!

## Retention & more sales

There are 4 major ways to improve sales:

1. Upsell - generate more income from an existing product through more features.
2. Cross-sell - add more products to the first product, often with discounts across all the products.
3. Follow-up - sell more products at a later time.
4. Continuity - sell a [long-term contract](people-contracts.md) instead of a one-time sale.

More connections between a product and other offerings creates more natural product placement.

- Selling a seemingly unrelated product can often inspire people to look to you for that product domain as well.

A successful salesperson can draw more attention through referral marketing.

- Their expertise will mean people trust them over a stranger or faceless entity.
- One of the most significant ways to generate nonstop referral attention is to build connections with others in related domains you're *not* [specialized](jobs-specialization.md) in, then direct people you serve to them as the situation presents itself.

Focus all your effort on specific types of consumers who may still yield a mutual profit where you don't directly advertise.

## Customer relationships

Maintaining relationships with current customers is much cheaper than getting new ones, and the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) philosophy has mostly replaced the aggressive sales model.

- CRM believes in a give-and-take relationship between the customer and the service provider.
- CRM focuses on [win-win](people-conflicts.md) through prolonged relationship-building beyond a simple one-time benefit.

CRM's strength comes from how it builds its network:

1. Instead of selling, let others sell for you through their passion for your product.
2. Create referrals through connections of connections.
3. Generate affiliate marketing through associated industry providers who work well naturally alongside your product.

The simplest CRM is to keep a calendar.

- Have a clear policy that indicates exact rules for when to follow up with prior customers (e.g., 3 months after the most recent purchase to ask if they want a resupply).
- If you're using an automated message, do *not* try to make it sound like you're an actual person sending them a private message.

Generally, most people don't reply to email from how much volume they receive.

- Have a system that allows for limited or completely removing their email subscription.
- Because of the over-information of modern marketing, you will gain more retention long-term by *not* provoking them to sign up for an email list.
  - Instead, find unconventional and non-industry-standard ways to communicate with your clients.
- If your service helps them with a specific project, ask them in an email, "have you given up on this project?"

However, a defective or dysfunctional CRM system can be worse than none.

- If there's customer data tracked with software (e.g., Salesforce) and the customer has to keep providing it over and over, it's worse for the customer than simply asking as-needed.
- Large organizations can often create headaches for customers who simply want a plain datasheet or a quick summary.
- People can often feel privacy violations if they didn't [consent to](people-contracts.md) information the CRM uses.
- Paying too much attention to CRM may miss that some customers are worth *not* having.

## Customer service

[Customer service](people-customerservice.md) is the key to holding a continued business relationship.

Without a human aspect, you can only convey value through the product itself:

- Someone with better [research](science.md) will eventually beat you in the quality of the product.
- Someone with a more [efficient delivery system](logistics.md) will eventually beat you in the product's price.
- You may not shut down as a business, but you may have to pivot from being a market player to operating a niche market.

On a [large-scale](groups-large.md), customer service becomes "public relations".

- Most [PR](people-image-distortion.md) is [adapting the story](stories-storytellers.md) to fit a particular viewpoint that's favorable to the organization.
- The art of public relations involves using proven [psychology methods](mind-bias.md) to [manage a brand's optics](people-image-distortion.md).

If there are multiple stages in the marketing process, and employees are paid based on moving customers to the next stage, it creates a perverse incentive (i.e., [Goodhart's Law](lawsaxioms.md)).

However, too much customer service can be devastating to an organization.

- Social media does *not* reflect real life.
  - The intuition is that an angry message reflects 1,000 hidden angry messages.
  - However, usually, 1 angry message means 4 people are angry enough to be outraged, and the [algorithm](computers-programming-algorithms.md) favors "engagement" irrespective of *how* people responded or interacted.
  - With proper documentation, most companies can publicly communicate the exchange *back* on social media and let the public see the situation for themselves.
- Healthy referral marketing can become sabotaged by all the extra work (and [bias](mind-bias.md)) from maintaining business relationships with the most [unlikable and unpleasant](personality.md) consumers.
- Successful customer service scales in effort to the importance of the consumer to the organization.