Social Engineering Sales Techniques: Eliciting Valuable Information
This is part 2 of a series on how to apply social engineering as sales techniques. If you haven’t read part 1, I recommend you start there.
You need information to sell effectively
Many sales techniques start with discovery questions. That’s because you need to learn about the customer first before you can start positioning your solution.
The problem is that many prospects don’t want to give information to the sales professional because they don’t want the information to be used against them later.
(When I’m the buyer, I actually take the opposite approach: I tell the sales person exactly what I’m looking for so that they can recommend the best solution to me and be a true consultative seller. I just pay attention to how they’re using sales techniques on me later.)
So if the buyers are predisposed against giving you information, you need a bit of an edge to help you succeed, and this is where where the techniques on eliciting information come in.
Elicitation is similar to active listening
A lot of elicitation techniques are very similar to techniques you’d get out of an active listening course. They show that you’re paying attention and encourage the prospect to keep talking. With the right techniques, you can steer the conversation into the direction you want.
The best resource for elicitation, which also provided a lot of these techniques is a free PDF from the FBI counterintelligence unit that shows how to detect and defend against elicitation techniques.
Minimal encouragers
Let’s start with the very simple techniques that you are probably already doing naturally. Minimal encouragers are sounds or short sentences that show the speaker that you’d like them to continue and that you’re listening, for example:
“Uh huh.”
“I understand.”
Reflective questioning
Let’s say the prospect mentioned something that you’d like to dig into more. You can steer the conversation through a technique called reflective questioning. You simply turn their statement into a question:
“You couldn’t get the reports out of the system?”
These techniques can be really powerful because they keep the prospect talking but you stay in control of where the conversation is going.
Paraphrasing
A technique that’s similar is to take a statement that you’d like to hear more about and to paraphrase it into another statement:
“So your advice wasn’t getting heard.”
Emotional labeling
If you pick up on an emotion, call it out. This shows the person you are listening that you empathize with them and understand their point of view, for example:
“That must have been frustrating for you.”
This is also an excellent rapport building techniques because it makes the speaker feel understood.
Bracketing
As a sales professional, you’re always interested in the size of the budget the customer has to spend. This can be difficult to tease out.
One good technique is to state a range and have the customer react. You may want to highball just a little to anchor the customer high for the negotiation and to ask for more budget.
“I see companies of your size reserve backup storage budgets of about $100K to $400K.”
You could also use bracketing to help you scope the opportunity in other ways. Let’s say you price based on the number of CRM seats, you could say:
“You must have somewhere between 200 and 300 CRM users.”
After you’ve made that statement, make a pause and don’t speak until the other side says something.
Uncomfortable silences
Use uncomfortable silences to your advantage. Most people can’t stand the silence and will ramble and disclose information.
“…”
Also make sure that you’re not selling against yourself by filling a void. After you present the price to the prospect (better: “investment”), put your phone on mute and ride out the silence until they say something.
Compulsion to correct
Many people feel compelled to correct something if they know that it should be different. Instead of asking for information, make a statement and have people correct you, for example:
“I see that you’re reporting into Daniel Krieger’s organization.”
Also see my post on using cold reading techniques in sales for similar examples.
Presumptive question
Let’s say you’re trying to find out who they’re currently contracting with. You have a hunch that they have signed with your competitor ACME. One way to get a confirmation is with a presumptive question:
“So what do you like about working with ACME?”
Note that I’m asking what they like about them, not what they dislike (which you may be more interested in). I recommend this for two reasons: First, it’s more positive and you don’t come across as trash-talking the competition. Second, when you ask people about what they like about a solution, they’ll quickly start chatting about what they don’t like (and usually talk about this way longer).
If you’ve liked this post, check out part 3 of this series, where you learn how to influence buyers.
