Social Engineering Sales Techniques: Influencing Your Prospects

This is part 3 of a series on how to apply social engineering as sales techniques. If you haven’t read part 1, I recommend you start there.

Influencing your buyers

Exerting influence on your buyers is a huge part of sales. there are quite a few techniques you can use to help you with this task.

Reciprocation

One of the oldest ways to influence is reciprocation. (It’s a fancy word for “I scratch your back, you scratch mine.”) Think about what you can do for your prospect that makes them a little emotionally indebted to you.

“I’ve had to pull quite a few favors with our engineering team to make this work for you.”

It doesn’t have to be a big thing — small favors.

Commitment and consistency

Ask your customers to commit to something. The Sandler sales methodology has a technique called an upfront contract. Let’s say you are in the process of a technical evaluation and the customer has one item they want you to change about the product before they sign, you could say:

“I understand you would like us to implement a custom feature for you. You’ve seen our commercial offer, so you know the price. If I get our product managers to commit to this change, will you sign the order? Are there any other items that we need to discuss before we close or is that the last remaining item?”

This way, you are getting an upfront agreement from the customer to sign if you can get them what they want. Find out if they are serious about signing or just stringing you along. You may uncover other things that haven’t been on the table before that you can address in parallel rather than after each other, therefore shortening the sales cycle. And if they don’t sign, they’ll have huge credibility issues with you and fight their own cognitive dissonance. (In that case, you may want to disqualify the deal.)

Similarly, reference customers will find it emotionally difficult to lapse on a renewal because they have made a public commitment and want to be seen as consistent in their views.

Social proof

Nobody wants to be the first person to try something. It’s much more comforting if others have gone the same path before. Use this technique in your sale as follows:

“I just talked to Joe at ACME. He had the same challenges as you and is very happy with our solution.”

There are many other ways to use social proof. Yelp and Amazon reviews and eBay seller ratings are strong examples of social proof.

Similarity

People like people who are like them. It’s what’s familiar to them. Also, if you are like them, you can’t be bad, right? Find similarities between you and your buyer and bring those up in conversation:

“So you also grew up in Kansas? What town?”

Sellers are doing this all the time. Sports teams. Alma maters. Hobbies. There are tons of examples.

Compliments

Very old trick, but people still like to be complimented. If you want to do it less obvious, compliment not the person but their team, company or company’s reputation:

“I hear your inside sales team is top notch.”

Association

Tell me who your friends are and I’ll tell you who you are. Association is powerful. Think about the people or organizations you associate with and highlight this in conversation.

“Jeff Bezos is one of our founders.”

“Google is one of our key investors.”

Even if they have never heard of your company, you’ll get instant credibility.

Authority/Expertise

If you have a way to prove your expertise or authority in your specific field, make sure that you use it.

“We’ve run expenses processing for most Fortune 500 companies for over a decade.”

Another way would be to combine this with the concept of association if you have an expert working for your company:

“Last year’s Nobel laureate for economics runs our investor advisory team.”

Scarcity

Nothing is more valuable than something scarce. Gold. Diamonds. Doge coin. Try to find something you have that is rare, or talk up it’s scarcity:

“My team only has two more tickets for our user conference that we can hand out before the event. If you want to go, I recommend you reserve them quickly.”

Confidence bait

We talked about trust in an earlier post in this series. The confidence bait is similar to this concept. It’s when you provide information “in confidence”:

“Between you and me, I think I can push my management to discount another 10%. They really want to hit their bonus this quarter.”

Summarize the agreements

When you are at the end of a call or meeting, make sure you summarize all of the agreements you made. This ensures not only that you understood them correctly but also ensures the buyer hasn’t forgotten about them.

Commitment and consistency also plays into this. If you summarize, and the buyer agrees, they will have a harder time to argue their way out of what they agreed to. To be safe, send an email with your meeting notes.

Build life-long relationships

These sales techniques are little helpers to build relationships and move the sale along. However, never lie to your buyer or do something that is against their best interest. You should focus on building a symbiotic relationship that can last a lifetime, even beyond your current sales gig. Many sellers stay in the same industry their entire life not only because they can leverage their expertise but also because they’ve built a strong network with strong relationships.

If you are a buyer and you notice these techniques being used on you, don’t take it the wrong way. Sellers are paid on commission. They can’t pay their mortgage if they don’t sell. Be aware of the techniques they use, and dance the dance. In fact, I find it quite fun to reverse-engineer the techniques sellers use on me.

If you’ve enjoyed this post, check out my post on psychic selling, where I apply cold reading techniques to sales.