The Power of Persuasion for Successful Selling

In sales persuasion isn't just an asset; it's a necessity. For salespeople, mastering the art of persuasion can transform not only their careers but also the entire selling organization. Imagine having the ability to consistently close deals, build meaningful relationships with clients, and inspire your team — all by adding simple, mostly incremental refinements to your communication.

This article will delve into

• The importance of persuasion skills in sales,
• The differences between conventional sales training and persuasive communication techniques, and
• How to align trigger activation with a selling model or process.

The Importance of Persuasion in Sales

Persuasion skills are vital for salespeople because they directly impact the most crucial event in business: the purchase. Unlike other business functions, sales revolve around communication that leads to a buying decision. Effective persuasion can mean the difference between a successful sales career and one that struggles to meet targets.

Great salespeople don't just sell products; they sell solutions. They understand their clients' needs, tailor their pitches to address those needs, and create compelling conditions for clients to choose their solutions. This isn't about manipulation or coercion; it's about connecting with clients on a deeper level and helping them believe in the value in what you offer.

Take Steve Jobs, for example. Jobs wasn't just a visionary; he was a master persuader. When he introduced the iPhone, he didn't just list its features. Instead, he painted a picture of how it would change people's lives, making the abstract benefits tangible and relatable. This ability to get people to imagine themselves in their own circumstances experiencing your offer is a hallmark of effective persuasion in sales.

The Quest for the X Factor

One of the key factors that separates truly successful salespeople from those who achieve only modest success is a relentless focus on optimal communication. My father, Russ Granger Sr., a renowned sought-after sales trainer, was obsessed with this "X factor." Despite equal levels of aptitude, education, training, and experience, some salespeople excelled far beyond others. Why?

Dad's pursuit of this mystery led him to develop the 7 Triggers  methodology toward the end of his distinguished career. This simple yet powerful formula for persuasive communication is rooted in neuroscience, and proven with over a decade of real-world results for individuals, startups, small businesses, and at some of the world's largest of most successful companies.

It helps salespeople understand and activate the emotional triggers that drive decision-making, enabling them to connect more meaningfully with clients and achieve extraordinary results.

My Own Story: Struggles and A Breakthrough

When I started my own agency, I faced a frustrating challenge: I couldn't land an anchor client despite my extensive experience and credibility in both marketing and sales. My initial frustrations might sound familiar. You meet with a client to go through your well-prepared pitch based on your knowledge of their needs and goals. You've covered all the bases, highlighted what you know they'll be interested in, and the prospect is nodding along in agreement. There's great rapport and a solid fit between your offer and their needs. It feels like you've sealed the deal. And then... nothing. No calls, no emails, no texts, no deal. What happened?

I had exactly this experience — over and over again, in fact. Despite my background and skills, I was striking out. Just when I was about to lose hope, I got a call from Dad. "Come down to the house this weekend if you can," he said. "We'll go out on the boat. I want to show you something." I figured he wanted to show off his restored vintage Chris-Craft, but he had something else in mind.

Dad handed me a draft of his new book, which was all about how most of what we thought worked to persuade people didn't really work at all. It was based on breakthrough neuroscience research that showed how decisions are made almost entirely in the emotional part of the brain, even for highly calculated business decisions.

As I read through the book, I realized that while I was familiar with many of the persuasion factors, I hadn't been using them effectively. The 7 Triggers provided a comprehensive system that combined these factors in a powerful way. When I reprogrammed my approach to incorporate these triggers, I saw immediate results. Not only did I land that essential anchor account, but I also went on to land every one of the five accounts I pursued that first year.

Conventional Sales Training vs. Persuasive Communication Skills

Conventional sales training often focuses on a process defined by the seller. This might include techniques for prospecting, presenting, handling objections, and closing deals. While these skills are essential, they can sometimes feel mechanical, even administrative.

Persuasive communication, on the other hand, focuses on the decision factors affecting the customer. It emphasizes understanding the customer's individual circumstances, their interests and motivations, and tailoring your messages to align with what is genuinely meaningful to them.

Traditional sales training might teach you how to present a product's features and benefits, even offer some rudimentary guidelines on how to engage customers in consultative fashion. But persuasive communication goes deeper. It enables you to connect those features and benefits to the customer's personal or professional goals; to their patterns of thought and behavior; to the factors that produce belief and not just comprehension. It's about making the customer feel truly understood and valued, rather than just another potential sale.

Considering the common (and inaccurate) reputation the persuasion dynamic has, it may seem ironic that persuasive selling isn't really selling at all, at least in the way we have come to think of it. Persuasive selling tends to be ideal for those who don't want to appear "salesy" because, while far from being passive, persuasive people steer clear of conventional selling techniques and instead create highly favorable buying conditions.

If you are familiar with the principles and techniques of consultative selling you’ll notice that these closing criteria are different from those used for producing what is typically called a "fit" between a buyer's needs and a seller's solutions. A fit is not a sale. A yes decision is a sale.

And decisions – as we know from live brain scan technology – happen primarily in the emotional regions. If decisions are fundamentally emotional, then the most favorable conditions for closing – for getting a yes decision – are also emotional.

That's why the kind of criteria recommended by most consultative selling methods – to produce a "fit" between buyer needs and seller solutions – are not inherently persuasive. They tend to be too logical to activate the emotional brain.

Top closers are not the ones with perfect product knowledge or mastery of a selling process. Top closers know – whether instinctively, or by experience or training – how to get prospects emotionally invested in the buy. They do that by activating emotional triggers (whether they realize it or not), which helps to produce favorable buying conditions.

How to Create Favorable Buying Conditions

Questions are nothing new when it comes to consultative selling, but in order to create conditions for closing you need to go beyond logical "fit" questions. You need to ask questions that will help you create specific closing conditions. For example: 

What are the biggest potential risks for you in making this decision? What would give you the most comfort for making this decision? 

When your customer begins to see that you understand their position beyond the practical factors of the solution itself, they are more likely to share their hopes and concerns, and to follow your lead. Once you've established a leadership position in the selling process, you are elevated to the role of influencer.

Trigger Tactics

It's easy – far too easy – to allow a focus on facts and features to gobble up the lion's share of selling time, and which is likely to reduce (if not eliminate) your ability to influence the buying decision. (Remember: without any emotional connection you are focusing on a fit, not a sale.) That's what triggers are for.

Each trigger has a list of elements – topics, or types of messaging – you can use in your conversations and presentations which will activate that trigger in the emotional part of the buyer brain. Triggers work to connect facts and features to the emotional brain in order to influence yes decisions.

And though all the 7 Triggers can help to produce each of the five favorable buying conditions, certain triggers tend to work more directly than others to achieve a particular condition. 

By combining conventional sales training with persuasive communication skills, salespeople can create a more holistic and far more successful approach to selling. They can follow a structured process while remaining flexible and responsive to the unique circumstances of each customer. This combination can lead to higher close rates, increased customer satisfaction, and stronger client relationships.

The Power of Neuroscience in Persuasion

Recent advancements in neuroscience have revolutionized our understanding of decision-making. Studies using live brain scans have shown that decisions are made in the emotional part of the brain, even for seemingly rational business decisions. This finding challenges the long-held belief that logic and reason are the primary drivers of decision-making.

This means that successful persuasion relies on triggering the emotional brain. By understanding and leveraging emotional triggers, salespeople can create messages that resonate on a deeper level with their clients. This approach not only increases the likelihood of closing deals but also builds stronger, more meaningful connections with clients.

Emotional triggers are specific elements that evoke a strong emotional response, making the message more persuasive and memorable. These triggers can be categorized into different types, such as the Friendship Trigger, Authority Trigger, Hope Trigger, and Consistency Trigger. By incorporating these triggers into their communication, salespeople can create a compelling narrative that influences the customer's decision-making process.