It is needless to point out that sales are imperative for every successfully driven company. By communicating well with your prospects, they feel valued, accepted, and understood. This, in essence, makes them more open to purchasing the company's products or services, over and over again.

Acquiring desirable knowledge about effective persuasion techniques, could help you up your sales and conveniently meet your targets. It can as well create a formidable edge over your competitors in the market.

Technology advancements, tight life schedules, short attention spans, and an infinite number of online options are just some of the key factors that have helped transform the art of sales into more of Science. As a result, business leaders, entrepreneurs as well as marketers, are constantly analyzing their customers and experimenting to find unique ways of persuading consumers to be part of the solutions they are offering.

It doesn't matter whether you need to generate more leads, turn your customers on to new offerings, or pivot your strategies to Marketing, there are a variety of unfolding reasons why you may want to tweak sales approaches and lots of smart ways to make it done.

Being in a position to understand the basic principles of influence, can put you ahead of the competition. You gain more insights into why visitors abandoned their carts, why they buy and what makes them spend money. Most specifically, you will have insight into how you can turn theory into practice, and Science into cold, hard cash.

 The below painstakingly explained 14 persuasion techniques will give you an unfair advantage in the most critical and significant battlefield of all: the unique human brain.

What is the persuasion technique?

This is a method of selling where you make attempts to convince the customer that the product or service you are offering is exactly what they need. It is a justifiable way to complete sales since it involves the customers, and then coming to understand their needs, wants, motivations, and their struggles so you can, in essence, provide lasting solutions that will work for them.

Excellent persuasion selling means understanding a prospect's thoughts, about a product, or idea and being in a position to educate them about it so that they may gain more insights into it.

Why is persuading a customer important?

Creation of effective rapport

For you to be considered persuasive, you must have the know-how to get to know your customer and what they may need from a product or a service. You must be able to hear them a hearing ear, build a strong relationship, and win their trust before they may feel comfortable investing in your company, or you as a salesperson.

Expansion of business opportunities

The more you earn a customer’s trust the higher the chances of them recommending you and your company to their contact, family, friends, neighbors, and co-workers. 

Before you even know it, these individuals may become your prospective long-term customers if you can continue embracing cordial relationships with them.

Increased sales

The degree of trust that consumers feel in the salesperson they have become loyal to determines how much they are willing to spend on the products and services he/she sells. That being said, persuasion selling helps consumers continue to purchase from the same salesperson because they feel that their contact holds their best interest of them at his heart as he/she recommends the products and services for them 

Extensive job satisfaction

Having cordial relationships with your customers and being able to provide the expected solutions for them, can help you feel confident in your abilities and generally happy with your performance. That feeling of satisfaction that comes when your customers are happy with the products you recommended for them is phenomenal.

Highly selected Persuasion techniques to increase your Sales

1. Have an understanding that customers speak a variety of languages

It is common to find that many companies equip their salespeople with what we call a "one size fits all", company sales pitch. Little do they forget that each person on this globe utters his/her own unique language. All the mundane as well as traumatic experiences of your life have determined the language you use– where you grew up, the language your loved ones speak, your place of study, your allies, your career, your capital, and your spirituality. No one has ever had your life experience. Similarly, the language used by two different people to describe the same situation, or in other words, the way two people interpret the same language may be very different. For instance, reading the term snake might have different interpretations as it may be visualized to be a rattlesnake, python, or cobra.

2. Personalize your messages.

One of the most powerful maxims to help you the customer's trust is to resist the urge to adhere to a generic sales script. When you sound rather odd and overly rehearsed, or hardly share messages and, or information that feels relevant to your prospect, your efforts go in one year and immediately pass out of the other.

Nonetheless, this doesn't mean that you need to fully wing your sales calls. Instead, it just means that you need to get armed to adjust your messages depending on the preference of your prospects.

Personalizing your messages is more valuable than a scripted rundown of other features they may be less interested in.

3. Give extra attention to problem-solving

Instead of just dwelling on the reason why the prospects should buy your product, which in essence, can at times feel pushy and pissing off, put your efforts into sharing all the underlying reasons why your products can help them amicably solve their problems. By wholeheartedly keeping their concerns front and center and strategically positioning your offer as a solution, you are proving to your prospects the value of your products without being too pushy.

Let's take a scenario where you as a salesperson, selling expense and reporting software for entrepreneurs. In one way or the other, your prospects share their struggle with complex and manual logging of their expenses. You can respond to this query by mentioning the automated features of your software, and sharing how much time on average your customers save. This explains that you were both actively listening to the concerns of your customers, and you can provide a viable solution.

4. Avail Social proof

Did you know that having a good rapport with your customers makes them sell to you indirectly?

Well, leveraging social proof, can be one of the most powerful persuasion tactics.

While it is pretty obvious that buyers may take your direct word as a sales rep with a grain of salt because they are aware that you want to make the sale, they will trust the testimonials or stories from previous customers who were seeking a similar solution. So if you are facing resilience from a customer who feels unsure if your product is the right fit, sharing a customer's success story can be the best approach to the situation.

5. Encourage the prospect's decision-making

Although it may sound like backstabbing at first, letting your prospects decide on what they want, and allowing them to blatantly criticize what they feel isn't right, is the way to go.

After all, your end goal is to make a profit. As such you let your customers buy from you because they truly want and because they feel pressed to. No one likes being told what to do anyway, not even your prospects. You should avoid like a plague, being too directive in your approach. Simply provide contexts and information that makes choosing your products a cakewalk. It is always your mandate to remind your prospects that the purchase is truly their choice in the entire conversation.

6. Create personal connections.

As a well-known rule of basic human interaction, we are all willing and ready to engage in a deeper conversation with people we like. Even though it is possible for buyers to like your product or brand, as a sales rep, you are the major source of human connection representing your company.

In addition, by nurturing genuine connections with your prospects and getting them to like you on a human level, you are scaling yourself into a better position to have a persuasive conversation. Adjust your impressions using the tips below:

• Be more complementary: providing a genuine compliment can go a long way. Showing a loyal customer how you value his or/her contributions to the company is a more effective approach than just warming and serving him/ her.
• Find a common ground: while you are in the process of building a personal connection with your prospects, look for things you share in common and can relate with each other about. Commonality with your prospects is a sure way of building trust and persuading them to buy your product.

7. Remain patient with the process

Another important maxim in the sale is you should not rush the activities you are undertaking.

We know you have set targets to hit daily. Nevertheless, effective persuasion should always feel natural for the prospect. They shouldn't feel compelled, or pressured to sign on the dotted line.  That doesn't insinuate that you can't implement the sense of urgency and be timely– in fact, creating a moderate sense of urgency like offering a special price within a limited period can be an effective tactic.

As a rule of thumb, you should always know that you have to read the same line with your prospects. In other words, make sure that where you are in the process, aligns with where your prospects are on the buyer's journey.

8. Reciprocity 

This principle implies that when someone does something pleasant or gives something to you, you would naturally feel that you owe him the favor, and eventually would feel obligated to return it. It doesn't matter whether the favor is wanted or unwanted. All that matters is the compelling force of indebtedness within you towards that person. It is needless to say that sometimes the returning favors can at times be greater than the received favors.

How do you apply it in your business?

Well, giving gifts and other incentives to your prospects is an effective method to acquire goodwill, and endear your company to your clients or prospects. Whereas the gifts aren't expected to be expensive, they should be very useful and have perceived value. The prospects will reciprocate the favor by becoming loyal customers for your company or website.

9. Commitment and Consistency

As for this principle, people like to behave consistently. Once we make a decision, or in other words take a stand, we would always act and respond in ways that are consistent with our decision. To validate our decision, we would strongly justify and at the same time defend our earlier stand. This technique is in most cases relevant when the agreement is made in front of other parties.

How is it applied in your business?

At first sight or exposure to your business, the majority of prospects will hardly buy from you. This is because they lack enough information about you yet.

However, if you can lure them to try out your products or services for free, then you might eventually pay to use your products or services. You can as well convince them to start with a cheaper plan first, and then convince them to upgrade later.

10. Drive Prospects' attention with the power of "But"

This might be rather sarcastic to interpret at first sight, isn't it? Don't worry, we have got your back.

To begin with, using but to the positives and negatives assists you in controlling where your prospect's attention is going because you will always guide your customer's attention to whatever comes after the but statement. 

Let's consider the following two scenarios:

• In case you sign up to work with us, you certainly make a huge sum of money. But it is going to be a lot of work, so many sleepless nights, and you will spend hundreds of hours watching videos. You will also need 4 hours a day to spend executing everything we have taught you.
• If you sign up to work with us, you have to go through hundreds of hours of watching the videos, work 5 hours a day discharging on the stuff we teach, and expect to spend sleepless nights troubleshooting the problems. But, you are assured of making more money than you have ever made in your life.

Analysis of the two statements

Although both statements are offering the same thing from a similar company, the attention is different from each of them.

For the first statement, it was a positive expression followed by a negative one.

The second statement began with a negative expression and then to a positive one.

The second statement will be a very effective one because as much as you are building trust and being completely honest about the product you offer; you should keep the customer's attention focused on the reward.

After all, the last thing you want is to hear your prospects ask you such unhealthy questions as, What's the catch? Why are your products sounding too good to be true?

They are good enough to understand that you are not perfect, and they are aware that if they accept the offer, there must be some level of work involved. Therefore, confirming that makes them trust you more, and may influence them in making a purchase even if they weren't initially willing to. There you go, you can now tell the value of "but" as a persuasive technique!

Bottom Line

There we go, we have eventually touched down after a thorough elaboration of the ten most powerful persuasion techniques to help you win the customers' trust.

Implementing these tactics can help feel more at ease and confident walking into sales conversions with prospective customers. As was once stated by Amelia Earhart, "The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process, is its reward," the procedures for customer persuasion have been laid before. Wake up and take action now.