Sometimes you really have to sell to your friends in order to convince them to do something fun with you. Over the weekend, Cliff and I attempted to do just that. The presidential Gala was Saturday night, and one of our friends wasn’t convinced that he should go. We tried to reason with him for quite a while, each time getting a firm “maybe.” As the time to get ready for the dance quickly approached, it looked more and more as though we were going to fail in our quest to convince him to come to the dance. That is, until we started to implement some of the sales techniques we have learned in class.
First, we started to answer his questions with our own questions. When he asked us why we wanted him to go to the dance so bad, instead of saying “so you can have fun,” we tried saying “what are the reasons you don’t think you want to go?” This made him think about why he was resisting us and gave us a chance to show him that he really didn’t have a good reason not to go. When he continued to resist, Cliff used another technique and simply asked “so is that a no?” This make him really determine if he wanted to go or not. When he replied that it was not in fact a “no,” we knew we had him right where we wanted him. We made him realize that there was a part of him that really did want to go, and finally convinced him to go to the dance.
BoweryJE22
Looks like you guys got em! In all seriousness though, we are always participating in non-sales selling. If you would have asked me about going to the Gala I would have given you a straight up no haha. I like how you and cliff used the no principle. I have been very skeptical about that tactic but it seems to work rather well. I recently was trying to sell some guys on a specific movie we should watch.
Wow this is pretty great. I feel like you guys maybe started using the techniques as a joke but then they actually worked! It is cool to read about how these techniques are applied.
Haha this is so you, Logan. It’s fun to see how these tactics play out in real life – especially when they actually work! Just on the ‘no’ principle though, it seems like this tactic takes advantage of people’s fear of committing… again playing on human psychology. So I guess the real question is – even though the new method of sales isn’t physically pushy or irritating, is the mental manipulation just the same thing, dressed differently?