The Psychology Behind Selling: Cognitive Dissonance
Category : Lessons, New Skills, Thoughts
I always love learning to spot sales strategies in the act. Not because I’m going to criticize them for using such techniques, but to get a feel for how it really looks when its used in person, rather than reading about it. Did it work on me? How can I apply it to my own business? One such technique is called “cognitive dissonance.” You may have heard this term in your psych 101 class, but it has definite implications in the selling arena.
Cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling induced by holding two contradictory ideas at the same time. The “ideas” or “cognitions” at issue may include attitudes and beliefs, the cognizance of one’s behavior, and facts.
The hypothesis of cognitive dissonance suggests that individuals have a motivational drive to cut down dissonance by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, or by justifying or rationalizing their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. In other words, we are very good at coming up for reasons why we do things, even though they may at times go against our beliefs. Cognitive dissonance hypothesis is among the most influential and extensively studied hypotheses in social psychology.
Dissonance generally occurs when a individual perceives a logical incompatibility between what he believes and what is happening around him. In most cases, one thought implies the opposite of some other.
For instance, a notion in animal rights could be translated as inconsistent with eating meat or wearing fur. There would be a dissonance if an animal rights activist found out that his/her favorite sweater is actually made of animal fur that they helped protest against at one point. When people’s thoughts are consistent with one another, they’re in a state of harmony, or consonance. But acknowledging the contradiction would lead to dissonance, which may be experienced as anxiety, guilt, shame, anger, embarrassment, stress, and other damaging emotional states.
Salesmen often get close to customers by establishing a base as a friend, right from the start. They are hoping I have assembled a mental image of myself as a friend, a client, or a supporter. When you go in to buy a car for example, many times when you tell them what your career is, they will immediately tell you about someone they know who has the same career. Now I’m not saying that they are necessarily making it up, but it is certainly brought up for a reason. Cognitive dissonance – discomfort – comes about when we take actions that are incongruent with this mental image. And if I agreed to the increasing requests, they were building up my mental image – at the same time making it harder and harder to go against it, to say no to the following request. In other words, its harder to turn down a good deal from a friend.
Experimenters have also discovered that individuals would often change their positions towards something to match their behaviors to avoid the discomfort that dissonance induces. For example, after having spent 5 minutes on a survey I didn’t initially want to do, I may change my attitude towards the survey – “it wasn’t that bad, as a matter of fact it was quite fun to do” in order to rationalize to myself the time I didn’t want to spend taking the survey in the first place.
So how does this help us in business? Using the car salesman as an example, I would advise against using any kind of hard sell tactics, but building a long term relationships with clients is so important. More important than who customers will buy from is the fact that customers usually don’t buy anything until they’ve been exposed to it 7-10 times before. It gives it credibility and trustworthiness that are hardwired into our brains for survival purposes.
So build a relationship with your customers. On your website, offer a series of free materials that add value to your followers before they ever buy anything from you. Before you know it, you’ll have this fundamental part of psychology working in your favor.
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