Are You a Bad Person for Using Sales Tactics?
Good morning,
Sales newsletters (hey!), blogs, LinkedIn posts, books, etc. are filled with tactics to help you influence clients and close more deals. Are you breaching an unwritten business code when you leverage your knowledge of human psychology to close more deals? Today’s newsletter is about the simple rationale behind utilizing influence tactics ethically. Let’s dive in.
The answer to the above question is “You can absolutely ethically move others to agree to your request through influence approaches. But how you use your influence tactics is what determines if you’re a reprehensible salesperson or someone being genuinely helpful.” You’ll soon see how easy it is to responsibly use these influence tools.
Modern life is increasingly more complex than years past. Information is abundant and at everyone’s fingertips (good!) but making choices becomes more challenging (bad?)
In today's world, we're constantly bombarded with choices, big and small. Simply put, we don't have the time or energy to carefully weigh every single decision. So what do we do? We rely on mental shortcuts, or heuristics: quick, snap judgments often based on a single, usually trustworthy, piece of information. Think of something like the familiarity heuristic: “this person is from my hometown and I like them more for that” … based on the often subconscious (and potentially wrong) idea that familiar items, people, or concepts are safer or superior.
These mental shortcuts are becoming more and more relied upon as we face information overload. And while AI might offer some relief in the short term, it's likely that humans will continue to lean on these heuristics even more in the future.
Here's the interesting part: those who understand these shortcuts go through life with a real advantage. They can navigate decisions more efficiently, be the guide people need, and influence others. But it's only sustainable if they ethically use influence tactics. Using these tactics isn't inherently bad. Influence tactics are tools, like a hammer or screwdriver. These influence tactics only cross a line when deliberately manipulating a situation to inorganically take advantage of others’ reliance on mental shortcuts.
Let’s use the scarcity heuristic as a final example. This concept states that people tend to view something as more valuable when it's perceived as difficult to obtain. You tell a prospect “This is the last widget I have available– are you sure you don’t want it?”
Organic: In one world, you’re being honest. You helped provide truthful and critical information to a potential buyer. You’d actually be doing a potential buyer a disservice by not helping them make a purchase decision when considering the fact that this is the last widget available.
Inorganic: In another world, you're lying or at least embellishing the truth. You actually have more widgets available and were just trying to push a sale. And if the prospect finds out you abused the scarcity heuristic, you and your company deserve every bit of wrath from the duped buyer.
We’ll wrap with this: Drive the change you want to see in your personal relationships, with your customers, and in the world without a bruised conscience.
Use the toolkit of influence tactics at your disposal in relevant interactions. Find confidence in your ability to identify whether a tactic was organic or inorganic to a situation.
Humans make 35,000 decisions made each day (source). Many of these unsurprisingly happen automatically and simultaneously through the information we’ve subconsciously stored about what is “good” or “bad.” This is why our minds have heuristics as a crutch to prevent us from being crippled by a mountain of decisions. Thanks for deciding to make it to the bottom of this week’s newsletter