The Motivations of Sales
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@Dashrender said in The Motivations of Sales:
The inherent trust that the average person isn't out to screw their fellow man.
Saying things like "screw" in relation to all sales processes is really ridiculous. One side is out to get a good deal for them, the other is out to do the same. No one wants to screw someone, they each just want the best deal for the side that they represent.
The problem with ethics comes in when one side projects their own responsibilities and motivations inappropriately onto the other party.
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@scottalanmiller said in The Motivations of Sales:
@Dashrender said in The Motivations of Sales:
The key word think instills a feeling in the buyer that seller is working for the buyer. This is the intentional falseness/trick/social engineering that sales employ to throw the super off their game and start acting with emotion instead of logic.
No, there is no trick from the salesperson. ANY trick there happened when the buyer engaged in such a way that a problem was discussed. The social contract of sales means that you can never make this excuse. Buyers have a responsibility for their actions and cannot project this on a sales person. As long as they know that they are a seller, that responsibility remains with the buyer.
What do you expect from sales people otherwise?
"Hey says guy, I need a car, will this Kia Sorrento seat four people, that's what I need."
Your Ideal Sales Guy: "I don't know, I'm a sales guy, figure it out."
Real Sales Guy: "Well this seats four, so I think it will meet your needs."See how silly it is to think that telling people that something is thought to solve a problem is some kind of trick?
"From what you've told me you regularly have 4 people in your vehicle. The Kia would get the job done but we also have this fully loaded SUV available for only $150 more per month. I think it would be much better for you. It will fit 7 people and has extra features added for comfort. Do you think that having a bit more space and flexibility would be a better fit for you?"
So would this upsell be unethical? It's technically more car than they need.
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@Dashrender said in The Motivations of Sales:
@scottalanmiller said in The Motivations of Sales:
@BRRABill said in The Motivations of Sales:
So what if the fry girl says ... oh by the way, instead of paying $3.49 for that fry you can get 2 for $4 which is a much better deal.
In your world, she'd be unethical because she didn't research if you needed more fries, if you like fries, if you have someone to share them with, how the extra $.51 would impact your personal finances, etc.
In my world, she's just a sales girl doing her job in the 100% ethical, social contract way. She didn't lie, she didn't force, she didn't deceive. She did sales.
Also, in this example it's likely that the company is making a bit more money from this sale because the cost of the fries is so low.
Absolutely. The fries cost about $.02 (real numbers I was a fast food manager) and they sell them for $.51 here. It might SEEM like a good deal to you as a buyer and the whole system is engineered to create this false value reaction. It's total manipulation. The single fry is priced way over the top to make the second one sound like a deal, it helps you to forget how much you were about to be overcharged for the first one and make you forget that you never need that many fries.
So suddenly what is a $.02 product with $1.47 of profit on it becomes a $.04 product with $1.96 of profit on it, all in a single transaction with a single cost for order completion and credit card processing. It's a huge value increase to the store and generally zero (and often negative) to the buyer.
It's not just the fry girl upselling you, it's the entire engineering of the pricing structure to create exactly what @BRRABill feels ... he comes away thinking that he got a good deal and that he made the decision and that the fry girl was nice when, in fact, it was an orchestrated manipulation of his emotions from beginning to end. It's the "triple offering trick" in a slightly different way, where you offer a low, high and medium priced option with only the medium one being intended to be sold and the other two designed to be just foolish enough that people will only pick the medium offering - because no one would pick the high anyway and the low doesn't carry the margins that they wanted.
It's really easy to avoid this stuff as long as you remember the social contact. The moment you start to think that the sales person might be your advisor, then being confused and thinking that you are getting a deal when obviously you are not, happens.
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@BRRABill said in The Motivations of Sales:
@Dashrender said in The Motivations of Sales:
@scottalanmiller said in The Motivations of Sales:
@BRRABill said in The Motivations of Sales:
So what if the fry girl says ... oh by the way, instead of paying $3.49 for that fry you can get 2 for $4 which is a much better deal.
In your world, she'd be unethical because she didn't research if you needed more fries, if you like fries, if you have someone to share them with, how the extra $.51 would impact your personal finances, etc.
In my world, she's just a sales girl doing her job in the 100% ethical, social contract way. She didn't lie, she didn't force, she didn't deceive. She did sales.
Also, in this example it's likely that the company is making a bit more money from this sale because the cost of the fries is so low.
Right, but in a real world example....
The Sausage McMuffin with egg right now is $3.59 for one or $4 for two.
Is McD's making a little more money off me? Sure. Could have I saved 40 odd cents and only bought one? Sure. But I can tell you I am much happier buying 2 at $4.
Right, so is happier all it takes? So by that definition, everything you said about sales before you've switch and now it is only about getting you to be happy with the transaction. Like I said.
And since you would only complete a transaction that you deem to make you happy, we can safely say ALL sales (that don't involve lying) make the buyer happy. Therefore you just told me that ALL sales tactics, no matter how much trickery, pressure, manipulation or whatever are exactly what sales is supposed to do - because it's all about making you think you got a good deal.
I agree. You've come around to my point, 100%. There is nothing wrong for giving advice and selling what is not needed, because if the buyer buys it, it means that they were happy and all responsibility for getting what they needed, rather than what makes them happy, is on them.
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@BRRABill said in The Motivations of Sales:
We've had this discussion many times here at ML. I've also discussed it offline with many people from ML.
@scottalanmiller says "trust" has nothing to do with it, or twists the word to use it against me "you should trust they will oversell you"
I think there is absolutely trust.
It's not twisting words. There is only one thing that you can trust, only one thing that trusting a sales person makes sense to use as a term, and that is to act in a sales capacity. Just like your fry girl, she will oversell you and you will feel like it made you happy and you can trust that that is the way the transaction will go.
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@BRRABill said in The Motivations of Sales:
Same thing with a doctor. If I go to the doctor for something, I am going to trust he is going to help me get better. Not prescribe me something that will kill me just so it gets him a free trip. (Now does that happen? I am sure.)
Why do you trust this, though? This is irrational. Most doctors are paid sales people, not just of their own services but of products, and are famously unethical in this area at an alarming rate. If you trust your doctors, and that's your decision, that's not wise at all, you are your best health advocate.
But if I hired you to be my health advocate, and you just "trusted the doctors" I would consider you to be the crook because you were paid to look out for me, not to trust the seller's agents.
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What I'm seeing talked about a lot is, I think, perspective and a lack of empathy.
When a sale is presented from the buyer's perspective alone, the sale always looks good - because the buyer, by definition, is happy since he chose to complete the transaction. So buyer's perspective on ANY sale is that it was a good one.
When the SAME sale is presented from the seller's perspective and we see the upselling going on, pricing to encourage emotional reaction, discounts given and so forth, we react negatively because we realize that our happiness arose from being manipulated and the feeling of being manipulated makes us feel upset.
I think the real problem comes in when you apply false trust to the sales person and then realize that your trust is always betrayed that it turns into this feeling of something bad having happened.
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Example, it sounds like getting a second fry for $.51 is a good deal and we took advantage of something. But in reality, it only sounds like a good deal because we were manipulated with pricing to make it feel that way. The original fries were overpriced to make the second fries sound cheap, so we perceive it as a good deal even when logically we know it can't be.
This is the "sales" tactic used everywhere. Prices are raised at times of pressured buying and then "sales" are applied at times of low buying to make people feel that they have to buy extra or faster to get a "deal" when, obviously, the sale prices are the "real" prices and the higher ones are just price hikes designed to make the real price seem palatable and to stop people from questioning why the price is so high in the first place.
People react emotionally to deals and it makes them much easier to get to buy things that they don't need or want. So creating false deals is how this is done, as profits need to be made regardless.
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@BRRABill said in The Motivations of Sales:
The point is, through experience and history, I have pre-vetted the "sales" people I use. Whether it's the CDW rep, the local mechanic, or my doctor.
This makes no sense. You've not been able to define what a good sales person looks like or what you would trust them to do so pre-vetting an ambiguous thing means nothing. You trust them to do what... act like the fry girl? Sure, then we are on the same page.
Your definitions keep flip flopping, when you do the fry girl example, and you see yourself as happy with her upselling you, we are on the same page.
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@BRRABill said in The Motivations of Sales:
If I have gone to them 19 times before, and they've never done anything sketchy once, why would they pick this one time to screw me over?
What does this mean to you? In the context of this conversation, what we know are...
- If they do something sketchy YOU won't know (like the fry girl.)
- If they are good at sales YOU will think that they treated you great.
- If they upsell you and you like it, you will likely return to have this done again.
You also have the sketchy issue. One moment you say upselling is unethical, the next it is great. Basically, upselling that you fall for makes you happy. You are exactly the customer sales people want. The more they upsell you, the happier you are and you become emotionally attached to them. This is the exact emotional manipulation we are talking about. You describe is as unethical in a vacuum, but the nature of it is that you love it once it has happened to you and your emotions take you out of the logical place to evaluate what just happened. Like the fries that you didn't need and were price manipulated to make it seem like a deal that it was not.
The more you say you trust the sales guy, the more you make my point - that's the response that we predict.
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@BRRABill said in The Motivations of Sales:
I think people like myself, who are in the business of recommending only what a client needs (from an extensive history of seeing the same situation over and over again) and ONLY what they need for that particular thing do exist. Just like a mechanic. Is he recommending brand X brakes because he stands to make the most off of them? Or because he's put on 1000 brakes and those are the ones that work the best. Could they possibly fare better by hiring a consultant to spend hours researching things to ultimately recommend the same thing because it's the right recommendation 99% of the time? Sure, but why? Could I take my car from the mechanic, drive it to another place, spend $120 in a diagnosis fee, and waste an entire day? Sure! But why ... just trust that the guy I've been using for 10 years really does believe I need new pads and rotors?
This isn't a rational part of this discussion. You are going to unrelated places to try to reverse justify behaviour... again, this is what is expected given the irrational predictability of this process.
You are reacting as if someone has told you not to use a salesman, but no one has. That came from you as a reaction to being expected to empathize with their motivations.
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@BRRABill said in The Motivations of Sales:
You are overthinking the whole recommendation phase of this. If someone says to me "hey what's a good laptop for my kid" I don't need to spend 10 hours researching it. Is there possibly a better, researched answer a paid consultant would give them? Maybe. But is it worth paying the money when 99% of the time what I tell them is going to be perfect? IMO, no way.
Actually no, I'm just presenting super basic common sense and fundamental empathy. Things that really should not require thinking about much at all, it's just basic interactions with other people. It feels complex because you are fighting human nature and trying very hard to justify putting trust in someone that you should not and an amygdala reaction to something you perceive that I said, that I did not.
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In more talking on this, I've identified an important concept of micro vs. macro manipulation in sales. To me this is just obvious but I now realize that people are not seeing it. Let me give an example....
The base prices of fries, shirts, whatever are set not to make a sale, but to provide a foundation for sales. This is macro-manipulation. Big picture stuff that sets the stage before you get involved in the sales process.
By doing manipulation at a macro scale, sales people can use other tricks like discount prices, bundling, upsells and such to make inflated prices or overselling sound like a sweet deal to the buyer by messing with their ability to determine value. And because the value manipulation happens BEFORE the sales process begins, it can be difficult to identify it because it is not personal in any way.
But like the fries... the second fries are not a "deal" in any way, they are required to make the price of the first fries rational. But by manipulating the prices in this way, it makes an overall higher price seem acceptable when if presented in a more straightfoward manner, they would not.
Bundling often does this as well. Bundle pricing is normally higher than unbundled because we buy things we don't value as highly and in some cases the prices are literally higher because there is an emotional reaction to bundling conceptually by many people.
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The trick of a macro manipulation is to get the buyer to ignore the false original price and only focus on the discount portion.
Example, by one sandwich, get a second for very little. The buyer will become obsessed with getting the second sandwich as such a "deal" price, they forget to look at the full price of the sandwiches together or consider what the actual value of the second sandwich is (or maybe even the first one.)
A handy way to combat this is to always combine all prices and look at totals. Some of us do this inherently and never actually see discount prices mentally, making it far easier. I'm lucky that the way that I approach life statistically, I often think in weird terms like "cost per hour" that other people do not and naturally reduce sale prices or discounts in such a way that I never really see them.
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Clothing is done this way all the time. Macro manipulation through high "normal" prices and then discounts to make people say things like "but it is half off." How many memes are made about women buying clothes that they don't need and repeating the sales percentage as a "savings" when we know it is actually overbuying. Spending $10 on a shirt that isn't needed is still $10 lost, even if the shirt is 99% off the fake inflated non-sale price.
The same thing happens with sandwiches, french fries, cars, and even IT equipment.
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I know a sales rep (sales to sales people) for a phone vendor. They use "how to get more sales" as a sales technique to sell to the next tier sales people. Things like "if you sell us, you get to make so much more money by selling this other things bundled in - so why sell the competition when we earn you so much more"?
This is how the channel works. Channel product sales people go to their resellers and train them to make selling easier and then "sell" to them based on the potential profits down stream. Meta sales, if you will.
Even if YOUR sales guy is trying to act in your interest alone (hint: he's not, not ever) he is subject to being "sold to" by the channel above him. Even if he didn't mean to, there is little chance that that won't pass on to you regardless. Even just the selection of products that someone carries is a reflection of this process.
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Another aspect worth noting here is that talking about sales in a business context is easy, it's crystal clear how the sales process exists to sell things that are not needed and the role of the business buyer is to buy what is best for the business and best is always in terms of ROI so there is straight math that always tells us what the right answer is or should be. It's super simple, there is no room for emotion. It's "just business".
When we mix in consumer sales, the sales side remains identical. Sales people are always doing business. But consumers are not, they are buying normally for emotion. the choice between a red car and a yellow one is all emotion, not money. The choice between a burger and chicken fingers is emotion, not money. Sure price is still a factor, but convincing someone that they want a yellow car instead of a red one doesn't require making it cost effective, only making it seem cool or presenting it well.
When we buy for ourselves, it's not about profits or 99% of the time we'd simply not buy at all. But personal buying is not like that. We buy for luxury, prestige or fun. So using consumer buying like "I'm happy with my purchase" tells us nothing about the process because of course you are and of course you had no criteria to test against. So using those examples, while we can trivially show how sales people manipulate your emotions to upsell you, is easily confusing because of the "I like what I got BECAUSE the salesman talked me into it" aspect.
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@scottalanmiller said in The Motivations of Sales:
Sales people are an important part of any ecosystem. They have a lot of value.
Can't live without sales people. It's what greases the wheels of the world. It's how you tell the world that you have a product that they might want. As long as people look for things to buy, someone will look to sell them things.
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It's true. Sales people are very necessary. Without them there is essentially no means of disseminating information about new products.
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@scottalanmiller said in The Motivations of Sales:
It's true. Sales people are very necessary. Without them there is essentially no means of disseminating information about new products.
It's just the unfortunateness of the adversarial nature of it.
