MichaelSullivan
Sales Specialist
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Jun 2, 2009, 7:23 AM
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Improving Your Believability with Buyers
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By Michael P. Sullivan - 50-Plus Communications Consulting - www.graymoney.biz
Sales personnel at retirement communities need to consider the changing decision-making ability of people of age. We have found this issue to be critical especially with the wide disparity in age of prospects and those who sell to them. Training programs seldom deal with this intergenerational issue as the basis for improved sales success, as we do.
Older Baby Boomers and seniors rely more on their ability to judge people to make major decisions on major purchases like retirement housing than on rational analysis. This is a quite reasonable and effective strategy on their part if you think about it. The aging process sharply reduces the ability for most older adults to process information quickly, accurately and completely, making it difficult to analyze and comprehend information, frequently of a complex nature.
Older adults compensate for that decline in what is called “fluid intelligence” by compensating and relying more on their experience. They rely on:
. Whatever experience they have, or
. Their accumulated experience judging people, which they have been doing for 50, 60 or more years.
By the time they are 50 or so, most people have had a wide variety of experiences with other people. They have acquired a good ability at assessing who they can depend on, how much and under what conditions. And even if they aren’t very good at it, they believe they are. So, inevitably, when they cannot draw on prior buying experience, they assess the sales person instead and accept, reject, or object to it because of their ability to read the person.
That puts the burden on you not only to do the right thing but to appear to be doing the right thing. Sales people often fail that test. Their suggestions are not embraced because personally they are not believable enough. It is not that prospects necessarily distrust you; it is that a fundamental threshold of believability has not been crossed. The person remains open to intuitive reactions – gut feelings – that cause him or her to balk.
“Rational thought is great in a lot of circumstances where you have time and latitude to do it. But emotions provide rapid, immediate guidance, a gut reaction,” according to G.V. Bodenhausen, a Northwestern University social psychologist, as quoted in The New York Times.
Because the older person often cannot undertake rational thought about a key recommendation or suggested housing solution, his or her gut reactions dominate the response to it. If the sales person is not sufficiently believable, negative gut reactions about the recommendation itself or the sales person can derail the sale. If you have passed the believability threshold, those gut reactions are more likely to be positive. Whatever intuitive doubts the older prospect may have about your advice are overwhelmed by positive intuition about you.
Therefore, it’s important that you need to make yourself more believable. Unfortunately, most of us think we must make our suggested housing recommendations more believable, usually by throwing more details and often numbers at the prospect. But it isn’t usually about what’s been proposed; it is about you as a person. The average older prospect may not be able to judge your proposed solution clearly and honestly; but he or she can judge you.
Your believability at the time you make a recommendation depends on what you have done before as well as what you do then. Buyers use their entire experience with you to form an impression of your believability.
If you are all business and never show any real interest in them as individuals that will be a factor in their impression. If, on the other hand, you are highly attentive to them as unique individuals, expressing interest and concern about their lives, that too will be a factor in their impression. Which do you think will make you more believable when you make a recommendation?
Bottom line: Believability as it affects response to recommendations is not only about personal trust and integrity. It is also about emotional rapport and empathy. A very famous psychologist, Carl Rogers, said “real communication occurs when we listen with understanding - to see the idea and attitude from the other person's point of view, to sense how it feels to them, to achieve their frame of reference in regard to the thing they are talking about."
Prospects that sense that you try to see things from their point of view are much more likely to believe you have their best interests at heart when you make a recommendation and, therefore, are much less likely to have an involuntary negative gut reaction to it.
By Michael P. Sullivan, President, 50-Plus Communications Consulting, Charlotte, North Carolina, (704) 554-7863. Mike consults and trains staff at retirement facilities, homecare living firms, financial services and health care organizations. His book, “101 Easy Ways to Increase Business with Boomerplus Clients” is available on his website, www.graymoney.biz. Contact him at mps50plus@aol.com.
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(This post was edited by MichaelSullivan on Jun 2, 2009, 7:33 AM)
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