How to Get People to Say Yes Without Sounding Like a Salesperson

The art of teaching is awakening people's curiosity for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.

Anatole France.

Lesson number two, open curiosity gaps.

So there I was, standing outside Panera Bread, waiting for a friend and his father to arrive.

I didn't want to be there and I hoped this meeting wouldn't take long.

I didn't realize it at the time, but this meeting would fundamentally change the way I interact with people and situations.

In the previous lesson, we focused on how the brain processes decisions.

and how it depends heavily on feelings to guide our decisions.

If we want to be successful at getting people to act on our recommendations, we need to get them to not only understand what we want them to do, but also get them to feel a certain way about what we want them to do.

I like drawing comparisons from the world of sales because even though healthcare professionals don't necessarily identify as salespeople, they are nonetheless in a position of having to sell people every day on why they should do things or change things that will benefit their health or wellbeing.

Studies have found that over half of people in sales positions routinely do things that actually drive down the likelihood of a sale.

You've probably been the customer in the scenario where you were slightly interested in the product or service and you found yourself not trusting the person trying to sell you the product or service.

You became guarded and skeptical, maybe even resistant.

You've probably been the customer in the exact opposite scenario as well, where someone moved you from slightly interested to whipping out your credit card and getting all the bells and whistles.

In lesson one, we talked about the difference between education and communication.

Most salespeople are more than happy to educate you about their products, but how that's communicated to you can make all the difference in what happens next.

So let's go back to Panera Bread.

Here's the story.

I had got to know someone at my health club whose father was a financial advisor.

and he had suggested I talk with him about investments and retirement accounts.

I already had a financial advisor, and while I don't consider myself a financial guru, I thought I knew enough about the topic, and I didn't need his father's help.

Truthfully, I didn't even want to go to this meeting, but my friend was persistent, so I finally agreed to meet with both of them for lunch.

When we met, I was expecting his father to ask a few questions about my current financial status and how I was handling and investing my money, and then tell me about all the services his company offered and why they offered more value than I was getting with my current advisor.

In other words, I was prepared for a sales pitch.

That's not what happened.