The Entrepreneur’s Bookshelf: Sales

One of the fundamentals of being an entrepreneur is the ability to sell your product. It is not a simple skill to pick up. Particularly for the technopreneurs, selling something can be sometimes a uphill battle.

One of the things which I find that differs US from the rest of the world, is that sales is not a dirty word. If you check out biographies of most CEOs in multi-national companies, at some point in their biography, you will find that they are in the department of sales or marketing. It is not difficult to understand this because the CEO’s job is to sell the vision of the company to the investors.

Influence by Robert Cialdini

For sales, I strongly recommend one book. According to my friends in US, this is one of the must read bibles. Cialdini has managed to combine both theory and practice into one simple idea. He reduced the ability of selling something to the concept of influence. It is the ability to persuade someone to act in the direction which you desire. Cialdini holds a PhD in psychology and what he did in this book is incredibly interesting. He spent three years researching on how sales people operate and sell their ideas, products and services to people. After making a compilation he reduced the entire concept of influence into six principles: Reciprocation, Commitment and Consistency, Social Proof, Liking, Authority and Scarcity.

• Reciprocation: People generally feel obliged to return favours back to the people who have helped them or offered them something free in the past. Imagine you get an offer at reduced price, you have the tendency to buy more from the sales people.
• Commitment and Consistency: People have a strong desire to appear consistent in their behaviour. They also have a strong desire to commitments by providing reasons to justify them.
• Social Proof: People generally look to other people similar to themselves in making decisions.
• Liking: People are more likely to buy something if they are attracted to physical attractiveness and common goals of the products.
• Authority: People act in an automated fashion to commands from authority, particularly, if that person is a celebrity or sports star.
• Scarcity: People tend to want brands as they become less available. This is actually a corollary from the law of supply and demand in economics.

Notes:Guy Kawasaki has an extensive review of this book with an interview with Cialdini.

Comments