3 Sales Psychology Skills to Make More Sales

Mastering sales psychology is crucial if you want to make more sales. A huge problem that salespeople run into is that many popular psychology terms and concepts are therapeutic. Thus, they don’t translate over to the world of sales and aren’t effective in a sales process. Today, I bring to you 3 sales psychology skills that are important to master if you want to have a greater impact on your prospects and make more sales. These 3 skills derive from NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) and I did the heavy lifting of describing the correct role these “consciousness-mapping skills” play in the sales process.

The term ‘map’ here is referring to a representation of the psychological characteristics of your inner awareness and understanding. The principles of distortion, generalization and deletion are integral components when discussing topics related to memory and are extremely useful tools for persuasive communication. 

The 3 Consciousness Mapping Principles

These principles explain how memories can be altered or impacted by our individual experiences and perspectives, which in turn can shape the way we remember things. This can then be leveraged in our persuasive messages. 

• Distortion allows for a person’s perspective to affect the accuracy of their memories.
• Generalization is the tendency to make assumptions about details that may not have actually occurred.
• Deletion occurs when some aspects of an experience are completely forgotten over time. 

As such, these principles provide insight into how the memories of your target audience can be shifted from their original content due to external influences as well as internal processing. 

Now I’m going to teach this to you in reverse order. Reverse order is distortion, generalization and deletion. Okay? 

Today, we are going to provide a succinct overview of these three core principles and how they affect human behavior. In the near future in follow-up articles, we shall delve further into each individual concept, demonstrating how these psychological traits can be used strategically to effectively guide the opinions of others toward our desired outcome. 

Distortion: Same Content, Different Interpretation

Let’s discuss distortion first. This is the process of altering our sensory data to create a different interpretation of the same thing. It is how we modify and manipulate our perception in order to formulate plans and make decisions. 

Through this process, we are able to take something that may seem mundane or insignificant on its own, and transform it into something with greater potential for us to utilize. Distortion allows us to look at things from multiple perspectives so that we can better understand them and use them in ways that are beneficial for us. 

By taking the sensory data that we have available to us in the present moment and manipulating it, we are able to distort our perception of what will happen if we choose to do X or Y. This distortion allows us to use our imagination and creativity to construct ideas of what could be, enabling us to explore possibilities which may not exist in reality. 

In this way, distortion is a powerful tool for forming new concepts and ideas. And I’m going to teach you the three primary forms of distortion and how they are applied in future articles expanding upon these themes. 

So make sure you subscribe to the website and check back regularly so that you don’t miss anything: new articles are uploaded daily. 

Generalization: Creates Order and Structure

Next, let’s move on to the concept of generalization. This is the process we utilize to build and cultivate an orderly structure that governs our lives and conforms to our personality traits. In fact, this structure is so pervasive in our lives that it’s hard to ignore – there is ample social proof that we are highly regulated and structured people! 

All knowledge and science is based on generalization, the process of making assumptions about a group or class of things based on what is seen in individual examples. It is how we make sense of things that are unknown to us by recognizing the similarities between them and those objects which we have previously encountered or experienced. Generalization allows us to draw deductions from past experiences and anticipate what will happen in new situations and – hopefully – generate healthy behaviors for those situations. 

Example: Introducing New Structure

For example, let’s just say that you are a child growing up and you notice that your parents have left the room and you’d like to find them, and you yell, “Mom, dad where are you?” And all of the sudden, the wall opens mysteriously and they appear. Isn’t that interesting? And you think, how’d that happen? I want to be able to do that. 

Well, pretty soon you go over to the wall, where it was, and you see this little handle there and you push and you shove and nothing happens. There’s no magic opening. And your parents watch you do it, and they go, “No you have to turn the handle, see?” You turn the handle and then you push. And sure enough the wall opens and there’s a magic opening and you get through. 

But let’s go a little deeper. Now you’re on the other side, in a different room, and your parents disappear and you want to get back. So you go up to the magic wall, you grab hold of the handle and you turn it and it turns and you push and nothing happens. And you think, well shoot. How come? And you push and you push and nothing happens. 

Your parents say, “No, no, no, it only pushes this way, you have to pull it going the other way.” Ah, you’re beginning to see now. The light dawns. You are already conditioned to obey authority figures, so you try what they said and the magic wall opening appears again. 

Recognizing The Common Elements

Now one day you go over to a friend’s house and they have a sliding glass door and you go to that door and you think, huh, this looks like one of those magic wall openings, I’ll bet it works. And you look at it, and you try to figure it out. It doesn’t push and it doesn’t pull, but lo and behold you’re convinced it will open. 

Well, there’s a slider on that door, you slide it and you push it to the side and it slides right open and there you go.

This recognition and familiarity is a key building block in learning to open the new kind of door. It makes sense in relation to your past experience. 

It’s how we make sense of things we’ve never seen before. You’re going to learn the two primary patterns of generalization in follow-up articles, and wow, are these powerful when it comes to steering your customer journey! 

Deletion: Ignores Non-Relevant Information

Finally, we come to deletion; an act of paying attention to a particular set of information that causes the ignoring or removal of any other data. In essence, it is the process of eliminating certain pieces from memory or consciousness in order to prioritize one specific set. Therefore, it is not uncommon for individuals to delete certain information due to their focus on another detail. 

At any given moment, we are able to retain around seven plus or minus two pieces of information. This fact is affirmed by science and it has remarkable implications; it means that our minds are limited in the amount of data they can process at a single time.  

Taking a few minutes to consider this concept can be very thought-provoking. It serves as a reminder that our brains have certain limitations, and we must take these into account when deciding how much information to absorb at once. It’s kind of a mental version of the scarcity principle; there are only a few available slots for information processing. 

Your Memory Capacity

Beyond that, we can’t remember it. Previous research suggests that if I gave you say 15 random items real quick in a row, you’d probably be able to remember five to nine of them right now. Most of you couldn’t remember 15, myself included. 

Now if I sat and tried to memorize it for a bit, I could. So could you. But we have these seven plus or minus two slots to hold things in our consciousness. What happens when that five to nine number gets filled? And how many will you be filling if you have elicited their values and are fully engaged with their consumer preferences? 

And if it didn’t work this way, we’d go crazy. We have so many things bombarding us for our attention all the time that we’d go crazy. 

Multi Tasking Fills Up Our Mind Fast

I was noticing this the other day. I went out with my wife. She’d get a call and we had arrived at our destination, and she was talking to the person. I had opened the door and said, “Okay, honey, let’s go.” 

And she’d still be sitting in the car because it was like the multi tasking wasn’t quite working like that. She needed to hang up the call, then she could go ahead and get out and shut the door and lock it, et cetera. 

And I found myself doing the same kind of thing with her. I was looking at something and she wanted me to come look at something else and I couldn’t really hold both in my attention simultaneously, so I put down what I was looking at and went to look at what she wanted to show me. It’s human nature to let go of some things to direct our attention to others. 

Our Consciousness Gets Filled Up All The Time

Our consciousness gets filled all the time. It’s constantly filling up, and yet what do we do? Well, once it’s filled, we’re no longer paying attention to all the other signals and input that’s going on around us. 

For example, if you’ve been really tuned into what I’m telling you here, you probably have not been listening to the sounds that are going on around you. Maybe there are cars and horns or who knows what all, but you haven’t really been listening to that. 

Why? Well, because you’re reading my words. You’re absorbed in what you’re reading here. If you haven’t been all that absorbed, you may well be hearing all kinds of things and realized all of the sudden, shoot, I forgot what he was saying. I don’t remember. I better go back. And so you turn back a couple of paragraphs and re-read. Make sense? There’s a significant difference in recall depending upon where our focus is oriented. 

Four Types of Deletion

You’ll learn the four types of deletion and how to use them as we continue on here in future articles and I’m sure you can already see how useful it would be to fill up your prospect’s consciousness so that all that they can retain is what you want them to understand and do. How readily can you influence people if you’re filling all their thoughts? 

As you continue to evolve your sales process and make more sales, remember to practice these 3 sales psychology skills as often as you can. These are powerful to apply in any sales conversation and is sure to help you guide your prospects through the process of becoming long-term clients.

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