Buck Reed on the Psychology of Sales

Buck Reed is from the Midwestern part of the country and comes from a highly multicultural family. Together with his wife Renee, he is father to five children. A true family man, Buck loves to takes his children boating on the lake. But more than anything, he wants to impart on them the importance of working hard to achieve things in life. Buck, a self-made millionaire, now specializes in what he calls the “psychology of sales”, providing mentorship to sales reps across the country.

The Psychology of Sales According to Buck Reed

Making the sale is down to understanding psychology. We believe that, by giving people lots of options, they will inevitably choose at least one of them. In reality however, this isn’t true. What does happen is something known as analysis paralysis. Hence, a good sales representative is able to give people less options by a process known as chunking. This means they create categories of the products they  sell, thereby immediately narrowing down their options.

The second element is that people do not mind paying for quality. What matters therefore, is not trying to demonstrate that you are cheaper than everybody else. Rather, it is about demonstrating that you are of higher quality than anybody else. If you can demonstrate that, then you can charge pretty much anything you like.

The third element is that you have to be aware of what is known as loss aversion. People have an emotional bond with their money. What this means is that people will do all they can to hold on to what they already have, because the risk of losing something they own is bigger than the opportunity of earning something they don’t get have. Practically, this means that you must show people that by not buying what you offer them, they will do something that is dear to them.

Fourth, the old saying that there is no such thing as bad publicity is absolutely true. If you only have positive reviews, people will be highly suspicious of you. While nobody wants to get a negative review or even be attacked either online or in person, it does show your potential customers that you are for real and someone to be trusted. Everybody knows that you cannot keep everybody happy, which is why receiving some bad press is better than only receiving good press.

Last but not least, you have to learn how to be slightly more mysterious. Once you start to make more sales and climb the ladder within your sales organisation, it works to leave people guessing how you were able to achieve that. Doing so means that others will talk about you because they are interested and want to achieve the same thing. And when they talk about you, your name will get out there and your sales will increase.

According to Buck Reed, these five key elements of the psychology of sales can help anybody increase the number of successful sales they make. The effects often snowball, meaning they will grow more and more over time.