Closing Tips – Part 1 – Concessions and Compromise

The more the world evolves, the less of a connection people have with each other. I mean a face-to-face connection where quality time is spent together. In the sales world, customers have grown into a group who want transactions more than experiences and rapport. Our training needs to change with the times, and this means we need to seek out ways to have deeper connections with customers. Here’s something that will help.

The concession principle simply states that people become more likely to say yes to you if they said no to something else. Let me give an example.

Suppose I come to you and I say, “Hey, can I borrow $100?” And you say, “No.” And I say, “Well, can I borrow $5?” The research says you’re more likely to loan me that $5 this way than you would have been if I had just asked for the $5 directly. But because I hit you with a higher price to start, the concession principle says that you’re more likely to say yes to the alternate choice. There was a very famous study done by a guy named Robert Cialdini.

Cialdini interviewed a hundred college students and he asked them a very simple question. He asked these 100 college students, “Would you be willing to take a group of juvenile delinquents to the zoo for a day?” They asked a hundred students that question. It’s a binary question, with only a “Yes” or “No” response available.

Remarkably, 17% said yes. 17 out of the 100 said, “Sure, I’ll do it.” I was surprised that the number was so high. The 17 were essentially saying, “Yes, I’ll take your juvenile delinquents to the zoo.” Then they got another group of 100 college students and asked them the exact same question, “Will you take a group of juvenile delinquents to the zoo?” But they had another question, a setup question, they would ask first before they asked the zoo question.

The Setup

The first question was, “Would you be willing to mentor a group of juvenile delinquents for two hours a week for the next two years?” Mentoring juvenile delinquents two hours a week for two years – a significant commitment, right?

Out of the 100 students that were asked that question, exactly zero said yes. Not a single student agreed to mentor these juvenile delinquents for two years. But then they asked the second question. After they said no to mentoring for two years, they said, “Well, would you be willing to take them to the zoo for a day?” And 50% of the students said yes.

Three times as many as the first question. 17 on the first ask. On the next group, 50%. Three times as many people said, “Yes, I’ll take you to the zoo.” Why? Because they were first asked for something bigger. This is really, really important in selling.

Cialdini did a ton of different studies like that throughout his career. Now, you need to combine the knowledge that you now have with another little issue, which is compromise choices.

Compromise Choices

Compromise choices is that tendency we all have to go with the middle recommendation, right?

We’re not going to go with the cheapest, maybe not with the highest end, but we’re going to go ahead and go and ask for the middle. Most of us go for that. There’s a very famous story with Williams-Sonoma.

Williams-Sonoma is a kitchenware company that’s in all the big malls across the country. And years ago, they wanted to offer a bread baking oven to their customers. So they went out and they sourced a very high quality, very reasonably priced bread baking oven and they put it in all their stores. Turns out they could not give them away. Nobody was buying them. So finally the people at Williams-Sonoma said, “Well, maybe our customers have a little higher expectation. Maybe they expect a higher quality bread baking oven.”

So they went out and they found another bread baking oven that was higher quality and more expensive. And they began to swap out the inventory.

Problem is, some of the stores accidentally left both bread baking ovens on the shelves. What do you think happened to the less expensive one, the first one? You guessed it; they started selling like hotcakes.

And Williams-Sonoma had forgotten the basic element of consumer buying behavior and that is compromised choices. When they offer just one option to their customers, they are giving them a yes or no decision. It’s all or nothing. A yes or a no, right? And because people didn’t have any middle options, they just said no. When the customers only had one choice (that expensive one), they didn’t buy any of them. Customer research says consumers are more like Goldilocks, looking for the middle option because it feels “just right.” This is the power of compromised choices.

So you have to remember the concession principle – asking big to get something smaller.

Also remember the compromise choices, people tend to go in the middle. And the third thing you have to remember in closing is that people are going to…

Come back next week to find out. Until then, have a great week.