Selling Psychology: Why it pays to know Transactional Analysis in Sales

I read David Sandler’s book “You Can’t Teach a Kid to ride a Bike at a Seminar” in 2002 and I found some of his ideas interesting. As far as I know, David Sandler was the first sales trainer to see the importance of and promote the use of Transactional Analysis techniques (TA) in sales. Transactional Analysis is a field of psychology and therapy created by Eric Berne in the 1950s, and it gained fame through the book Games People Play. Click here for an introduction to TA.

Sandler started out selling sales training programs on 78 records. He made thousands of calls and observed that it had become an accepted belief in Western culture, that sales-people are fair-game. Furthermore, he observed that many buyers believe that it’s OK to waste a salesperson’s time and resources, deliberately mislead them and even lie or with-hold the truth from them.

Sandler believed the use of TA and other manipulative techniques were the only way salespeople could level the playing-field in a relationship that was heavily tilted in favor of the buyer.

Sandler died in 1995, but his “negative reverse selling”, and “struggling child” are pure Transactional Analysis techniques applied to selling situations and live on through generations of Sandler training professionals.

The following is a brief introduction of the ego-state model and a Flash video of a scenario for using a complementary transaction.

The Ego-State Model

At any given time, a person experiences and manifests their personality through a mixture of behaviors, thoughts and feelings. Typically, according to Transactional Analysis, there are three ego-states that people consistently use:

Adult: a state in which people behave, feel, and think in response to what is going on in the “here-and-now,” using all of their resources as an adult human being with many years of life experience to guide them.
Parent: a state in which people behave, feel, and think in response to an unconscious mimicking of how their parents (or other parental figures) acted, or how they interpreted their parent’s actions.
Child: a state in which people revert to behaving, feeling and thinking similarly to how they did in childhood.
We experience constant movement between all the ego states in response to thoughts, events, people, and memories.

Transactional Analysis – Complementary Child-Parent Transaction “The Struggling Child”

The following technique is useful in gaining access to executives and gathering information.

The “struggling child” has long been used in sales to produce a desirable complementary response when cold-calling – you may have even used it yourself when you have forgotten to do something or made a mistake and you need a person in authority to grant you a concession. In sales, and especially especially telesas, negotiating the corporation and finding the right person is half the battle.
In the “struggling child – parent” transaction, the seller will mimic the physiology and tonality to produce the ego-state which invites the Gatekeeper in this case, to respond as a nurturing parent.

Seller: (Struggling-child) is John even the right person for Web performance?
Gatekeeper: (Nurturing parent) John does handle Internet operations

In this familiar information gathering transaction, the gatekeeper unconsciously accepts the invitation from the struggling child and responds to the salesperson in the role of nurturing parent and the transaction is complementary.

What other possible outcomes are there for this…..let’s examine a couple of them.
The gatekeeper recognizes the attempt at manipulation, crosses with an adult- adult transaction and challenges the seller with any number of the following: what company are you with?, who are you?, or this gem, I’m not allowed to give out that information.

Another scenario could occur where instead of hooking the nurturing parent, we get the critical parent…..”I’m sorry, John doesn’t take cold-calls” and the gatekeeper hangs-up on you.

It’s worth mentioning that you cannot make someone respond to you in a certain way…..you can only invite them to respond…and for this reason some of these transactions will fail some of the time.

Guidelines:

  • The Struggling Child is a manipulative technique
  • It only works some of the time
  • Using it effectively requires practice, subtlety and natural delivery.

This concept is an excerpt for Advanced Marketing Concepts (Admarco) “Selling in the Internet Age” Selling Psychology E-Learning program running on the Cogbooks adaptive E-learning platform.