Emma Snider says, ““Hi there! Do you have time for a half hour meeting tomorrow?”

Whoa, that’s direct. What do you think the odds are of a salesperson booking a meeting using this approach? If I’m being generous, I’d go with a 1% success rate. And that single person out of 100 probably misheard the question. Or maybe they pledged to say “yes” to everything for a week. Bottom line: Whatever logic they used to agree to the meeting is not the norm.

Most reps wouldn’t be so foolish as to ask for the meeting right off the bat. Common sense tells us we need to warm people up a bit if we expect them to do us a favor, or give us something (like their time).

But will a bit of chit-chat make a prospect more likely to agree to a meeting? Maybe, but maybe not. A smarter approach is to hit them with a one-two request punch. I’ll explain.

Thanks to the psychological phenomenon of the “foot in the door technique,” people are more likely to say “yes” to a larger request after they’ve agreed to a smaller one. In a study conducted by Stanford Univerity’s Jonathan Freedman and Scott Fraser, participants were first asked to talk about what cleaning products they used over the phone“.

How to Book More Sales Meetings Using a Simple Psychology Trick

HubSpot

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