To achieve success in sales you need to learn the art of selling to the other person a product or service she needs but doesn't know it. A sale is a mental thing. It results from harmonizing certain mental elements which enter into all common agreements between people.

The power of suggestion is just as effective when used for a lawful and honorable purpose as for an unlawful and dishonorable one. Karen, one sales person I know, succeeds where others fail, largely because of her greater suggestive power. She draws such a vivid description of the products she is selling, makes it seem so very desirable, that her prospect feels he must give her an order.

Karen knows she is selling a good thing that it is to his customer's benefit to buy. The transaction is therefore of mutual benefit to both parties, the buyer as well as the seller. So what is suggestion? Suggestion has been defined as whatever creates or inspires thought? As a science, suggestion shows us how to start and steer thought.

Over 100 years ago James Allen said: As a man think in his heart, so is he? This is the essence of auto-suggestion. Thought is a creative force. It is a motive, impelling, sustaining force. 

Suggestion can help you to up build and develop yourself, to educate and train yourself in spirit, mind, and body. It can also help you to shape the desires and direct the will of the customers you seek to influence. In the first place, we direct the will of our customers by our very personality, which has been developed through auto-suggestion. Then the various steps of attention, interest, desire, and, finally, resolve, in the customer, must be induced by suggestion.

Our customer must forget himself and his own senses, ultimately; or at least, he must have had all his knowledge and experience so brought into harmony with those of the salesperson that he readily accepts the sales person’s ideas. If you remember that suggestion is merely the working of the subjective mental force, you have a pretty clear idea of the use that may be made of suggestion in the progress of a sale.

The simple study of psychology reveals that the activities of the will must be stirred up by approaching and capturing the intellect and feelings.

We get attention through the senses, increase attention to interest through the intellect, change interest to desire through the feelings, and finally, in decision we have induced the will to act. There is no mathematical dividing line, no architecturally apparent flights of steps; nevertheless, you should be perfectly conscious of the different stages of progress of the customer’s mind, and you should lead him easily and naturally from one to the other.

A sale is a mental process, and depends largely upon the quality and the intensity of the mental suggestion, and the confidence communicated to the would-be purchaser’s mind. Suggestion is properly used in the conduct of a sale when it is unobtrusive, and should be honest and well aimed. It should help the customer’s mind and inspire confidence. Suggestions to the customer should have the goal of not to overcome the will, but simply to guide and influence it.

Character is largely made up of suggestion; life is largely based upon it. Selling is pretty nearly all suggestion. You will become much more successful once you learn how to use suggestion to help the mind of the customer, without making him feel that any influence is being exerted. You simply lead your customer to buy.

Let the customer feel that he is buying, not that you are selling to him.

Every salesperson should study psychology. You should be able to understand the mental laws by which the mind of your prospect acts, so as to be able to read his or her mental operations. Psychology in selling is in reality only a different name for the principles which good business people, expert salespeople, have used in all times. 

Diplomacy, tact, cheerfulness, the good-will habit, and the suggestion of confidence ? all these form an important part of business psychology.

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