Boost Your Sales With the F-Word

A friend of ours recently joined a gym and told us how initially the staff and gym goers alike barely acknowledged her existence. However, just after a few weeks of going every day something changed and many at the gym started greeting her as if she has known them for years. What’s changed? After all, it has only been a few weeks. It’s the influential “F” word at work - Familiarity. In this month’s Sales Mastery Newsletter, we are going to unpack the psychology behind familiarity, and how you can harness its power to boost your sales while avoiding costly mistakes in the process.

When we think back on of our most rewarding and lucrative deals, many if not all involved a long process of relationship building. Even though most of these sales were initiated with a cold call, over time prospects became clients and clients became friends. None of it would have been possible without creating early ties through familiarity.

Why Familiarity Matters:

It turns out what our friend experienced at the gym is relatively common. So much so psychologists have a term for it, the propinquity effect. According to the APA Dictionary of Psychology the propinquity effect “is the tendency of individuals to form close relationships with people they repeatedly encounter. That is, the more often one comes into contact with another person, the more likely it is that one will form a friendship with that person”. To help illustrate the efficacy of the propinquity effect, one study found that the closer students lived to each other in a dorm, the more likely they were to become friends. 41% of people were friends with the person next door, while less than 25% had a friend a few doors down, and just 10% were friends with someone down the hall.

Familiarity and Sales:

If only we all had a dollar for every time we heard “it’s all about the follow up” from sales gurus. As annoying as that advice may be, we understand now at least the psychological rationale behind it when prospecting. Unfortunately, however a study from the Dartnell Corp found that 48% of sales people quit after the first prospect contact, 24% stop after the second, 12% after the third, and 6% after the fourth. This means that most salespeople (90%) are not using the propinquity effect to their advantage. At the same time though, we have experienced that there is a fine line between consistent prospect touches and becoming a nuisance. Our research on the propinquity effect sheds further light. According to Psychology Today if there are repeated negative interactions, such as doing the opposite of what a prospect instructs or talking condescendingly to others, no amount of repetition will put the propinquity effect to work for you. Furthermore, overly excessive exposures (10-20 in one study) can diminish liking.

Our Takeaways:

Learning more about the psychological power of familiarity has reinforced the importance of staying close to our prospects and clients – but also not too close. Establishing a consistent sales cadence that includes alternating touches (calls, voice mails, emails, white papers etc.) spread out over time (not all in one or two weeks) is best for creating familiarity. While the consensus seems to be no more than 10 prospect touches for risk of diminishing the benefits of familiarity, each industry is different so you will need to be the judge. After all, to quote the immortal words of sales legend Claude Diamond, “it’s over when you say it’s over”.

*A note to our readers: We have received multiple requests to dedicate a Newsletter to dealing with current sales challenges. We are going to devote the February Newsletter to just that. If you would like to pose a sales challenge, please send it to [email protected] and we will do our best to include it. All challenges will be addressed anonymously.

Co-Author: Eric Mainthow