High Pressure Selling
This article covers meaning & importance of High Pressure Selling from marketing perspective.
What is High Pressure Selling?
High pressure selling is when salespersons use psychological pressure on the customer by appealing to their fear, greed and pride to sell a given product or service. As the name suggests, high pressure selling phrase means creating enough pressure so that it can generate huge sales at a rapid rate. High Pressure Selling is also known as hard selling.
Importance of High Pressure Selling
They believe that customers usually tend to procrastinate their buying decision even if the decision is meant to promote their self-interest. But if the sell is made unethically where the seller persuades the customer into buying with a selfish interest of gaining himself at the expense of the customer, it is referred to as high pressure selling. These are manipulative tricks to promote selling. This is done for numerous reasons like increasing the pace of sales, salesperson willing to receive incentives, occupying larger shelf space and managing inventory.
Methods of High pressure selling
1. Endless Chatter: This is one of the shrewdest techniques used by salesman during high pressure selling. Here, the salesman keeps explaining the benefits of the product as if a monologue. The tone used is friendly but persuasive. The idea behind this is that customers usually find it difficult to interrupt the salesman and deny buying the product. Some do it out of their shallow nature and others empathize the effort put by the salesman. The salesman keeps speaking and the customer is extremely assertive when saying no.
2. Emotional manipulation: Salespeople usually rely on emotional manipulation to pressure customers into buying. For example, they will ask a person who loves adventure to imagine how rich would they feel if they go for a tracking or cliff-jumping, basically bringing out his passion for adventure and turning him emotional. They will then produce their adventure kit and cite the benefits and utility in fulfilling the man’s passion. He has got a high chance to purchase the product out of his emotional will.
3. Limited Time offers: These offers induce an urge in the customer to buy a product, solely out of anxiety. High pressure selling pressurizes them by announcing that the product might not be available the very next day Customers who are contemplating the purchase decision are sure to buy fearing in loss and those who are not may also find the deal profitable. E.g These kind of offers have become more common and are highly prevalent in the e-commerce industry. All offers made are for limited duration and urge users through relentless advertisement.
Reasons for High Pressure Selling
High pressure selling is done for various reasons which are listed as follows:
1. Incentives for salesperson: Selling in greater volume helps the sales person reach their stipulated target which results in additional incentive pay.
2. Shelf space: Pushing the firm’s product is also done so that the firm’s product portfolio can occupy a greater amount of shelf space.
3. Inventory control: Hard selling is also done to keep the inventory to an optimum level.
4. Plant capacity: A manufacturing plant needs to operate at an optimum level of production which might not match the market demand of the produced good. Hence, to prevent stockpiling of goods in the warehouses and inventories, company’s sales rep push hard to sell the excess goods to the distribution channels.
Advantages of High Pressure Selling
1. Quick selling- High pressure selling method is like artificially inducing demand by creating a buzz around or pressurizing customers with relentless appeals and is highly effective in increasing sales.
2. Active salespeople- Salespeople find themselves to be important stakeholders under such selling methods who may otherwise be dull and uninterested in their actions.
3. Acquiring non-prospective customers- High pressure selling is helpful in acquiring even those customers who aren’t envisaging the idea to buy. Lead by inducing pressure and anxiety, this promotes sale. In such cases, the customer often misses out on checking the product quality and specifications and ends up buying the defective products as well in haste. He lacks a free state of mind and the reasoning while the purchase decision is made.
Disadvantages of High Pressure Selling
1. Unethical and Provoking
2. Forced Decision Making
At the end of the day, high pressure selling is highly unethical because you are imposing your actions to influence the buying behavior of customers. It is not a willful rather forced decision making where the buyer isn’t making an informed decision. If found guilty of manipulation, the customer has the right to charge against the company and subsequent legal actions may be taken. The company must ensure that the decision taken by the customer promotes the self-interest of both parties and not one of them.
Hence, this concludes the definition of High Pressure Selling along with its overview.
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