In many situations my sales technique is indistiguishable from a therapy session. After all, sales is about establishing a relationship, a relationship is built on trust, and trust requires intimacy.
In these sessions you have to start with the fundamental fact that people are insecure about something. The insecurity may not necessarially be about you or the situation or the reason you are even there. But you have to wait, to be patient, and tease the thing out, because ultimately you need to support this insecurity.
Most insecurities come back to the prime existential doubts: death, isoloation, independence, having to make decisions. These usually manifest themselves in very indirect ways. Your job as a salesperson is to find out what these insecurities are and to support them.
And how do you support them?
The opposite of insecurities are vanities, what a person takes pride in. Everyone has these too, and unlike insecurities these are usually pretty easy to distiguish. Your job as therapist-salesperson is to use a person's vanities to support their insecurities, acting as middle man and earning trust.
It's really not that hard.
The difficulty lies in taking your own emotions - your own insecurities and vanities - out of the equation, while at the same time remaining authentic (and, yes, this exact same advice is given to therapists).
Window Manager - An Executive Who has Nothing to do but Look out the Window
(aka "whatever")