Joe Sugarman, in Triggers, uses his Ice Cream Ordering Sequence to explain a sales technique:
In the late 1950s I was working in New York selling printing equipment. One day after dinner, I decided to stop by a small ice cream parlor to have a dish of ice cream. I sat down at the counter and the waitress asked me for my order.I requested my favorite dessert, “I’ll have a dish of chocolate ice cream with whipped cream.”
The waitress looked at me with a puzzled expression, “You mean a chocolate sundae?”
“No, I want a dish of chocolate ice cream with whipped cream,” was my response.
“Well, that’s a chocolate sundae without the syrup,” replied the waitress.
“Isn’t it just chocolate ice cream with whipped cream? What’s the difference?” I inquired.
“Well, a sundae is 35 cents and plain ice cream is 25 cents. What you want is a sundae without the syrup,” replied the waitress, with a rather smug expression on her face.
“OK, I want chocolate ice cream with whipped cream, so if you have to charge me 10 cents more, go ahead,” was my reply. (This took place in the ’50s when a dollar was worth a lot more than it is today.)
[...]
And for the next few weeks, each time I ordered my favorite dessert, regardless of the restaurant, I’d still go through the same hassle.One evening, after having worked really hard during the day, I was finishing my meal in a restaurant in mid-town Manhattan when the waitress looked at me and asked, “Would you
like dessert?”I really wanted my favorite, but I just didn’t feel like going through the entire verbal routine that I had been experiencing for the last few weeks. “I’ll have a dish of chocolate ice cream,” was my response. I didn’t ask for the whipped cream. This was a simple request — one I didn’t expect a hassle over.
As the waitress was walking away, I thought to myself, in what must have been a fraction of a second, how much I really wanted chocolate ice cream with whipped cream and that I should not let myself be intimidated by a waitress. “Hey, miss,” I called, as the waitress was still walking away, “could you put whipped cream on that ice cream?”
“Sure,” was her response. “No problem.”
When the check came, I noticed that I had been charged just 25 cents for the ice cream and whipped cream — something that I had been charged 35 cents before.
How is this used in sales?
A good example of this can be seen at car dealerships. The salesperson tallies your entire order, gets approval from the general manager, and then has you sign the purchase contract. As she is walking away to get the car prepped and ready for you to drive it away, she turns to you and says, “And you do want that undercoating, don’t you?” You instinctively nod your head. The charge is added to your invoice. “And you’ll also want our floor mats to keep your car clean as well, won’t you?”Once a commitment is made, the tendency is to act consistently with that commitment. The customer nods his head.
[...]
One of the important points to remember is to always make that first sale simple. Once the prospect makes the commitment to purchase from you, you can then easily offer more to increase your sales. This is very true for products sold from a mail order ad or from a TV infomercial. I have learned to keep the initial offer extremely simple. Then, once the prospect calls and orders the product I am offering, and while the prospect is on the phone, I offer other items and end up with a larger total sale. An additional sale occurs over 50% of the time, depending on my added offer.