The Solvay pharmaceuticals and healthcare company has just had some great success in selling flu vaccine. This followed the adoption of a new training programme for its tele-sales team. In one day it managed to increase the number of units sold from 6,000 to 20,000.

The foundations of this success were laid in February when the team members were made to change their attitude, from being passive takers of orders to being active sales people. To achieve this, Solvay hired Influence at Work, a team of development and skills specialists, to produce a training programme.

Tim Batchelor, training and development manager at Solvay, said: “The sales team were just writing down orders. They were not producing orders for new business. We had to improve their efficiency on the phone so that they could question customers more closely and sell more vaccine.

“We looked at several options and eventually brought in Influence at Work and got them to analyse some of the phone calls. This told us the staff were not questioning customers deeply enough about whether they just wanted their usual order or whether they wanted to increase it. They were taking orders and not selling.”

The next step was a workshop that examined what the sales staff were doing and how they could offer customers a better service. But to understand how Solvay’s sales were raised so sharply, we have to explore the work of Robert Cialdini, a psychology professor at Arizona State University.

Cialdini has spent a large part of his career examining people’s behaviour. He went underground for three years working in petrol stations, car lots, cafes, selling door-to-door and attending Tupperware parties. This produced a vast body of scientific evidence on “how, why and when people say yes”.

Much of this experience has been distilled into his best-selling book Influence: Science and Practice, which has sold more than a million copies.

Cialdini has also worked with some big clients, including Glaxo Smith Kline, Nike and Aventis. After he persuaded Bose, the sound reproduction company, to drop the word “new” from one of its advertisements and replace it with “hear what you have been missing”, its sales rose 45 per cent. The professor argued that “new” was a word that created uncertainty.

The training at Solvay was done by the British outpost of Cialdini’s company, run by Stephen Martin and Gary Colleran. “It’s not enough just to have the best product or good service any more,” said Martin. “Increasingly it’s the products or services that are presented in the most persuasive or influential way that are the most successful. Companies can be hugely surprised by the effect of changing a few words or, in the case of Solvay, the time at which they ask customers to do something.”