Tricks of the Trade: Motivating Sales Agents to Con Older Adults

Abstract

Purpose of the study: Financial fraud is estimated to cost consumers approximately $50 billion annually. To examine how new hires are trained to engage in fraud, this study analyzed a sales training transcript from Alliance for Mature Americans (Alliance). In 1996, Alliance was charged with using deception and misrepresentation to sell more than $200 million worth of living trusts and annuities to 10,000 older adults in California.

Design and methods: Transcribed recordings from a 2-day Alliance sales training seminar were analyzed using NVivo10, coded inductively, and examined to identify emergent themes.

Results: Predominant themes were as follows: (a) indoctrination using incentives and neutralization techniques and (b) training on persuasion tactics targeted at older adults. Findings suggest that sales training focuses on establishing the company's legitimacy, normalizing unethical sales practices, and refining trainees' knowledge about how to influence older consumers.

Implications: Predatory and fraudulent businesses peddling ill-suited products threaten the economic security of older Americans. Improved insights into sales manipulation strategies can guide the development of protective policies including educational approaches to help older adults detect scams and resist purchasing fraudulent products.

Keywords: Consumer fraud; Indoctrination; Neutralization techniques; Persuasion knowledge; Persuasion tactics; Sales tactics.

Figure 1.

Adaptation of Friestad and Wright’s (1994) Persuasion Knowledge Model (PKM). A persuasion episode consists of a dyadic interaction between a sales agent and a target consumer. Sales training reinforces and refines sales agents’ knowledge about the topic (the product or service), the target, and how to persuade the target. The target consumers’ cognitive resources affect their ability to draw on persuasion knowledge to make inferences about sales agents’ ulterior motives. This task requires higher-level attributional processing, which is affected by cognitive load (Campbell & Kirmani, 2000). Persuasion coping behaviors are consumers’ adaptable responses to contend with persuasion attempts to ensure that outcomes are in their best interests.