Pull These 4 Mental Triggers to Start Making More Sales
Sales are the lifeblood of any successful business. Despite this fact, the word sales tends to leave a bad taste in people’s mouth.
That’s because when we think of sales, the most memorable encounters tend to the be the negative ones.
It’s those unrelenting telemarketers who take persistence too far.
It’s those used car salesman who pretend as though they’re your best friend cutting you a fantastic deal at their own expense.
Far too often, sales is equated with manipulation.
Which is a shame, because that’s not really what selling is all about.
Selling, when done right, should be all about delivering the best value possible to the customer. Sometimes (quite often, in fact) this means your product or service isn’t actually the best thing for them.
If you want to be great at sales, you must first accept the fact that your product is not right for everybody.
When we take this knowledge to its logical extension, therefore, it stands to reason that the only people you should actually sell to are the ones who stand to benefit most from what you’re selling.
Operating from this position puts power in your hands because you’re now working from a place of authenticity.
And authenticity in sales always wins. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.
Okay, so now that we’ve got that straight, let’s talk about some specific tactics that leverage human psychology to make your sales pitch as effective as possible.
Here are 4 mental triggers you’ve got to learn how to pull.
AUTHORITY
Why should I hire you instead of the guy down the street?
Ideally it’s because you have the best product for the best value, but this can be a hard thing to explain to the general public encountering you and your product for the first time.
Of course you’re going to tell me your Pizza-Cutter 10,000 is the best on the market.
But I have no reason to believe your word on something so biased.
So how do you overcome people’s doubts?
Through education.
The more knowledge you freely share with the customer about what, how, and why you do what you do, the more likely they will come to view you as an authority on the subject.
Telling me your Pizza Cutter is the best doesn’t get us very far.
Pointing me to a bunch of articles, videos, or podcasts that I can use to educate myself on the subject allows me to come to that realization organically.
This is where content marketing really shines.
But remember, it’s never about making the hard sell. It’s about creating brand awareness and giving value to the customer free-of-charge.
The most powerful sales pitch is the one the customer gives themselves.
So give them the information, educate them about what you do and what you don’t do. Empower them and you’ll be surprised how much more likely they’ll be to buy from you.
Why is that exactly?
Well, to understand that, we look to the next mental trigger…
RECIPROCITY
Humans are hardwired to reciprocate.
The old “you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours” is an evolutionary adaptation that directly affected our ancestors’ ability to stay alive.
It’s programmed deep into our brain and there’s no way around it.
Think about the last time somebody gave you a gift unexpectedly. Chances are you experienced a low-grade anxiety about paying it back somehow.
For better or worse, our lizard brain keeps subconscious tabs on these debts.
Salespeople have known this for a long time.
Think about the last time you went to buy a car, did the salesman offer you a drink?
Of course they did. Most dealerships these days have an entire room filled with goodies.
Surely they aren’t doing this out of the goodness of their heart, and no, it also has nothing to do with making you feel more comfortable.
They give you free stuff because they know the effect it has on your subconscious.
An interesting study showed that individuals who accepted something even so small as a free drink, we’re much more likely to pay more for a vehicle than their counterparts who turned down the drink.
What’s perhaps craziest about this quirk of human psychology is that it doesn’t matter that the initial gift was worth only a couple dollars, it still affected the final outcome, even on a purchase running tens of thousands of dollars.
The takeaway here, if you’re being sleazy, is to walk around giving people soda’s before you start your sales-pitch.
But remember, it’s not about the hard sell.
It’s about adding value to the other person’s life.
So again, we can accomplish this by educating and by dispensing free materials that allow the customer to make the best buying decision possible (even if that means they take their business elsewhere).
If you put the required time, energy, and resources into creating high quality educational resources that are of value to your customer, then you can be sure that you’re igniting subconscious reciprocity cues in their brain…but, unlike our used car salesman, we’re doing it by adding actual value to the customer’s life.
Making sales in this way makes it exceedingly easy to pull the next mental trigger.
SOCIAL PROOF
In his book, The Personal M.B.A, Josh Kaufman identifies 5 reasons customer’s don’t make a purchase. For our purposes here, we shall discuss only 2 of those 5.
- It won’t work.
- It won’t work for me.
In that first reason, we’re dealing with the old, it’s-too-good-to-be-true issue. In the second, we’re confronting the my-problems-are-unique issue.
Both excuses can be addressed with the simple application of social proof.
We’re incredibly social animals and we place an inordinate amount of trust in the opinions of others.
Marcus Aurelius perhaps put it best when he said:
“We all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own.”
Quite the pessimistic view of human interaction, but not far from right when it comes to making sales.
Showing how your product or service has benefited others who’ve experienced similar circumstances to our prospective customers is a powerful way of closing a sale.
It is a mistake to simply tell the customer how great your product is and how it will solve all their problems.
The correct play is to show them somebody else who has been where they are, then show them how your product or service changed their life for the better.
And if your product really is the bee’s knees, then you’re naturally going to the fourth and final mental trigger.
SCARCITY
There’s a reason Limited Time Offers work so damn well on us.
Famed Nobel Prize winning psychology, Daniel Kahneman, showed us in his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, that people are significantly more likely to act in order not to lose something, than they are to gain something of equivalent value.
Simply put: You will work harder not to lose $100, than you will to earn $100.
This is called Loss Aversion and it’s the reason adding an element of scarcity to your offering is so incredibly powerful.
To my eye, there are three types of scarcity:
The Price Goes Up
You have a limited amount of time to buy something at its sales price. After that, it’ll return to the normal.
Deal Goes Away
You have a limited amount of time to buy something before that thing disappears entirely. Limited run of product/services.
Bonuses Go Away
For a limited time only, there are bonuses materials attached to the item. Buy 1, Get 1 Free.
Regardless of which scarcity trigger you pull, the key is to genuinely enforce the consequence.
Nothing builds bad faith in a customer quicker than an item that’s always on sale.
Putting It To Work
If you want to build a thriving company, you’ll have to come to terms with sales. There’s simply no way around it.
With that said, there are good sales practices, and bad sales practices.
Don’t fall into the trap of making the quick sale at expense of the long-term relationship with your customer.
Treat them right…do your best at every point on the sales spectrum to add value to their life and not only will you see your sales conversion rate increase, you’ll see a boost to the number of returning customers.
And that, my friend, is the key to a successful business.
