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Do You Know What Really Motivates Your Customers?
Over the last few weeks, the response to February’s newsletter has been incredible. “That was awesome,” “That is so true,” and “I can’t believe how much I was actually doing that.” Needless to say, this has hit home with a lot of people, particularly us. (If you remember, our last newsletter spoke of the number one word that can get you fired, which was the word, “I.”) As a company, just as you, we continually strive to find specific tools, techniques, or strategies that will weather the test of time. As much as we try to continue to seek out new ways to engage and help customers, it sometimes baffles us on how much the basics still work. Our readers just proved that theory two weeks ago. In reviewing the traffic to our website, we found it amazing how incredibly high the conversion rate was for the opened emails. Obviously, we took a step back and said, why? After a moment of silence, it became obvious why. PAIN. One of the things we teach in class is that 90% of everything we do and say is a result of some particular pain, fear or discomfort. If this is the first time you’ve heard this, just keep reading and you’ll realize its true, you just didn’t know it. Early on in my sales career, I hit a big bump. I was wining and dining customers and pushing feature benefits, hoping to snag some deals using that approach. Well, guess what, the deals weren’t coming, but boy was I spending a lot of money. This frustration led me to do some research on human behavior. I noticed a pattern…every article or book made a mention of the word “pain.” Why people wear what they do, why they take a particular route to work, why they eat the same thing every morning for breakfast. They focused not so much on why people did what they did, but the pain or discomfort they would experience if they DIDN’T do things that particular way. Then the light bulb went off. I said to myself, “Well, that must be the reason why people buy something…pain.” What I learned is pain supersedes everything. When you’re faced with an inconvenience or a discomfort, you do whatever it takes to relieve yourself of that feeling before moving on and tackling something new. You wait until you are fixed of your problems or it will dominate everything else you try to accomplish. Our lives tend to stop when the pain gets too bad, until we see the “doctor” to get our issues wrapped up. So, if we understand that everything people do revolves around some sort of pain and pain sells, then why do we continue to push feature benefits instead of being the “doctor” to our customers? We need to realize that pain and emotion are what will lead us to success in the end. We need to get our customers to the point where their life will “stop” until we fix them. Think about it. When you go to the doctor, he doesn’t tell you how good he his or what he’s done in the past, he tries to find out what’s wrong with YOU. He asks you what hurts, how long has it hurt, and are you taking anything to make it stop hurting? He dissects your problem so he can track down a solution to your troubles. Do the same in front of your clients. Get them to the point where they are emotional with you. Get your conversations to the point where your customer is the one doing all the talking. Find out what their pains are. Find out what would happen if they didn’t get fixed. How would it affect them personally? People buy emotionally and justify logically, gang. If we can get our customers to an emotional state, to the point where they need to see “the doctor,” the door is open for us to “prescribe” our solutions and keep the business coming. Have fun selling and be outstanding!
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