Hello and welcome to the latest episode of the Six Minute Entrepreneur. Now this week I’m kicking off episode 2 of the Six Minute Entrepreneur How To Sell series.
Now if you weren’t here for episode one, I talked about the essential skill of listening so go and check that one out if you haven’t already seen it!
But today – I want to talk about the psychology of buying. To help me explain how it works, I want you all to imagine a seesaw…
This is actually called ‘the buyer’s seesaw’ and this explains how customers make decisions about what they’re going to buy and also what different factors you can consider that will influence that decision.
So imagine every customer has a seesaw and it’s just over their head. Now if you look closely at your customers, you’ll see it with every single one of them when they are making a purchasing decision.
On one side of the seesaw, you’ve got money and on the other side, you have desire. In simple terms, the decision to buy anything, whether it’s a house, a holiday, a new dress, even a burger – it’s always the debate between how much it costs versus how much you want it.
As with most seesaws, you’ll find that one side is heavier than the other, so it’s actually going to tilt one way. And if the price is more than the desire, then the seesaw tips the wrong way.
We want the desire to exceed the cost because then the customer will decide to buy. If you went into a shop to buy a can of pop and it was £25, you wouldn’t buy it would you? The price that you would be paying would exceed your desire.
But if the pop was only a pound, then you’re probably going to be able to justify the price. It is as simple as that, a really easy concept, but absolutely key to understanding why a customer is making a purchasing decision.
Now, as a salesperson, you need to be able to know when the seesaw is tipped in your favour and the consumer’s ready to buy because they’re not always going to tell you.
The other thing is, you need to be able to influence the seesaw if it’s not going in your favour. That’s what this is all about.
There are only two ways that you can make the seesaw move. You’re either going to make one side lighter or you’re going to add more weight to the other side. So, if you think about price, the easiest way to guarantee you a sale is to offer a discount and to drop the price.
Make it cheap enough and anybody’s going to buy it, right? But the payoff is this tactic is going to cost you. It’s going to cost you, the seller, money. You give away your profit in order to win the sale. So the other way to influence the seesaw, which is the one I prefer, is to build the customer’s desire by helping them to see more reasons to buy.
Now, there are loads of ways that we can help build up desire and the more of them that you have in your armoury, the more likely your customer is to go, ‘yep, I’m all on board with that, we’re making that purchasing decision’.
So, here are a couple of little techniques and tactics that you can use…
Number one, relate specific product benefits back to what they said they were looking for because remember, if you were listening to episode one, that was all about listening. So you should have heard from that customer what they wanted.
For example, if time was a big important issue to them, remind them that this product is available for immediate delivery, or you can get it on next day delivery.
Then, ask them ‘yes’ questions that are going to remind them about the suitability of the product. Things like, do you like the colour? Are you happy with the size? Things that you’re always gonna get a positive answer on the whole.
Number three, tell them about the quality and remind them about any warranties you’ve got.
And then number four, demonstrate what the product’s going to do or let them test it. If you think about supermarkets, they’ve always promoted products by having small samples.
So in summary, to bring this all together I’ve got a few things that I want you to remember, right? Firstly…
Any decision to buy is often a trade-off between what something costs and how much that customer really wants it. Secondly, reducing the price might win you the sale but it’s going to cost you profit, not our preferred route. Number three, focusing on reasons to buy by raising desire, it’s going to be better for profit but it’s also going to remind the customer why that product is right for them.
So there you have it. The next time you’re talking to a customer, I want you to imagine this seesaw on their head and imagine which way it’s tipping and it’s your job to help them get it to tip the right way.
Now, while we’re on this subject and linked in with this, I want to talk about creating win-wins, which is a build on from the seesaw concept. Within business, when I’m selling something, I always try to create a win-win scenario whereby whatever the outcome of the question I’m going to ask the customer, the answer is yes.
Instead of asking somebody ‘would you like this, yes or no’ if it was a jumper I was selling I would say would you like this in the blue or the green because either of those answers results in a positive response.
So always try and think about this when selling. It’s just building on from that seesaw concept but try and think about how we can frame questions to that customer in a way that whatever the response coming back is always a positive.
And I’ll give you a little bit of a tip. I use this trick with my kids all the time. So even if I’m trying to sell my kids on an idea, giving them something where I’d be happy with the outcome – it’s a win-win all round!