marketing sales

Using reverse psychology to win in sales

education, Human Brain, Marketing, mindset, psychology, Thinking

Most customers believe that when a sales person comes / talks or meets them, they will talk superlative about their company products and services. A lot of that will be worthless and baseless.

So most customers raise their guard and are ready with all kinds of objections to counter the claims of the sales person. Its just a mindset issue.

I have mentioned many times that marketing and sales are all about applied psychology. So if we know that the customer will come up with various objections to our offer, why not give out all the things that your offer does not have – upfront. This way you will puncture all the arguments that the customer could have been trying to add up against your offer.

Obviously you need to word it in such a way , that it does not demean the solution that you have provided. You could put it as …. most of the vendors have policies that completely disregard the customer’s need for authority….we were also like that….however we have now got better sense and brought about this change so that you have the authority….

By acknowledging the challenges upfront, you disarm the buyer with whatever objections they were intending to raise against you.

In addition if you have been educating your buyers , using your marketing, then the buyer would already have been primed with the fact that you keep the customer’s interests in mind first. Which helps reduce the pressure on the sales team when they are selling.

It’s taken me many years to utilize the understanding of human psychology in improving my customer handling capabilities and I am trying to still learn everyday. You should also see how you can utilize this knowledge.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

As an example

Differentiation

differentiation, Marketing, Sales

Bigbasket is a grocery and fresh fruit and vegetables delivery e-commerce company in India. I order stuff from them via their Mobile App

I was ordering the monthly stock of groceries, couple of days back on their app.

I ordered my standard brand of multi grain flour, biscuits etc.

My wife had asked me  to also order mustard sauce.  I don’t  have a  preferred brand of mustard sauce. So I searched. There were basically two types of  mustard sauces- American Mustard and English Mustard. And every brand had these two.

To top it, I don’t know the difference between the two.

So I randomly decided to look at American Mustard sauce.

Now comes the interesting part….between the various brands that they had on their catalog, the only difference I could see was price…..maybe if I had tried to go deeper I would have found out some things. But at least I was not able to see upfront and I did not have the time to explore, so I kept scrolling down.

Suddenly I came across a brand which was clearly showing 96% fat free. Now please understand I don’t know if others are also equally fat free or not. But because I appreciate things which have less fat I ended up buying it. I didn’t think of price.

As a practioner of marketing I am always looking for seeing how companies who don’t have a brand, differentiate their products to make them stand out. Otherwise for most people if they don’t see the difference the only way people choose is on price.

Having a well recognized brand helps make you stand out. But if you’re starting new, the only way you can survive is by being able to differentiate your business.

On the other hand if you differentiate, then you will appeal to some people who will then not think of price when they buy your product or service. Slowly you then build your brand because of the differentiation.

Till next time.

Carpe Diem!!!

Relentless – Part II

Habits, Marketing, Sales

Since yesterday when I first wrote the blog post about being relentless this thought has been going on in my mind continuously all through the night that all marketing success at one point comes down to being relentless in your pursuit. You can read the post.

That does not mean there are no other attributes  – like if you are running in the wrong direction then obviously you will reach the wrong place but assuming you have the right direction then if you have to reach your destination you need to be e consistently relentlessly going after your target destination to be able to reach there

After the post I looked around to see which other authors had sold more than a million books and try to identify what all they were doing to achieve those numbers. One author who comes to mind is Russell Brunson. He’s written 3 books and has this relentless effort to ensure he’s in front of the right influencers who read his books, interviewed him and their audiences bought his books.

If I  look at sales,  one of the greatest sales guys I have had the chance to read about was the late Chet Holmes. He had a methodology which he used to call the Dream 100. His idea was very simple. He would first identify the Top 100 (notional number) that he wanted to do business with.

Then he would  relentlessly every alternate day send a bulky packet with information and next day give a call.  In one case as per him , where he had listed 167 companies in his list of dream companies , he was able to get all of them as customers within about an year.

At the end of the day,  the consistent focus of daily activities is what helps these companies execute.

Again as I said earlier this does not mean that you don’t need a good product or service.  It does not mean that you don’t need to differentiate your offerings.  It does not mean that you have a faulty strategy.  These are table stakes.

If you have all the above and then you execute relentlessly that’s when you succeed.  If you have all the above and do things in an episodic way then you will fail.

Till next time.

Carpe Diem!!!