Are you like I was at the beginning of my sales career? I had a company car, a great upside pay potential and a lot of freedom over my daily schedule yet still, I had a problem with my new job title of sales person. This problem caused me to look at my profession through the wrong lens. Instead of understanding that my function was to sell products and services to my customers, I convinced myself that it was, instead, to bring my customers important products and services that they needed. If this is your philosophy, you may find what I found all those years ago, selling to people’s needs is not selling at all.
Through my many years in the sales profession and my unofficial observations of human behavior I have found one fact to be true. People often worry about their needs. They think about the future consequences that they may suffer if they cannot find a way to fulfill these needs, but they rarely act upon them. Conversely, people take action when they find something they want. For some reason, the urgency of a desire is greater than that of a need; the masters of the selling game know this instinctively.
Take the following example: Rita creates a new website that provides people with a software tool to clean their computer and eliminate errors. Her copy reads like a technical book that explains all of the problems people may have if they do not use her product. She goes on to list a few testimonials and talk about how effective her software is. To her surprise, she gets very few downloads. People visit her site, scan through a few pages but almost none of them buy. Since everyone who finds her site has to have been looking for “computer clean up” services, why is it none of them seem interested when they get there?
People visiting Rita’s site typically have a computer problem and have expressed a need for the software that she sells. They have not gone as far as to buy because they have not yet received enough incentive. Yes, their computers are moving slowly; yes, they are aware they may have a virus; and yes, it is also possible that they could lose everything on their computer if it crashes before they act. However, these consequences are perceived to be so far off in the future that they cannot have any effect in the present.
So what should Rita do? If she waits for people to be desperate enough to download her software, say because their computer just crashed or they just lost valuable data, she would be relying on third party circumstances. Instead, she should change her copy to change the need for a solution to their computer problems into wants, creating a strong desire to fix the problem that brought the visitors to her site in the first place. She can do this by creating urgency as well as including emotion and feelings in her copy.
When Rita masters the language that can bring urgency to her proposal, she will learn how to turn her product from a need to a want. This will increase her performance as she will find that people will act upon their wants while they only worry about their needs.
© Copyright MMVI, Alvin Day
