How to Harness Psychology to Increase Sales!
Every sales guy struggles to understand the purchasing habits and mindset of the customers in order to boost sales. Several marketers and sales experts would swear by certain simplistic ideas about psychology that can be developed to understand people and their pyramid of needs or motivators, which can guide a salesperson to make his pitch. But is it that simple as it sounds?
Human beings are known to be highly complex creatures and are definitely not easy to understand. However, many entrepreneurs and salespersons are taking efforts to get into the realms of human psychology to understand the trigger points that would consequently increase sales. Here are some of the techniques that are easy to employ.
Appeal to the Emotion
Most of the purchases that are made are decided on the basis of some feeling or an emotion, and not really through a logical deciding process. We buy expensive clothes from huge brands to make us feel affluent, a red dashing sports car to make us feel young and attractive, and we buy real estate in areas that are connected with right parts of the society. This is the reason why intangible benefits play an important role in influencing the buying decision.
As a consumer, we might be oblivious to any particular feeling or emotion that leads us towards making the purchasing decision, but this is the feeling that the salesperson needs to comprehend and act upon. If as a salesperson, you can understand the feeling or emotion that your customer is seeking in connection with your product or service, then you must start pleasing this emotion by creating a suitable experience for your customer. Once you have succeeded in pressing the right button for emotion, it is now time to validate the purchasing decision with good logic, just like your house purchase would be justified with good schools, appreciating rates of the property, and other factors. So the key here is to first appeal to that emotion which the customer is trying to satisfy, and then follow it with concrete facts, features, and benefits which will help the customer to justify his emotional urge rationally.
Give Your Customer “Less Option”
If you have been into the sales business for some time, then you would know by now that if you give too many options to the customers, they would often select nothing. This is what is known as the “analysis paralysis”.
This does not mean you eliminate the choice of 95 products and offer only 5 to your customers which would be devastating to your business. But what you can do here is to categorize your products in such a way that the selection that the consumer has to make is from a limited set of choices. If you selling electronics, you wouldn’t offer all the products in your store in one go, but would have sections for varieties of televisions, phones, appliances and other stuff. That is how all the stores, whether they are online stores or the regular ones, offer their products. Look at amazon, it has different departments and further classifications for the products so that it is easy for the customer to make the buying decision.
Losses are Always Greater than Gains
Human beings are not very logical but are mainly emotional, and hence it always matters more to us when we are losing something rather than gaining. There have been studies which have shown that psychologically, losses are twice as powerful as gains, and this is a well-known theory in economics known as loss aversion. So, someone who loses 100 bucks will be deprived of more satisfaction than someone who will gain satisfaction from attaining 100 bucks. When you think of this logically, it wouldn’t make much sense, but for humans losing something of your own is more valuable than gaining something that is not yours. Therefore, along with telling people what they will get by buying a certain product, you must also reiterate what they will lose out on if they don’t buy whatever you are selling.
You must have Good Reviews as well as Bad Reviews
In today’s age, all our purchasing decisions are dependent on customer reviews of that product or service. People are more confident about making a purchase when they hear good things about it from other people, and so yu must make sure that you have plenty of good reviews which are easily accessible to others. Nurture your best customers as they are the ones who will then turn into your loyal advocates.
However, when you are running a business, whether you are selling products or providing services, not everyone is going to love what you do. Every product or service that is in the market has its own set of fans as well as haters, and so it is nearly impossible that you would not get a single bad review. Be real in such situations because that builds the trust with the customers when you acknowledge bad reviews and try and work on them.
Of course, these techniques barely scrape the surface of understanding the customers, psychology is a deep and powerful tool that marketers and salespersons can use to not only meet the sales goals but also to increase sales and to improve conversions.
