You’re watching the Super Bowl when one of those unforgettable commercials comes on. You grab your sides with laughter. How do they come up with these things?
The next day everybody at work is talking about that great ad for…
What the heck WAS the product?
We’ve all seen those ads—so much wall-to-wall cleverness and funny characters that there’s no room in your head to notice and remember what should be the one thing that 10 million bucks was supposed to achieve: the purchase of the product.
The same thing applies to the sales process. Who hasn’t seen a salesperson, fresh from a seminar on cross-selling, suddenly spread a dozen different account options like a Japanese fan in front of a poor customer, whose expression falls into a blank and frightened stare?
A confused mind never buys. Tattoo that axiom on your brain. Choice is a lovely thing, but give people too many options, shared with unclear thinking, causes a client to make no choice at all.
Barry Schwartz drives this point home in The Paradox of Choice—Why More is Less. More couples decide to date again in speed dating events with six options than with twelve. More customers buy jam from a street market vendor with four choices than from a similar stall with eight choices.
Even if a customer does manage to make a choice, they are likely to be less happy about the one they selected because they know about the advantages they turned down in the other options. People who were offered a plane ticket to Las Vegas valued the gift more highly when it was offered in isolation than when it was offered with several choices.
You confuse ’em, you lose ’em. So, keep it simple.
Use fourth-grade language. Make your suggestions in chunks. For example, “I’m going to recommend three steps. The first step is to better align your deposits by setting up a Financial Freedom savings account, another for your 2nd home, and another for a college-savings account for your son. We’ll set up an automatic sweep as money comes into your account to each of these savings accounts. Then, your second step is to set up your loan structure, I’m going to recommend…”
Bring everything into a few small chunks and explain it in a way that makes it easy for your client to understand and to buy.
Remember, a confused mind never buys.
Your ability to help people requires you to demonstrate clear thinking so you can articulate the best options with the least number of steps and words.
This will make purchasing your product or service easy for the client and will create a mind more ready to buy.
Confusion to Conviction: Creating the Mind that Buys…
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