If you’re a business owner, getting your customer to make a purchase might be the hardest task you’ll ever have to do. Forget about hiring and coaching a team, being a great leader, setting up operations, and business strategies. If you haven’t got a fantastic sales strategy, then none of that would matter. Sales is a hurdle that discourages most entrepreneurs and makes them give up before they’ve even started. How do you make a potential customer part with their hard-earned dollars? How do you give them a good reason to want to do business with you? How do you overcome objections? In this blog post, I will review how to persuade people to take action in six easy ways. These six techniques will give you an idea of how to elevate your sales strategy to persuade your potential customer to do business with you.
Table of Contents:
1. Let your customer know the consequences of their inaction
2. Motivate your customer to take action
3. Give them a clear deadline
4. Guide your customer so that the decision is easy and obvious
5. Eliminate barriers that make their decision challenging
6. Warm up your customer
1. Let your customer know the consequences of their inaction
Many people don’t take action because of inertia. What do I mean by inertia? I mean that it’s easier, simpler, cheaper, and more convenient to stay still and not move. It’s easier to stay in their comfort zone than do something that makes them uncomfortable.
Exercise and physical activity is a great example of this. People find it challenging to stick to an exercise routine, even if they’ve paid for a gym membership and loaded up on that fancy gym gear. It’s easier to just relax in front of the T.V. after a grueling and exhausting day at work, or taking care of your kids when you’ve just spent time preparing them dinner and tucking them into bed at night.
People won’t take action unless you let them know the consequences of inaction.
To overcome that bit of inertia, show them the reasons why taking no action is actually the wrong decision for them to make. Your customer is comfortable where they are, so show them that their inaction causes even greater discomfort.
You must show them the discomfort of staying where they are.
Going back to the exercise example, haven’t you ever thought about working out more when you read a news article that explains the risk of having too much abdominal fat? Or drinking sugarless soda which instead spikes your sugar level?
Maybe you’re an advocate for climate action or a charity. For the climate action example, maybe you’ve shown them the dire consequences for the planet if the human population continues to cut down trees, drive SUVs that cause global warming, or dump their unrecyclable waste into landfills. All of these things would cause discomfort into any environmentally conscious citizen.
Once you’ve described the discomfort of not taking any action, your customer would be more persuaded to take that first step. I further describe how you can eliminate barriers for your customer that would encourage that initial step.
2. Motivate your customer to take action
There must be a motivating factor in order for a customer to act. If there’s no motivation for the customer to act, they would slip into indifference and apathy. When trying to make a sale, you must answer the question, what are people motivated by? If your product doesn’t answer that question, they are left wondering why they should buy from you at all. Give your customer the motivation by persuading them to take action.
You need to give them a reason that lights that fire in their soul. Dangle a carrot in front of them, and push them to act. This doesn’t just apply to sales. For example, maybe you’re a team leader at work, and you just can’t seem to get your reports to be motivated enough. Their productivity under your leadership suffers as a result.
This is when you really need to empower them to make their own decisions and take ownership of that project. If the momentum falls flat after that initial enthusiasm, pump up the energy and recharge that spark. Motivating people is all about lending them your infectious energy. It has to be so motivating that it’s contagious. Only then will your team or customer take action, and maintain that momentum.
3. Give your customer a clear deadline
This is one of the easier ways to persuade people to take action. Online stores love to use this technique to ramp up e-commerce. They put up a timer on their storefront counting down the days, hours, and minutes until the sale is over. This strategy works because of the “fear of missing out” and the creation of “scarcity”.
This is also something that you must use in the workplace if you’re a team leader. Your direct reports are less likely to procrastinate and get a task done if they have a goal to work towards. And as you know, every goal must have a deadline and be time-bound. When they have a deadline, it’s like turning that hourglass upside down and letting the sand run out until there’s no more time to waste.
To make a faster sale, use this technique. Envision how you can incorporate a countdown into your sales strategy. It could mean setting a deadline for them to take action before the sale is over. Some decisions, however, take time, especially if it’s a lengthy sales cycle. Sometimes your customer doesn’t like to feel rushed into making a decision, especially if the decision involves an expensive purchase. Use your judgement when trying to implement this technique. I go into more detail below about warming up your customer if this is the case.
4. Guide your customer so that the decision is easy and obvious
Most of the time, you have to make the outcome of their decision obvious. Don’t rely on confusing them into making a decision because it won’t work. If it’s too challenging to do something, they will not do it at all. The trick to overcome this is to make it easy. It must be effortless to take action. This is one of the easy ways to persuade your customer to take action.
For example, e-commerce and shopping online makes it easy to buy products. At first, the customer wavers between indecisive and decisive. What makes them finally enter in their credit card number and hitting the “buy” button? It’s because the online store is designed with the user’s experience in mind. There are many steps involved throughout the purchasing journey. Landing on the initial webpage that acts as their virtual storefront. Loading their shopping cart with products. Entering in their credit card number. Finally hitting the “buy” button. Making it easy means acting like a guide throughout their purchasing journey, or their decision tree. There are many steps involved, and you have to be there every step of the way or else your potential customer will just forget about it and go back to being inert.
From attractive graphics, colours, and fonts, your customer should have no choice but to continue through to the final step, because you’ve made the purchase or decision irresistible to them. Be available to answer any questions every step of the way.
From initiating that sales call to closing the sale, you should make the process so simple that it’s easy for the customer to agree to buy. Ever get lost because you didn’t have a map? It’s the same concept with sales. The customer needs a map that guides them in their decision.
5. Eliminate barriers that make their decision challenging
Your customer doesn’t have time to work out the kinks when making a purchase. If it’s too hard for them to decide, they will just move on to the next business that makes their purchase a no-brainer. With technology, it’s easier than ever to make the customer journey smooth, barrier-free, and effortless.
Once you’ve gotten rid of all the barriers, your customer will love you for it and come back for more. That one-time customer will soon turn into a repeat customer who’s loyal and brings in more referrals to your business.
Eliminating barriers means making the process easy. Think of ways to eliminate these barriers before they even pop up on your customer’s radar and even before they encounter them.
6. Warm-up your customer
There’s a reason why it’s called “cold-calling.” When you are cold-calling, your customer doesn’t know you and doesn’t have a good reason to buy from you. You haven’t yet built up the rapport that makes them familiar with your product. There are many books explaining how you can warm up your customer for better results. Some that I would recommend include Launch by Jeff Walker and Oversubscribed by Daniel Priestley. These two books both explain methods for warming up your customer before you ask them to make a purchase. To this end, you will have greater success in persuading your customer to take action.
Ever heard of the observation that it takes at least seven touch points for your customer to finally buy from you? These touch points can include social media posts, emails, and newsletters. It’s anything that makes your customer more familiar with you and your product. So every touch point should give them more information about your product, and should be persuasive enough that they pay more attention at the next touch point.
Getting your product in front of your customer only once will not persuade them to buy from you. That’s why lead nurturing and warming up your customer works. You must do this at least seven times.
The Final Word
Implementing even a few of these strategies will propel you forward to sales success. These techniques will guarantee that your customer’s journey is far more painless and quicker than your competition’s. Guiding them and showing them the right way at every step of the customer journey eases the potential pain points in your sales funnel.
When inertia is the default state of your customer, it takes leadership skills to motivate them into taking action. Show them two options: option A, the consequences of staying inactive, or option B, the benefits of making a definite decision. Then, make their decision process easy, clear, and obvious. It has to be obvious so that they won’t waver between these two states. Strategies I’ve just described include setting a deadline for them to make a decision, eliminating barriers in the customer journey, and making their decision obvious and clear.