There comes a time in virtually every market when the buying public becomes quite sophisticated.
Constituents within your market have tried all kinds of things and none of them have performed as claimed.
New information and new choices are never more than a mouse click away for these consumers.
And as a result, their normal distrust of advertisers is heightened and it becomes difficult to get their attention.
As soon as they land on an obviously promotional piece — full of vibrant promise and claim — they’re liable to have the “yeah sure” reaction and back button away.
At best they will push back mentally against every promise and proof element you present and eventually reject your sales argument.
It’s just human nature for people to resist being sold … to resist being told what to do … to resist ideas that are not our own.
The secret is to avoid giving your prospects anything to resist against …
Don’t try to sell them. Start by confirming their skepticism. Take sides with them, and show them you know how they’re feeling.
When you do this skillfully, you completely bypass the natural resistance your prospects have to consuming your marketing and accepting your sales arguments.
Again, it’s just human nature. When someone agrees with us, and then adds to our understanding, our attention is transfixed.
We willingly bond with such a person because they agree with us. We sell ourselves on their ideas, thinking they are our own. And we don’t even realize we are being sold.
How to harness the power of buyer reactance to fill your sales pipeline to overflowing …
Instead of creating the typical promotion that comes out of the gate full of claim and promise, make your sales copy look and feel like editorial.
In the editorial section of your promotion, you are simply confirming your prospect’s suspicions: “Yes, commercial interests are shamelessly spreading all kinds of damaging myths and half truths.” You are the whistleblower, exposing them for what they are and showing people how to avoid being taken.
If you do this convincingly, you are creating the classic us-against-them dynamic. You and your prospects are uniting against a common enemy — the makers of bogus claims and false promises.
Realize that one of the most powerful human compulsions is to be right. That’s part of the reason why harmonizing with the prevailing belief system of your market is so critically important.
By definition, the problem they came to your website to solve is challenging their sense of rightness.
By giving them an enemy to blame, you are essentially feeding their compulsion to be right, while absolving them of guilt and responsibility for their predicament. They find this enormously comforting and empowering and it draws them to you.
As you systematically confirm and expand on their suspicions about virtually every other option available to them, it is important to set up a central selling idea well before you transition to pitching your program.
All of the various flawed solutions fail because they are missing something fundamental to resolving the problem. At some level there is a very simple, easy-to-understand reason why they fail. Insiders know the secret. Outsiders do not.
Example: The problem with all of these approaches is that they attack the symptom of the disease, but do nothing to eradicate the cause.
Well before even mentioning your program, you are installing buying criteria, and drawing your prospects to a conclusion or set of conclusions that support a purchasing decision.
And in the process, you are building an ideological fence around your prospects … inoculating them against your competition.
It doesn’t hurt at all if the common denominator behind your prospect’s previous failure to solve his problem seems obvious. Ideally, you want it to be such a natural and intuitive conclusion your prospect will wonder how he could have missed it …
This naturally opens a rift in his brain … causing him to question everything else he has come to believe about his problem prior to encountering your promotion. It shatters his sense of certainty. This is an uncomfortable feeling. Your prospect will be very motivated to regain his lost sense of certainty. The natural reaction is to invest more authority in YOU, his enlightener. And hang on your every word.
Deep down, even the most skeptical of your prospects want to believe …
If you’re dealing with truly targeted traffic, your website visitors are desperate for a solution. And their resistance is surprisingly superficial, merely a perimeter defense mechanism waiting to be neutralized.
Once their BS radar is deactivated, your prospects will be ready and willing to consume your sales pitch and get involved with you and your program. And so you seamlessly transition from an apparently objective evaluation of the facts to sales copy that deals specifically with your solution.
Would you like to discuss how this powerful concept can be used in YOUR business to generate and develop ready-to-buy leads in the most jaded (and lucrative) markets?
You may qualify for a free strategy session where we break down what you’re currently doing and give you a point-by-point action plan for supercharging your results with this breakthrough concept.
Until next time, Good Selling!
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