Tuesday, March 27, 2012

The psychology of selling: Using positive phrases

The psychology of selling: Using positive phrases

As you promote and sell your services as a financial advisor, you may feel your clients are mysterious and complex. Fortunately, you can rest assured that effective selling is based on psychology. And much of the success of selling has to do with the phrases you use in your sales copy in email newsletters, blogs, Web content and sales pages.
  • People are emotionally driven: Clients decide to purchase your services based on a  need, emotion or feeling -- not necessarily a logical thought. This is why the content you write must express intangible benefits to the reader to persuade them to buy from you. As you write your content, ask yourself what emotions you are hoping to stir up in your reader in order to write the most effective sales copy.
  • Use positive and recognizable phrases: To let you in on little trick, you can turn to social media to access positive phrases that entice your clients to purchase your services. Observe firsthand the type of language and phrases that they use when discussing your industry. Then use these exact phrases in your content to perfectly identify with your clients. This is a subconscious way of establishing a bond with your clients to attract them to choose you over your competition.
  • Always provide value: Value does not always mean price. However, the content you provide to your clients should always be valuable to attract them to the credibility of your business. Whether this is offering a free downloadable report, online videos or compelling content, your clients must see value in order to even consider purchasing your services. And once you offer value to gain clients, these same clients are highly likely to pass along this valuable information to their own friends and family to do your marketing work for you. 
Most of us know in our bones that if a client objects on price, the problem is not really price. Conventional wisdom says the problem is value. But conventional wisdom is occasionally wrong, and price is often one of those cases. To test the truth of this, just check your own experience.

How often have you tried to convince a price-objecting client that actually, the value is quite high, a bargain, under priced for the value you get, etc. I don't know about you, but in my experience, it has rarely worked. The reason is that both price and value are economic issues, but price objections are usually emotional.

Why price is like dating
Remember (if you're a guy) asking out the prettiest girl in school for Friday night? If she said, "Oh, I'm sorry, I'm busy Friday night," did you get the hint? The hint was not that she was actually busy Friday night--she was telling you "no" in a socially acceptable way, allowing you to pretend it was a scheduling problem.

The truth was she didn't feel like going out with you. And you probably got the hint: You instinctively didn't push for Saturday. You didn't try to respond to what was really an emotional issue with a scheduling solution. You knew that if she had wanted to go out with you, she'd have said, "I'd love to--I've got a previous commitment for Friday, but could we make it next Tuesday or Thursday?"

Price works the same way. If your client says to you, "Oh, I'd like to, but that's really just too expensive for me," they probably don't mean it's too expensive. They mean they don't feel like buying that insurance from you. If you respond by trying to argue value, it's like trying to convince the "I'm busy Friday" girl to reconsider for Saturday--it's just not going to happen. You don't respond to emotional objections with economic arguments.



 

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