Forget sales psychology and focus on the psychology of buyers
For some reason, those of us who feel uneasy about selling our work tend to focus on the pushy side of sales. But whilst nobody likes to be manipulated or pressured into a sale, most of us enjoy buying things we want and need, so a really useful mindset shift, if you don’t like selling, is to reframe things.
What if you thought about how to create an enjoyable and inspiring buying experience for your clients?
One way to do that is by starting with great customer research, so you can understand exactly what your audience needs, and then connect with them emotionally as part of the sales and marketing process.
Another is to make sure that you are building trust with your potential buyers, by being honest, authentic and consistent in all your dealings with them.
You also need to be aware that we make the decision to buy emotionally first, and then we post-rationalise this decision with all the ‘rational’ reasons why we should make a purchase, so tapping into your clients emotions is absolutely fundamental to the buying and selling process.
Another area to dig into is your pricing. If, deep down, you feel resentful about your pricing (because you’re undervaluing your time or your experience level) this will negatively affect your sales. By the same token, if you secretly feel that your prices are too high, people will pick up on your ambivalence. Only when you’ve reached your Goldilocks, ‘just right’ price, not too high, not too low, will you be able to share your work with the right level of excitement.
Pricing is also a huge part of your positioning. If you want to be seen as a high-end brand, it’s obvious that you can’t focus on low-cost offers - and we all, as consumers, are likely to have very different expectations of the same core product if it’s offered at a different price. Think of the different pricing you’d expect for a cup of coffee from McDonalds versus one from an independent artisan coffee shop. As buyers, we’d be confused to be given the McDonalds pricing for the artisan flat white.
We’ve all experienced the pleasure of buying something we really want - see if you can cast your mind back to whenever that last happened for you, and work out what was so positive about that experience. Whether it’s wandering round a farmer’s market or a gallery or your favourite bookshop, or finding the perfect dress, or the course that will teach you exactly what you need to learn right now, buying can be a totally positive experience. Think about what makes it work for you, then tap into that, when you’re looking to sell to others.
One of my favourite places is Daunt’s bookshop in London. It makes me feel happy just to think about being there. The buying experience is of being somewhere calm and beautiful, with an abundance of books, and enthusiastic and knowledgeable booksellers. The shop is laid out as a journey, with books catalogued according to the country they’re set in, which makes browsing much more fun, and leads to me finding unexpected treasures. I don’t feel pressured to buy - but I enter the shop looking forward to buying there.
It’s also worth thinking about your own best and worst experiences of working with service providers.
For instance, I changed my whole approach to how I followed up with clients, based on my experience of a lack of follow up from a therapist I’d been seeing for a while to help with my longstanding insomnia. I realised that the fear of seeming pushy or salesy had stopped me from following up with people who seemed interested in doing continued work with me but who then never got back to me.
However, when this therapist didn’t follow up with me when I didn’t continue to book more sessions with her, I didn’t feel grateful that she wasn’t being pushy – I felt like she didn’t really want to continue working with me, or maybe she had the same doubts about whether the process was working for me at all that I did, or maybe she just wasn’t very organized or professional. None of this, I’m sure, was what she intended to project – on reflection, I’m pretty sure she felt she didn’t want to hassle me or be pushy in any way - but what actually came through was a lack of interest, care, and a sense that perhaps she didn’t fully believe in her own process.
The very fact that you’re putting yourself in your client’s shoes and thinking about buying psychology means that there’s an incredibly low risk that your clients will ever feel like you’re being pushy or salesy. However, there IS a risk that they’ll feel that you’re being so hands off that maybe you’re just not that interested in working with them. Also it’s likely that they’ve hired you to show leadership and take a stand for what you, as the expert in your field, consider to be in their best interests.
To go back to my example of the sleep therapist: if she had said to me, “I know you might be feeling like you’re not making much progress at the moment, but this is a longstanding problem for you, you’re not going to solve it overnight. I believe that if you work with me for X more sessions and follow through on the homework I give you, you will start sleeping better.” – I wouldn’t necessarily have continued to work with her, but I wouldn’t have found that pushy and I’d have had much more respect for her own belief in what she does.
The key here is not to be arrogant or to over-promise results to people, it’s simply to consider how you can most fully be of service to them. If you truly believe that you can help them, say so and explain how and why that would work. If you don’t believe that you’re the best person to help them, say that instead (and if you know of anyone who would be better placed to help them, refer them on).
When I think about the great experiences I’ve had with service-providers, they’ve made me feel like I’m important to them and that they’re genuinely really pleased to be working with me. They’ve been upfront and clear from the beginning about what they need from me and unapologetic about taking a stand for what they think is important. They’ve had clear boundaries about what they do and don’t do for clients. If I’ve taken a while to get back to them, they’ve followed up with me, and explained more about how they think they can help (obviously not by barraging me with emails and phone calls).
It can be incredibly worthwhile to take ten minutes to jot down some impressions you had from both your best and your worst experiences as a client of a service provider and then to reflect on the experience you want your own clients to have with you.
If you want to start applying the psychology of buying to your own business, it’s wrapped into my Unlock Your Message programme.