Exhaust Shoppers’ Resistances

When your customer makes a purchase, you’ve successfully sold an idea—the idea that the product or service is worth the shopper’s investment.
     People resist being sold. They love to buy things, but hate being sold things. Succumbing to salesmanship implies you’ve allowed your weaknesses to be exploited. And people don’t like to view themselves as either having weaknesses or as having been exploited.
     There are exceptions to this. There are times we want to hand over control to somebody else so we can say, “I couldn’t help myself when I got this item.” In addition, there are those of us who choose to reward adroit salesmanship by making a purchase.
     With the others of us, one effective selling approach to handling resistances is to surface them. Actually, go beyond surfacing resistances of highly reluctant shoppers. Exhaust those resistances. Keep asking, “What other concerns do you have?”
     Perhaps the most important reason for doing this is you then have the opportunity to address the reasons. You might choose to give a counterargument, or you might decide to make a case for a different product or service in order to save the sale.
     Do it gently, though. At some point, the shopper will run out of reasons. You don’t want to embarrass him when he finds it necessary to say, “I guess that’s all, but it’s certainly enough.”
     Research findings from Universität Heidelberg and Universität Mannheim indicate that if you ask the highly reluctant shopper to generate loads of reasons not to buy, when she finds it difficult to come up with further reasons, this makes the purchase more attractive. She is saying to herself, “The fact that I can’t think of more reasons might mean that my reluctance is misplaced.”
     A related reason for going gently when exhausting the resistances is to avoid any shopper embarrassment arising from an awareness that his reasons are unreasonable. Bring these out from the recesses of the mind into the light where the flawed logic becomes apparent. Say, “My guess is that there are reasons we’ve not discussed for your hesitation in buying.” This unleashes those hidden resistances so they show themselves.
     Psychologists who study negotiating find that, when this sort of technique is used, the person is unlikely to say, “Boy, my reasoning was silly” aloud to the other party, but can say it inside the head and thereby erase the resistances.

For your profitability: Sell Well: What Really Moves Your Shoppers

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Ask Shoppers for Reasons to Buy
Create Your Future by Anticipating Resistance