Clean Up the Prospect’s Hassles

Massage professional Tobi Lessem, who does business in Northern California, comes to the client’s home with her equipment. This eliminates the hassle for the client of driving to the appointment and worse, needing to navigate through traffic to get back after the massage’s therapeutic relaxation.
     But Ms. Lessem’s service delivery method sometimes causes another hassle: Potential clients are ashamed to have a professional come into a messy home, and it would take an effort to clean up. The result? The prospect keeps putting off making the appointment.
     Ms. Lessem’s remedy? A package deal in which she’ll clean your place and then give you a professional massage. “You can feel the weight coming off their shoulders literally and figuratively,” she reports.
     Home improvement retailer B&Q in Sutton-in-Ashfield encountered a similar impediment to profitability and used a similar remedy: Research by the Behavioural Insights Team, UK Cabinet Office, had found that when prospects for installation of attic insulation thought about the need to clear out the loft in preparation, this thinking often was enough to give pause. Cleaning up was overwhelming, and so a cause for eternal delay. People weren’t taking the energy-saving route even though it would save them money and was subsidized by a UK government grant.
     So B&Q cleans up the hassle as part of the subsidized service. Their staff clear out the home owner’s belongings, give the owner the opportunity to decide what items to donate to a local charity or to discard to the trash bin, install the loft insulation, and then put back the remaining belongings. According to The Economist, the additional service resulted in a threefold increase in use of the installation program.
     Were prospects for Ms. Lessem’s massage services and the B&Q installation services aware from the start of the real reasons they were putting off the purchase? Until the offer was made explicitly, many probably didn’t make a clear connection. They were unlikely to say to the retailer, “Listen, if you throw in a cleanup service, you’ve got my business.” It took the retailer’s behavioral insight to achieve this profitability edge.
     Regularly think through what hassles may be getting in the way of more people using your services and purchasing your products. When you deliver to the customer’s home or business, the hassle could be cleaning a messy place. When the shoppers come to you, it could be a messy parking situation.

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

Click below for more:
Park Your Carcass to Learn a Lot

Redirect Customer Tempers

Some guy, energized by all the news of the weekend’s Mega Millions lottery, buys a two-buck ticket for a relatively minor-league twenty million dollar jackpot. And, against the odds, he wins.
     With great excitement, he rushes to the lottery office, ticket in hand. “I’m here for my twenty million dollars,” he says.
     “It doesn’t work like that,” is the reply. “If we verify your win, we’ll send you a check for one million dollars each year over the next twenty years.”
     The guy can barely control his rage. “Hey, I want my twenty million dollars. That’s what I heard promised. So I want all the winnings right now. And, look, if you can’t give me what I heard you promise me, then give me my two dollars back.”
     Customers can sometimes act in the spirit of that guy, letting their temper dictate disadvantageous actions. Handling an angry consumer requires finesse. The formula for action:

• Let customers express anger in bursts of up to about thirty seconds. This gives you time to understand their points well enough to reply sensibly. Beyond about thirty seconds, people often get more and more wound up.
• Listen attentively. At the onset, resist the urge to interrupt or even to decide what you’ll say. As you get closer to the thirty-second mark, decide what you’d like to reply.
• Avoid interrupting the person in the middle of a sentence. Wait for him to take a breath and then begin to talk. Keep your voice decisive, but calm.
• When the shopping experience itself has been responsible for the consumer’s anger, ask questions like, “What may I do to make things right?” Then decide what action is wisest and either do it or announce when you will do it.
• If you conclude that the customer’s anger is not caused by experiences in your store, say something like, “I treasure our customers’ business, and I’m always looking for ways to improve. What suggestions do you have?”

     Next, efficiently redirect the discussion toward the positive. Findings from research at University of Maryland and Yale University indicate that too much talking will lock into the shopper's mind the bad feelings they're experiencing, and those negative memories make it less likely they'll buy from you in the future.
     On the other hand, when you redirect customers’ temper tantrums, odds are customers will feel indebted to you later, after good sense returns.

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

Click below for more:
Cool Down Customer Temper Tantrums
Protect Customers From Dangerous Decisions

Separate Soft Money from Hard Advice

Please note: The University of Groningen, Erasmus University, and University of Minnesota research which I reference in this post was later considered to have been flawed. I'm leaving the post here because I referenced it in later posts, and I don't want my blog readers to reach a dead link.

Money’s funny. Well, at least the range of consumer reactions to money is funny.
     Psychologists at University of Minnesota, Florida State University, and China’s Sun Yat-Sen University had one group of study participants count out eighty $100 bills. A matching group were assigned to count out eighty blank pieces of paper. All participants were then exposed to tasks in which they experienced social rejection and physical stress. The people who had worked with the $100 bills reported less discomfort during and after the tasks. Handling the real money gave people magical relief.
     But in another study, subtle reminders about money caused shoppers to back away from the advice of experts. Researchers at University of Groningen, Erasmus University, and University of Minnesota began by assigning participants to one of three conditions. Some were instructed to work at a computer which showed hard currency symbols. Another group were assigned to create sentences using words related to money. The objective of these first two conditions was to get the people thinking about money. People in a third condition were given tasks that were unlikely to trigger thoughts of money.
     Then in the main part of the study, participants were given directive advice by authority figures about products and next asked to evaluate the products themselves. What did thinking about money have to do with this? It turned out that the participants who had worked with the currency display or created the money sentences were quite likely to evaluate products in ways that went directly counter to what the authority figures had said. This was not true of the participants who hadn’t been cued to think about money.
     The researchers’ explanation of the findings is that thoughts of money trigger a drive for independence. The relatively soft reminders led the participants to rebel against the hard-edged advice from the authority figures.
     This happened, though, only when the money-cued people were making decisions about products for themselves. The effect disappeared when the same people were asked to evaluate products intended for use by others the people knew closely.
     Retail salespeople are taught to hold off on talk of money until it’s clear the consumer fully appreciates the benefits of making the purchase. The reasoning is that once money is mentioned, the typical consumer starts thinking only about that. This Groningen/Erasmus/Minnesota research indicates another reason is to keep the shopper’s mind open to authoritative advice.

Click below for more:
Cast Magic Spells for Escape Benefits
Give Change in Varied Denominations

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 usually 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

Click below for more:
Ask Shoppers for Reasons to Buy
Create Your Future by Anticipating Resistance

Skedaddle from a Skittles No-Win

There are public relations situations in which a retailer could make things worse no matter what the retailer does or does not do. Often, the least bad alternative in such situations is to promptly move away for a while. This gives time for emotions in the marketplace to cool so that when the retailer does take action, the public’s response will not be so reflexive or extreme. Moving away also gives you, the retailer, time to strategize.
     A recent New York Times article provides an example of this sort of thing from the world of candy. It’s the case of Trayvon Martin’s Skittles. Mr. Martin is the teenager killed by a Florida crime watch volunteer. The case has drawn broad accusations that racial prejudice is behind the killing and the subsequent police response.
     At the time of the shooting, one of the few items Mr. Martin had with him was a package of Skittles. Now people are buying Skittles to display as a protest. Those selling the candy are profiting. Shouldn’t they be giving the extra money to racial reconciliation programs?, some people are asking. A professor of African-American studies at Cheyney University of Pennsylvania is quoted as saying that, because of the added publicity for Skittles, Wrigley should donate funding to communities where, “murder based on stereotypes is a reoccurring theme.”
     According to the NYT article, Wrigley has not responded to these demands, instead issuing a statement saying, “…we would never wish for our actions to be perceived as an attempt of commercial gain following this tragedy.” A spokesperson for the business declined comment about the impact on profits from the involvement of Skittles in reports of Mr. Martin’s death.
     Considering a consumer psychology perspective, the Wrigley response is wise. Later, Wrigley’s might do well to donate money to causes logically related to the Trayvon Martin incident. How much money would be seen by consumers as enough, while not exploiting the situation? That decision might depend on the degree to which the death ends up being viewed as racially motivated.
     Prior to serving as the name of an import from Britain which has become a highly popular candy treat among American teenagers, “skittles” referred to a British game many of us would call “bowling.” Handle a “Skittles No-Win” incorrectly and your profitability might get bowled over. Handle it with a deft skedaddle and you might strike it richer.

Click below for more:
Cultivate Controversy Carefully
Keep Quiet to Fuel Principled Controversy

Hire the Autistic for Their Retailing Strengths

Fans of the TV show “Parenthood” came to know, through the character Max, the personality liabilities and assets of Asperger’s Syndrome, which mental health professionals consider to be a mild variant of autism. Max had difficulty both looking people in the eye when talking to them and acknowledging what others in social interactions truly want. Not the sort of person you’d want as a front-line retail employee, you might be thinking.
     Actually, what I’m thinking now is about my Uncle Larry, who was the general manager of the Boston Store in downtown Milwaukee during the early 1960’s. He strongly advocated hiring the handicapped for their strengths. The reasons he gave to those who asked were that these people had trouble finding work, so they didn’t demand the highest of pay rates and they were dedicated to the boss. But because such bosses often coach disabled employees to improve their living situations and counsel them when they are emotionally upset, maybe my Uncle Larry's true reasons included doing well by doing good.
     The Max character in “Parenthood” had an incredible ability to absorb, recall, and use minute details. Go back to Dustin Hoffman’s portrayal of autistic Raymond Babbitt in the 1988 classic, “Rain Man” or back to the title character in 2009’s “Adam.”
     A Bloomberg Businessweek article a while ago discussed the profitability opportunities in hiring people with autism. The attention to accurate detail and enjoyment of routinization are assets for many tasks. In the retailing environment, for instance, think about who you’d ask to make the ongoing changes in shelf tags to optimize merchandise pricing.
     The Bloomberg Businessweek article recognizes that training the autistic employee requires special skills. As you might expect, behavioral scientists find that computer-based training often works better than face-to-face training. Related to this, employees with autism can suffer paralyzing anxiety when confronted with the social interactions found in any store. They might do better handling the internet side of the business, working in a quiet room. Wearing headphones not only blocks out the distractions, but also signals to people wandering by that this employee prefers to forgo the collaborative suggestions.
     The Max’s, Raymond’s, and Adam’s in the retailing workplace avoid social interaction because they don’t know how. When they master the skills, they often treasure the opportunities to break out of loneliness. Retailers can help make that happen when hiring the autistic for their retailing strengths.

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

Click below for more:
Attract with Social Consciousness
Accommodate Disabled Shoppers’ Psychology