AUTHOR: Kenda Macdonald
As a dedicated consultant, I specialise in elevating businesses through top-tier consultancy, fueled by a deep understanding of buyer psychology cultivated over years of experience. My expertise lies in crafting marketing and sales strategies that propel businesses to new heights by leveraging insights into the buyer brain. As a bestselling author, public speaker, and strategist, my passion for decoding human behavior drives me to innovate and deliver unparalleled results. I've designed a methodology adaptable for all types of businesses, ensuring transformative customer journeys and experiences.
All kinds of wrong I'm afraid...
It's a bold statement. You may be on the right path, but you've more than likely been tainted by today's Marketing "gurus". So let's jump straight in with a pretty heavy statistic to exemplify what I'm talking about here:
1 Million US Sales people will be replaced by self-service eCommerce by the year 2020 (Forrester Research)
1 million. In the US alone. 2020 is not that far away....
It's has been clear for some time now that we live in a buyers market. The consumer consumes on the consumer's terms. The forecastings and trends certainly support that.
And it's becoming increasingly hard to get by on traditional sales methods because of this.
Interestingly we have more prospects than EVER before (thanks globalisation!) - but we're finding it harder and harder to sell. Why?
I'm not going to fluff this up:
It's because you still think you're the most important person in the relationship between you and your prospect...
Yep I went there!
Now - I'm not saying you need to not tell people how awesome you are and how much of an expert you are. That's still super important.
What I am saying, is that you're still selling to your prospects with logic.
Yes you are the expert, and you are super awesome. And so logically you and your company are the obvious choice. All making sense here!
Except logic has nothing to do with buying behaviour. Zip. Nada.
There has been study after study on this (here is a round up article which is pretty decent) - so much so that there is even a new scale for testing called the CBI scale - The Dimensional Structure of Consumer Buying Impulsivity (bit of a mouthful if you ask me!)
Long story short - Humans buy with emotion - not logic.
So if you're appealing to their logical side, you're going to lose. Appealing to logic is a much longer sales process, and one that we can't afford in today's 2 second world.
Further to that - we actually make all our decisions based on emotion - not just our buying decisions. Descartes error is a fantastic read on this subject (check it out)
So stop it with the logic!
So if your copy is all wrapped up nicely, and you're hitting all the emotions for your prospects in your messaging, you may be thinking that you're all good to go. Well not today my friend 🙂
We need to talk about your funnels...
Since we're emotional buying creatures, why are you building funnels that ascend on price?
Ryan Deiss lovers - hear me out!
The funnels that you currently have created more than likely ascend on price. Yes there are many sorts of funnels, but if you follow conventional marketing wisdom, any basic funnel you propose will look like this:
Freebie -> Low Priced Product -> Medium Priced Product -> High Priced Product.
All very logical. Except we have agreed that logic isn't the key ingredient here. Emotion is.
Yep kitty - woops! Guess the conventional marketing wisdom missed that one...
Now, how are you supposed to fix this? Well it's a teeny fix actually...
It involves you thinking slightly differently.
You shouldn't be ascending your funnels on price - you should be ascending on value.
Value is the key to emotional purchasing.
And by value, I am NOT talking about price value. I am talking about the value your solution is providing to your consumer on an emotional level. What value are you adding to their lives?
If it so happens that as the value increases in your funnel, the price increases too - then so be it. In actual fact, it's more than likely that this will be the case.
This is the secret all the big guys don't tell you - it's not about the price, it's about the value it provides, and often, they go hand in hand.
People have an intuition for when things feel "off". It's a subconscious survival trait.
If your product ascension feels staged - it will put your prospects off.
They won't know exactly why, but emotionally it won't feel right.
On the other hand - if the value stacks nicely, and you are increasing their quality of life along with a price increase - the ascension feels "right". We're strange illogical beings, but the purchase will feel natural.
So here are some questions you should be asking yourself right now:
Are you ascending based on price, or are you ascending based on value?
Logical ascension vs. Emotional ascension?
Have a long hard think about your funnels and be honest!
I'm going to let you in on a not so little secret here: I am a terribly unemotional person! So I find this really hard 🙂 But I know it works... So if you find it hard - you're probably as cold hearted as I am 😉
Joking aside - small business owners find emotional selling really hard to do - we're too close to the problem.
It makes far too much sense to us to sell logically. But getting this right is vital for success.
