Copy Tip 26: Persuasive Sales Factors
Several years back I completed a multi-day Tony Robbins sales training event called Power To Influence. It was a very valuable investment in sales training and I loved every minute of it.
The overall approach outlined in this training really is congruent with good copy: when a sales situation is approached the right way … when you stack up massive value for your prospects … there’s no need to “hard sell” because you’ve established and properly qualified your prospect well before the “end” of the sale (which is in fact not an end at all, but instead the beginning of a long-term client relationship).
In terms of getting a prospect to respond — to meet your Objective — you need to combine the following two approaches:
EMOTION and LOGIC
Customers need Emotional Reasons to Buy Now (ERBN) and Logical Reasons to Buy Now (LRBN).
You might have heard this another way:
People buy on emotion and back it up with logic.
Tony Robbins describes it as a seesaw — on one side, you have your Emotional and Logical reasons to buy now (predominantly Emotional reasons), and on the other side is a client’s Dominant Reasons to Avoid Buying (DRAB).
I’m away from the office (and all of my graphics tools!), so here’s a really basic hand-drawn sketch I’ve scanned in to show you what I mean:
The drawing above shows how you need to stack up the emotional and logical reasons to buy now, outweighing the dominant reasons to avoid buying.
It’s a really simple formula to get someone to buy:
Give them MORE ERBN’s and LRBN’s than they have DRAB’s!
In other words, once they feel that there are more reasons to buy than avoid buying, you have a sale… the balance of the seesaw tips to your side.
It might be an easy way for you to help discover the three lots of “reasons” you need to know — the emotional and logical reasons that help convince your prospect to take the action you want them to take, and the objections they have that are their dominant reasons to avoid buying.
You need to know ALL THREE.
Each then needs to be illustrated with proof and other credibility elements to make a convincing and effective presentation to your prospect.
So here’s what you need to do …
All of these (emotional and logical reasons and objections) are then incorporated into your copy to persuade your prospect to take the action you planned in your Objective.
Quite often, objections are overlooked or avoided in copy. I think this is the wrong thing to do, for two reasons.
Firstly, it sends a message to your prospect that you don’t really understand the situation from their point of view. Otherwise you’d be more empathetic towards them, knowing what both attracts them AND their potential objections.
Secondly, if YOU raise the objection, you also get to provide an answer – an answer than can help demonstrate why that objection shouldn’t dominate the decision to act. You can put the objection in perspective, and show how it is outweighed by the positive emotional and logical reasons to buy now.
There’s more also going on here — by admitting a perceived fault with your product or service, and raising it as an objection, you are perceived as being more believable in what else you say because you are being truthful (you should always be truthful of course, but this shows you both being truthful and being seen to be truthful).
I wanted to mention this formula as we go deeper into our copy tips … yesterday we talked about what motivates buyers, and today is more on how to get a prospect to go from “not buying” to “buying” — tipping the seesaw in your favour — which means reasons to take the action you want them to take, now!
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