If you are working hard but seeing little to no increase in sales, this could be attributed to a lack of understanding about human behaviors. From a marketing standpoint, this is also why clickbaits work so well. According to Professor George Loewenstein from Carnegie Mellon, curiosity creates an information gap. People are interested in themselves. People believe what they want to believe. If you are trying to sell someone on something, the last thing you should do is go against their beliefs. Get-rich-quick schemes play on this nature of human beings to make them buy into the promise of becoming a millionaire in one month with zero effort. For example, we can design our sales process to make it insanely easy for people to make purchases. On top of that, we can limit the choices we offer to customers to increase sales. Let your business soar.
People are not rational. You can have the most logical and compelling proposal but still fail to elicit any response. If you are working hard but seeing little to no increase in sales, this could be attributed to a lack of understanding about human behaviors. A DNA survey involving 1,056 people from 52 populations revealed that people are 99.9 percent the same. In every human brain, you find the same makeup that gives rise to our thoughts and emotions.
Successful salespeople and marketers understand universal human behaviors well enough to use the right trigger words to get them to take action, each and every time. Here, we explore five common human tendencies and what you can do about them.
Related: The Ability to Sell Will Make or Break Your Company, So Stop Underselling It
1. People will do more to avoid loss than to gain pleasure.
In his book Thinking Fast and Slow, Nobel winner Daniel Kahneman asserts that we typically fear loss twice as much as we relish success. This means price decrease has a bigger impact than price increase. For example, from July 1981 to July 1983, a 10 percent increase in the price of eggs led to a 7.8 percent decrease in demand, whereas a 10 percent decrease in the price led to only a 3.3 percent increase in demand. (Putler, 1992)
As a result of this loss-aversion tendency, people are also more likely to stick to existing solutions rather than to risk losing what they have. That doesn’t bode well for new businesses. So what can you do?
Consider offering free trials to lower the risk of going into business with you. Once they start incorporating your solution in their lives, loss aversion will work in your favor. It becomes hard for them to stop using your solution, so they will pay to continue using it. Money-back guarantees work in the same way. Legendary business consultant Jay Abraham calls it “risk reversal.”
2. People are naturally inquisitive.
Curiosity is something that distinguishes us from other species. Psychologists have theorized it’s something evolution has endowed us with to propel the human race forward and to ensure its survival.
From a marketing standpoint, this is also why clickbaits work so well. According to Professor George Loewenstein from Carnegie Mellon, curiosity creates an information gap. Whenever we perceive a gap between what we know and what we want to know, we can’t help but seek to close the gap. While I am not encouraging you to create clickbaits, you can apply this tip in the attention-scarce social media space. Great companies across time have made use of stories to draw people’s attention and bring their point across. Stories work so well because, unlike blatant sales messages, it provides the impetus to continue reading/watching. The ups and downs experienced by the protagonist in the story create an information gap that we can’t help but…
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