Lowering Sales Resistance In 5 Easy Steps
Lowering sales resistance is one of THE most important things you can try to tackle throughout your copy.
You see, people LOVE buying, but they hate getting sold to. So if you want to make sales, you need to lower the sales resistance that person is already having.
And if you’re not exactly sure what sales resistance is, have you ever walked onto a car lot and had a car salesman walk up to you, trying to figure out what you want to buy? That feeling you get, you know, the feeling of wanting to punch them in the face and do your own thing…is what prospects are feeling as they’re reading your copy.
So before I get into these 5 steps for lowering sales resistance, let me give you a little bit of a visual.
Losing The Sales Resistance Battle At First
This is how you start the sales resistance process (losing)
At first, you’re going to start off losing the battle. You prospect is literally trying to find reasons to say no to whatever you’re selling them.
Think about it, the majority of people out there are trying to look for excuses for EVERYTHING. Want to lose weight? People will have excuses why they can’t. Want to make more money? Same thing. This goes for everything, and there’s no exception to the product you’re selling.
Your job at this point is to create trust in the prospect and at least get them to contemplate owning whatever you’re selling them.
And eventually when you get them interested enough you’ll hit a …
Sales Resistance Standstill
The sales resistance standstill
At this point, they’re still going to be leery about the product but you’ll not only have their attention, they’ll have read a considerable amount of your copy and be at least thinking about consuming the product or service you’re writing about. Their will be a sort of battle going on inside the persons head.
Essentially, they’ll be unconsciously weighing the negatives against the positives and seeing which one comes out on top. The picture above represents the negatives and the positives (the money being the negative because they have to spend it, the arms-raised person representing the benefits).
And eventually you’ll (hopefully) come to a point where you can…
Gain Momentum To Win The Sales Resistance War
winning the sales resistance war
And finally, you’ll be able to be like this little gold man above and win the war even when the odds are against you! This only happens successfully when you have a good product selling it to the right people and using the right sales process to do it.
And although this seems like a hard thing to do, let me give you those 5 tips to lowering sales resistance so you can make this process MUCH easier – no matter what you’re selling!
Keep in mind, these are in no particular order:
- Show Credibility – Especially in today’s super-resistant buying economy, showing credibility is absolutely essential. People are getting scammed by other companies all the time, so trust is at an all time low. Therefore, you must hit them hard and early with the credibility either of your product, the spokesperson for your product (i.e. the creator or person endorsing it), or the company.
- Show Proof – Without proof, credibility doesn’t matter. Just because you SAY someone did something doesn’t mean they actually did. Just because you SAY someone made a certain amount of money in 30 days or lost a certain amount of weight in 30 days…doesn’t mean they actually did.
- Overcome Objections – No matter what you’re selling, people are going to have objections. They may have objections to price, whether or not it really works, what the true benefits of it are, and many other things. This is where doing your proper research comes in handy. If you don’t know what the objections are and how to overcome them, you’re going to lose tons of sales!
- Create Trust – Creating trust comes from a variety of factors. Credibility and proof both help tremendously, but I think one of the biggest factors missing from people’s copy is simply not understanding the prospect. You need to make it feel as if it’s themselves talking. That’s literally how much you need to understand that prospect. Do you know how he feels at every second of the day, how he feels before and during reading your copy, and know how to relate to your prospect? If not, you need to learn how. Getting them to agree with you early on, validating things they already know, and showing them that you’re just like them will go a LONG way towards creating trust with your prospect.
- Breaking Down The Price – Eventually you’ll come to a point where you need to tell them the price. This is where you’ll lose the majority of your customers. It’s not necessarily that your price is too high, it’s that you haven’t shown enough value to allow the price to be that high. So what do you do? You break it down so it seems like mere pennies. For example instead of $30/month you could say it’s less than a cup of coffee per day. Or instead of saying it’s $40 for a health book, say it’s what the personal trainer charges for just 30 minutes of her time, yet she put over 30 hours into the book so truly you’re saving “X” dollars.
As I mentioned, lowering sales resistance is sometimes a hard feat to do. But if you know how to do it and you know what buttons to push to lower the resistance without your prospect even realizing it, that my friend is how you become a great copywriter.
