What if you could get 5%, 10% and maybe even 15% conversions with mediocre sales copy? You can, but there’s something you’ve got to do first – you’ve got to build trust, likeability, credibility, build rapport and loyalty with your prospects.
Contents
- People buy on emotion but first you need to Build Rapport.
- Build Relationships with Your Prospects
- Build Rapport with your articles
- In-person connection
- Being emotionally invested
- Know Your Customers
- Use The “Law of Reciprocity”
- The Power Of Using ‘Fear’ In Marketing and Sales
- Be Sure To Capture Your Customer’s Attention
- How To Keep Rapport Going And Build Long Lasting Relationships
People buy on emotion but first you need to Build Rapport.
In fact, if you ask someone a day after they read your sales letter what it said, they might have trouble telling you. But if you ask them how it made them FEEL, they’ll have no problem remembering.
When you build a personal connection with your prospects, you’re simultaneously building trust and likeability with them, too.
Imagine someone is standing next to two people; a stranger and a friend. Who are they going to listen to? The friend, of course, because they don’t know this stranger and don’t know if they like them or trust them.
The first thing you want to do is give people room. Imagine they’re physically walking into your website to look around, and you POUNCE on them with your latest, greatest offer.
What are they going to do? Most likely run right back out the door.
But what if you tell them to look around, feel at home and browse at their leisure?
They relax. And they browse.
Build Relationships with Your Prospects
How to Move from “I don’t know you” to Signing the Deal – Building Relationships with Your Prospects
We’ve all been approached by a salesperson out of the blue before, and we usually have our minds made up on an answer even before they say “hello.”
If you’re not a seasoned salesperson, this process can seem intimidating.
How do you go from the initial greeting to successfully closing the deal?
There’s a simple approach that’s also highly effective. It turns a sales encounter into a conversation where you and the prospect decide together whether your product can help them.
Building Relationships is at the Heart of Successful Sales
Think for a second about the brands and companies you buy from. It’s likely that you have a relationship with them. You interact with them on social media. You go to them for the information you need to help solve your problems. The brand feels more like a trusted friend than a random salesperson.
The heart of successful sales is building relationships. This is what high-pressure sales is missing. Good salespeople build and nurture these relationships so that when the person needs your product, it’s already an easy sell.
Start Where Your Prospect Is
Like any relationship, it starts with getting to know each other. You have to listen to your customer and find out what they need from you. You also need to explain to the person what you offer and how it uniquely solves their problems.
Through the process of listening, questioning, and carrying out a two-way conversation, not a sales pitch, you can discover together whether your product is the right match for them.
A Better Benefit than Making a Sale
What if you discover that it’s not a good match? Now, you’ve spent a great deal of time and effort on someone who won’t buy, taking away from time you could’ve spent closing a deal with someone else.
It may sound counter-intuitive, but actually this could be the best outcome. You want to help the person and when they don’t buy, it means your offer doesn’t solve their problem right now. It could be that it doesn’t address their current needs, or maybe they’d like to buy but aren’t in the right financial situation to make a purchase.
Start the Relationship the Right Way
If you can turn this around and find another way to help the prospect, you’ve succeeded. Send them useful information or put them in touch with someone they should get to know. Offer your expert help and the person will leave the encounter with a positive impression of you and your business.
You’ve just started the relationship on the right foot. In the future, when the prospect is ready to buy what you have to offer, they’ll come to you. When they come across others who may need your service, you will come to mind first as they will think of your honest and trustworthy approach and recommend you over others as goodwill.
So In the meantime, keep in touch and engage them wherever possible.
Build Rapport with your articles
They read your latest article, and they’re impressed.
You know what you’re talking about AND you come across as being friendly, personable and approachable (Hint: Think of those three adjectives next time you write ANYTHING for your readers.)
They go to an article on traffic.
Ah-ha! Now you know they’re interested in traffic.
Why not offer them a report or email series on getting more traffic? It’s free, and it will be a tremendous help to them.
What are you doing here? Building rapport while being helpful. You’re still not selling anything.
You don’t build rapport with someone by bragging about your product the moment you meet them. Instead, you want to focus on making an impactful emotional connection or bond with your prospect.
And you can do this by:
- Empathising with their problem
- Showing you understand their problem or challenge before you ever talk about solutions or product
- Showing some of your own personality
- Validating their thoughts and emotions
- Making a commitment to help them, regardless of whether or not they buy
If your presentation makes your prospects feel good, respected, listened too, validated and intelligent, then they will buy from you.
Heck, you won’t be able to stop them from buying from you.
In-person connection
This is easier done in person than over the internet
…but we still have tactics we can use to make people feel understood and right at home.
For example, let’s say you’re on my website. You’ve already read my article on rapport building, and you gained some good tips and the feeling that I know your frustrations and challenges.
Then you see is this:
“What if I show you exactly how to build rapport and get more clients, even if you don’t buy my course today?”
Would you be interested? It’s hard to imagine someone interested in building rapport wouldn’t be interested in that offer.
Other things you might say to your prospects to build rapport and build that connection…
- “Wouldn’t it be nice if…” (Insert their dream here. For example, “Wouldn’t it be nice if you could turn on traffic as easily as you turn on the water in your kitchen sink?”)
- “Have you ever dreamed of a world where…” (insert their fantasy here.)
- “Are you tired of false promises? Me too…” (insert personal experience here.)
You can also empathize with them and validate their feelings…
- “If you have trouble with ___, you’re not alone.”
- “If you’ve failed in the past at ___, it’s not your fault.”
- “Are you tired of guys who act like jerks getting all the dates?”
- “Are you tired of people dumber than you, getting richer than you?”
Open-ended questions are super powerful at completely bypassing a person’s scepticism.
For example, if we say, “This course shows you how to quadruple your traffic and sales in 30 days,” the prospect is likely to be highly sceptical of that claim.
Wouldn’t you be?
But if you say, “Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a simple way to quadruple your traffic and sales in 30 days?”
Being emotionally invested
Now the prospect is imagining what that would be like, instead of thinking it’s not possible. They are becoming emotionally invested in what you’re saying and in the offer itself.
Another way to connect with your readers is to see how many times you can use the word, “you,” within reason.
Instead of saying, “This keyboard makes typing so much faster and easier,” you might say, “With this keyboard you’ll be typing much faster, with fewer embarrassing mistakes that would otherwise make you look bad to your readers.”
Instead of saying, “With this product, people can achieve this and this benefit,” you’ll say, “With this product, you will be doing __ and you’ll even be enjoying __.”
Look through your text, and anyplace you see words like, “it,” “this” or “the,” try replacing them with words like, “you,” “your” and even “I.”
Yes, it’s okay to talk about yourself.
“The first time I used this product, I immediately saw a big difference in how ladies responded to me, and you will, too. Just imagine when you walk into a bar and every lady there turns to look at you…”
Finally, you can persuade readers simply by restating their own opinions and feelings.
Again, this is easier to do if you’re speaking to someone in person, but it’s still possible to do it online, too.
Know Your Customers
You simply need to know your customers
- Why are they interested in a product like yours?
- What do they think is important?
- What are they trying to achieve?
- How do they feel about this issue?
- What are their passions?
- What are their pains?
And so forth.
Then echo what you know about them back to them.
By validating your readers’ pet peeves, concerns, challenges, feelings and so forth, you’re creating a strong bond of likeability and trustworthiness that your competition won’t have.
“If you still haven’t lost the weight yet, it’s not your fault. Overworked and chronically tired mother of three discovers the scientific secret to automatically losing a pound a week with no restrictive diet and no stupid exercise regimens.”
The first sentence is validation – of course, it’s not their fault, and they’re thrilled you’re saying that. The second sentence is relatable and believable – overworked, tired mother, losing one pound a week, with no stupid dieting or exercise.
No doubt, you can do better.
The point is, rather than slapping your readers upside the head with your latest greatest product – why not build rapport first?
Show them you understand them, you’re on their side, and your motivation is to help them first and make a profit second.
This alone should see a big jump in your conversions.
Use The “Law of Reciprocity”
When you give a potential customer a free gift, you don’t expect a gift back…you expect business.
The “Law of Reciprocity” states that when you give people something, they will want to give you something in return. It’s the reason there’s a prize in the Kinder Surprise, why Google is free, and the thinking behind advertising agencies taking prospective clients to dinner. In each instance, the hope is that the freebie will result in more business.
When you offer free gifts, make it clear that you have with no expectations of anything in return. For example, “If you’re thinking about installing a garden pool, I’d like to send you my free report Pool Installation Made Easy. Whether you buy your pool from me or not, this guide will make the process much, much easier.”
An offer like this says, “I’m a good guy.” That will make it more likely that someone wish to reciprocate your kindness by giving you their business.
It’s also important that the gift be given “free and clear.” “Buy something and get a free gift” is much less appealing than “Get a free gift with no cost or obligation.
Your reciprocal relationship, like any relationship, is a two-way street, and you’ll never get better than you give. It’s important that the gift you offer has real value and is something that will deliver a genuine benefit.
Offering a free subscription to Netflix for 30 days will get people trying it out. Offering a box of chocolates when a customer purchases the weight catchers diet book is not.
Food for Thought: “Thank You” Gift
It appears that even a warm, friendly comment of gratitude will activate the obligation to reciprocate on the customer’s part.
A New York University conducted an experiment in a medium-sized electronics store. A subject entering the store was told in a warm and friendly manner: “Thank you for shopping here today. We appreciate having you as our customer.” As a control, the next shopper entering the store was not told anything.
The average amount of money spent by subjects who received the appreciatory comment was $408.03; the average amount spent by the 100 subjects who were not told anything was $240.54.And it didn’t cost a penny to say thank you!
That’s why you see so much free giving squeeze pages on the internet, all offering you free content, videos, pdfs, audios etc in exchange for your name and email.
The idea being to build a list of prospects who have shown interest in your offer to whom you can offer more information but the premise is that one day they will buy from you due you providing so much value upfront. but this is key “VALUE” make sure to offer the amazing value that will help your prospect solve a problem or at least help them with a small step to a bigger problem. The value of Reciprocity will work wonders.
The Power Of Using ‘Fear’ In Marketing and Sales
You probably don’t sit around thinking about worst-case health scenarios, but insurance companies do. They use those scenarios and the fear attached to them to educate you into buying a product that you may not have considered otherwise.
Our fears, whether they’re of illness, loss, or social rejection can motivate us to make wise decisions by forcing us to consider negative possibilities — “Will I die if I don’t follow this diet?” “Will my business collapse if I don’t purchase this software?” “Will I be embarrassed if I don’t use this deodorant?”
There are three kinds of consumer ‘fears’ that tend to be leveraged in a marketing message or sales pitch.
- Fear that the status quo will go from good to bad and from bad to worse if he/she doesn’t buy your product
- Fear that the consumer will be paying more than is necessary unless he/she does business with you
- Fear of making a mistake in choosing a solution unless it’s YOUR solution
- Fear of losing out on an opportunity unless they act now and purchase your product.
Food for Thought: Fear of Loss is A Biggie
When writing your marketing materials, bear in mind that people respond more to what they are going to lose than to what they are ” going to gain. It’s called “fear of loss.”
Ask yourself: What will my customers stand to lose if they do not buy my product or service? When you’ve figured out the answer, you’ve identified a key sales point for your sales letter. (The fear element talks to the pain point your target may need to consider.)
A word of caution: Fear works when an optimal level of fear is evoked. Not too much, not too little, but a level of fear that’s just right.
How do you know what’s optimal? That’s tricky. You need to go to a level of fear that’s strong enough to scare people into action, but not so strong that it makes them so disturbed that they just turn off and stop reading.
And, of course, you should only use fear as an emotional button when it’s clear that there is a way to avoid the feared stimulus is explicitly indicated — and the way to avoid it is with your product.
Sometimes it not that you have to use fear but the product or service you sell may need prospects to have the education as to why they should use a product or service and in this education you are giving them pain points to consider. Sharing both the good and bad or positive or negatives about something allows people to get a balanced perspective. It’s not nice to evoke fear just to make a sale out of greed but if the message has a scary element which is informative then it’s only fair that they know that too.
Your own wisdom is needed to ensure you are coming from a place of service as the intention behind something is very important. If you are coming from a place of service then when you talk about fear its to help the prospect to understand rather then using fear tactics to make the sale.
So it’s very important that you learn to understand your self and why you do what you do and how your service and message can help others and not do it to rip them off to make a quick buck.
Be Sure To Capture Your Customer’s Attention
You’ll be sure to capture your customer’s attention if you focus your marketing on their concerns.
Making A List, Checking It Twice – In marketing, you’re never to old to believe in Santa Claus…or at least to learn a lesson from the jolly old elf.
Santa knows his “customers” inside and out…and you should, too.
Data collection — finding out what people want and why they buy — and using that data correctly will get you right where you want to be: deeply rooted in their hearts and minds.
Every time your offer appears…anywhere your brand is seen, people should react to you like Santa. Your prospect should be enthusiastically imagining what fabulous ‘gift’ you have in store for them that will make them happier. Every time they see “Brand You,” they’ll think:
Santa Clause Is Coming to Town…for ME!
To sell effectively, you need to be familiar with the full range of consumers’ feelings. If you know why people buy products and services like yours…what makes them feel good about their decision…
You can highlight those reasons in your sales messages to make it more effective and practically irresistible.
When asked and research shows why they’re making a purchase, people generally say they’re motivated by one of these five key emotions:
- Fear of Loss
- Desire for Gain
- Desire for Comfort
- Pride
- The desire for Personal Satisfaction
Food for Thought: Don’t Forget What You’re Doing
Never talk about your benefits without immediately referring to your offer. When your potential clients are all revved-up by the benefits offered by a feature of your product, you want to capitalise on that emotion immediately. So to seize the opportunity by repeating a “Click here to order now” message or button
How To Keep Rapport Going And Build Long Lasting Relationships
You’ve established rapport with another person and the two of you clicked. (In business or personal life) You’re off to a great start, but at the end of the day, establishing rapport simply gets you a foot in the door. What you do from here to take advantage of that is up to you.
Your goal should be to keep that connection between the two of you strong and turn it into a lasting relationship that will serve you well for years to come. Come from an authentic place, be real and genuine.
Let me share a couple of ideas with you for doing just that.
Start by staying in touch. Relationships have to be nurtured and at the very least that means that the two of you need to interact on occasion. Give the other person a call when you’re thinking about them, or simply to check in. Send a text message, stop by the house, or share a link to an interesting article on social media. In other words, put in the time and effort it takes to nurture the budding relationships.
Another great tip is to keep making it about them. At our core, we’re always interested in what’s in it for us and getting closer to our own goals is one of our biggest motivators. Use this to your advantage and keep strengthening your relationships with others by focusing on what’s in it for them. Yes, you’ll also accomplish your own goals along the way, but what you talk about and share should be about how it will help them.
Keep using their first name whenever you talk to them. There’s a lot of power in a first name and we love hearing it. It’s a great way to establish rapport, but also works wonders down the road. That’s why it’s so important to get into the habit of remembering people’s names. It makes them feel important and that you truly care about them.
Other ways to nurture relationships are to always be kind and friendly. Check your attitude if needed before you engage with people who are important to you. Being friendly and in a good mood (or at least appearing to be) will go a long way to open doors for you.
Of course, a little praise or a gesture of appreciation never hurts. If you’ve made a new business contact that could have a big impact on your bottom line, don’t be shy about sending over a gift basket or the likes to show you care and are very interested in a mutually beneficial relationship. If you’ve made a new friend who shares a hobby, send a handwritten note to let them know how much you appreciate them and that you enjoyed the time you spent together.
Above all, treat those around you with honesty and respect. It may seem very old-fashioned, but there’s a reason it’s worked for thousands of years. These virtues instill trust in those around us and trust is the best basis for a long-lasting relationship in all areas of your life.
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