The most valuable tool in closing a sale? Trust. (No contest.) But trust doesn’t come cheap. Even with years of dedicated consistency, trust is tough to earn, and easy to lose.
Inmy book, I describe 7 different universal forms of persuasion. Trust is one, of course, but not the only one. What’s a faster way to attract customers?
Once you successfully add lust to a pitch, customers pay a higher price point (my research shows that in some cases, twice as much). They’re also more willing to go out of their way to obtain your product, more enthusiastic in talking with colleagues about it, and best of all, more likely to reject your competitors.
Trust retains customer relationships over the long-term. Lust, on the other hand, helps you captivate them in the first place. Care to know how to add this zing of attraction to your sales?
Three ways to turn “sorta-kinda-maybe” into “absolutely-positively-yes”
1. Make the Ordinary More Emotional
Over time, a straightforward pitch can become stale. A competitive claim can feel cold. Even the most trusted process can begin to seem, wellyawwwwn! a little boring. But when you bring a jolt of creativity to a presentation, or inject a playful wink into your marketing, you’re creating an instant emotional connection. You’re lowering barriers of resistance, increasing your influence, and allowing your prospect to absorb your message.
2. Add warmth
Do you know how powerfully a smile can shift a conversation? Even subtle cues can turn common meetings into persuasive experiences. Real estate professionals often use sensory cues such as baking bread or brewing coffee when showing a home to buyers, because these nostalgic scents cue unconscious memories for many buyers. A brilliant combination of both trust and lust.
Use trust to decide what you say. Use lust to improve how you say it.
3. Create “Lustomers”
What happens when you turn a cold prospect into an “I gotta have it” sale? You’ve created a “lustomer” – a customer who lusts for your product or service. The more passionately someone feels about you and your product, the more successfully you’ve transformed a customer into a lustomer.
You’ve been a lustomer before, probably without even realizing it. Think of those times when you’ve been excited about making some particular purchase a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, tickets to a basketball game, or even a sportscar. (For me, it’s an Apple iPad. I’m practically drooling to buy it.) In these situations, we’re no longer just regular customers, and the sale is no longer just a regular transaction. Thanks to lust.
What about you? Are you currently using trust in your sales? Or lust? Or one of the other personality triggers? I developed an online test to measure your fascination, the F Score personality test, to reveal what naturally makes you most persuasive.
Trust still reigns supreme. Always will. But while trust drives long-term relationships, lust drives them straight to your door.
Every brand, even a personal brand, relies on specific triggers to fascinate.
When consumers buy a product, what they’re often actually buying is something more than the utility of the item—they’re buying a trigger. If they pay for your product but don’t get the expected trigger in return, you could face a backlash.
When Kelly Clarkson became the first American Idol winner, her fans’ expectations were clearly defined: She was the newly christened American pop princess, decorated with bubble gum and sparkles. But then Clarkson threw the world a curveball with her third album, My December. The new darker, grittier Clarkson abandoned her pop formula. Songs such as “Haunted” and “Sober” were deemed “too negative” by her own label. Clarkson canceled her tour due to underwhelming ticket sales and sought new management. The singer’s brand has recovered, but only after returning to her fans’ expectations with the trust trigger once again. Madonna, on the other hand, succeeds because of her manipulation of the vice trigger; her fans expect her brand to reinvent and experiment.
Every brand’s value is built upon a specific combination of fascination triggers. Abandon those triggers with great care. Obviously, if Porsche released a car that was safe-yet-sluggish, or Volvo released a car that was zippy-yet-unsafe, these companies would contradict their primary brand triggers, and weaken brand value. Such is the problem now facing Toyota.
The trust trigger was Toyota’s most precious brand asset. Damaged trust could cost the brand far more than the actual cost of the recall– even more than lost stock price or market position. I outlined ramifications in my blog post last week, with an interview:
The more respected the brand, the greater the surprise when that brand contradicts its core triggers. Just as Toyota contradicted its primary trigger, Tiger Woods contradicted his brand’s valuable triggers of prestige, mystique and power. Can the Tiger Woods brand recover as quickly as his golf game? Stuart Elliott in the The New York Times reports:
Is the Tiger Woods Brand Beyond Repair?
Tiger Woods’s golf game may recover, an advertising executive believes, but it may take his brand a long time to do so — if it ever does.
That is the conclusion of Sally Hogshead, who worked at agencies like Crispin Porter & Bogusky and is now a brand consultant and author. Ms. Hogshead, who said she was in the satellite media center during Mr. Woods’s remarks on Friday morning, called his speech “a big step forward in recovering the Tiger Woods brand.” …Mr. Woods’s decision to try “defending his wife, protecting his children and paying respect to his mother” should help “quell the outrage” over his behavior, Ms. Hogshead said, especially among women…. Also on the plus side of the ledger, she said, was the fact that he “let his guard down” with his remarks “to show us his humanity.”
On the negative side, Ms. Hogshead said, was “the way in which he manipulated the press conference” by taking no questions from the press… Also, the Woods brand “was founded upon prestige, mystique,” she added, “and an aura of elusive untouchability…”
Once lost, the prestige and mystique triggers, are extremely difficult to regain. Fortunately, Woods can return to his power trigger in golf. How do other established personal/corporate brands evolve over time, while staying true to their triggers?
Celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck’s company scores high on lust (crave-able foods), and prestige (trendy restaurants such as Spago). Even while selling part of his brand to Campbell’s, and introducing his soups to a broader market, Puck retains his core values of lust and prestige. The lesson: As your company expands, stay mindful of your fascination promise to consumers.
It’s good and necessary to update your message over time. However, radically changing your trigger without warning might just end up sparking another trigger for your accountants… alarm.
Vice and lust take center stage in my conversation with the zesty Phil Dobbie!
Phil describes the 7 fascination triggers:
Understanding these triggers will help you understand what motivates people to buy products. As you’ll hear, these are hard wired attitudes that have been entrenched in our brains from the early days of humankind. In her new book Fascinate, Sally says that fascination is behind a lot of the decisions we make, from the brands we buy to the songs we remember, and from the person you marry to which employees you hire.
The same principle can also help to explain the triggers that you use personally to influence others. By understanding the triggers you are already using, you can hone them and make your messages even more influential.
What inner thoughts do you accidentally communicate during a client presentation? Your voice could be giving away far more than you’re actually saying.
