Joe Sugarman's Triggers - The TV Salesman's Secret
I was told this story by a master salesman who worked at a TV and appliance store. He was the most successful salesman this store ever had and consistently beat out all the other salesmen. He had some very good sales techniques, but that wasn’t what impressed me. It was the way he decided, in advance, who his best prospects might be.
He would simply stand in the aisles watching customers walk into the store. He would observe them. If they walked up to a TV set and started turning the knobs, he knew that he had a 50% chance of selling them. If they didn’t turn the knobs, he had a 10% chance of selling them. (This, of course, was before the advent of the TV remote control.)
In direct response advertising, you don’t have the opportunity to sit in your prospects’
mailboxes or in their living rooms to observe them read your sales presentation. You are not there to see any knobs being turned.
But you can get them to turn the knobs by giving them a feeling of involvement with or ownership of the product you are selling.
In all my ads, I make the prospects imagine they are holding or using my product. For example, in one of my earlier calculator ads, I might have said, “Hold the Litronix 2000 in your hand. See how easily the keys snap to the touch. See how small and how light the unit is.” I create through imagination the reader’s experience of turning the knobs.
In short, I take the mind on a mental journey to capture the involvement of the reader. I make the reader believe that he or she could indeed be holding the calculator and
experiencing the very same things that I’ve described. This mental energy creates a picture in the mind of the prospect, which is like a vacuum waiting to be filled.
In personal selling, many of the same principles apply. You want to let your prospects take a stroll down a path with you, or let them smell a fragrance, or let them experience some of the emotions you are feeling by getting them involved with your product or service.
If I were writing an advertisement for the Corvette sports car, I might say, “Take a ride in the new Corvette. Feel the breeze blowing through your hair as you drive through the warm evening. Watch heads turn. Punch the accelerator to the floor and feel the burst of power that pins you into the back of your contour seat. Look at the beautiful display of electronic technology right on your dashboard. Feel the power and excitement of America’s super sports car.”
If I were selling in person, I would get the car buyers involved. I’d let them kick the tires, slam the doors—anything that gets them involved with the car. The more they get involved, the closer you’ll get to that sale.
In direct response, using a gimmick to get involved with the reader is often referred to as using an involvement device—something that involves the consumer in the buying process.
Sometimes it may seem silly. Have you ever received those solicitations that say, “Put the ‘yes’ disk into the ‘yes’ slot and we will send you a trial subscription to our new magazine”? I often wonder who invented that very simple and seemingly juvenile concept. Yet, as direct marketers will tell you, this type of involvement device often doubles and triples response rates. It’s not juvenile but rather a very effective direct response involvement technique.
The reader becomes involved in the solicitation. The reader makes a commitment to take an action. The reader is either taking action or imagining taking action through the power of the words on the solicitation.
My own daughter, Jill, when she was four years old, clearly demonstrated how you can get involved in the sales message. There was a Peanuts Valentines Day TV special and my daughter Jill was sitting and watching the show with her seven-year-old sister April. My wife, who was watching as well, told me this fascinating story.
Charlie Brown was passing out Valentine cards in a classroom and was reading off names of the recipients: “Sarah, Mary, Sally . . . Jill. Where’s Jill?” said Charlie Brown. My daughter immediately raised her hand and said, “Here.” She was so involved in watching the show that she thought she was part of it.
I use involvement devices quite often. An involvement device that ties in with what you are selling can be very effective. Let me give you a perfect example from an ad that I wrote, where the results really surprised me.
The product I was offering was the Franklin Spelling Computer, a device that helped correct spelling. It was quite novel when it first appeared and it sold quite well.
Although I wasn’t the first to sell it, I was offering a model that was a little more sophisticated than the first version.
I examined the product and felt it was priced too high. But the manufacturer would have been pretty upset with me if I had dropped the price. So I tried an involvement device as a method of lowering the price.
First, I wrote an ad that described the product, but with an unusual premise. The ad I wrote contained several misspelled words. If you found the misspelled words, circled them, and sent in the ad with the misspelled words circled, you would get $2 off the price of the computer for each word you circled. My concept was simple. If you didn’t find all the misspelled words, you paid more for the computer—but then again, the computer was worth more to you than somebody who found all the mistakes.
I ran the first ad in The Wall Street Journal and the orders poured in. I also received a few phone calls from people I hadn’t heard from in years. “Joe, I want you to know, I spent the last hour and a half trying to find all the words and I don’t even intend to buy your damn computer. I normally don’t read the entire Wall Street Journal for that length of time.”
And the response was very surprising. I had anticipated that readers would find all the misspelled words. In fact, even the word “mispelled” was misspelled. When the response was finally tallied, to my amazement, people only caught, on average, half of the words, so I earned a lot more money than I had expected to from the ad. And, of course, those who really needed the computer got real value.
Advertising copy that involves the reader can be quite effective, especially if the involvement device is part of the advertising. Whenever you are selling in person, keep this very important concept in mind. For example, involve the prospect in your selling process. If you are selling a car, let the prospect take a test drive. This is critical, as the prospect will then feel an obligation and be committed on a subconscious level to buying a car.
But let’s say your product is something industrial, such as a new CT scan machine for a hospital—something you can’t easily lug around with you. How do you involve the prospect?
You can’t take the machine to the prospect’s office. But you can bring part of the machine with you. While talking to the prospect, hand him a part of the machine for him to hold.
Believe it or not, this simple act gets the prospect involved in the selling process. It is a very effective involvement device. Have the prospect help you open the box that the spare part is in. Actively get the prospect to involve himself with what you are doing and with the selling process. All of this activity gets him involved and, in a very subtle way, committed.
The feeling of ownership is a concept that is pretty close to the feeling of involvement. In this subtle differentiation, you are making prospects feel that they already own the product.
An example in print might be, “When you receive your exercise device, work out on it. Adjust the weights. See how easy it is to store under your bed. . . .” In short, you are making them feel that they have already bought the product by carrying them through the mental imagery of actual product ownership. The same applies to selling in person. By dropping suggestions on how the item might be used by the prospect in her own home, office, or factory, you are creating this mental imagery of actual ownership and thus developing a deeper commitment.
If I were selling an above-ground pool, I might say, “Just picture yourself in the pool in your back yard on a very hot day with your children. What kind of pool toys would be in the pool?”
In this dialogue your prospect is using his or her imagination to picture the pool in the back yard, with the children frolicking in the pool with their pool toys. Involvement and ownership are not new to the business of selling. It is well known as an
important factor in helping consummate a sale. What might not be known is how effective it really is in dramatically increasing sales—something that direct response advertising has proven. A good involvement device in direct response advertising has doubled and even tripled response. Use it in a personal sales presentation and who knows how much more effective your sales presentation might be?
Trigger 6: Involvement and Ownership
[Via - Triggers]
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