One key to helping your merchant make a purchasing decision is discovering what drives their decision making process, in other words, what motivates them. The word motivation, like the word emotion, comes from the Latin root meaning “to move,” and the psychology of motivation is the study of what moves us, why we do what we do. For our purposes, motivation will refer to any process that causes your merchant to move toward a goal or away from an unpleasant situation.
Remember the two controlling factors in most people’s lives are:
- The Need to Avoid Pain Away From Motivation
and
- The Desire to Benefit or Gain Pleasure Toward Motivation
These motivation strategies are nothing new; Aristotle observed this phenomenon thousands of years ago. One interesting finding is that the majority of people will react out of fear of loss more than the desire to benefit or gain pleasure. Your goal should always be to support your merchant in making powerful decisions that help grow and improve business.
When you uncover what motivates your buyer in the decision making process your commitment ratio will improve drastically. One way to discover their style is during your pre-talk or small talk phase of the sales process. Instead of the usual chatter, ask a simple question, and as the person answers, you can discover their hidden strategy for making decisions. Try something like this, “how did you first get started in your (business, career, industry, etc.)?” or “what do you find most challenging about (being a small business owner, your line of work, etc.)?”
While the person is answering, listen for any point at which they express having made a decision, and then we ask them the critical question to discovering how they think: “How did you decide that?” These are process questions that will unveil the mental steps they follow to come to a conclusion and take action.
Let’s say the dialogue goes like this:
You: “So Jim, I’m curious, how did you first get into this line of work?”
Jim: “Well it’s funny you should ask. At first I was planning to be a lawyer, but when I completed college I took a summer job in construction sales.”
You: “Wow, that was an unexpected change. I’m curious, how did you decide to take open a construction business?”
Here is where deep listening comes in, where you begin to listen beyond the content to the process they are about to describe. All decisions have a directional component and there are only two possible directions: toward or away from.
So let’s say that Jim in our example above says, “Well, my family was pretty poor and I had to work my way through school washing dishes, and I was determined to never have to do that kind of work again to make a living. So I went into the construction business for what I thought would be just a summer job.”
How is Jim motivated in this example? Is he motivated to move toward something or does his answer indicate that he is more prompted by moving away from something? The answer is that he went into the construction business to move away from being poor and washing dishes. If Jim had said instead, “I saw the construction business as a way to make more money than I had while washing dishes and it seemed like exciting work,” then clearly the motivational direction would be toward.
Remember, this is all being discovered during the small talk. Jim has no idea that by answering your question he is telling you not just what he did or even why he did it, but more importantly how. But it is not just “how he got into the construction business,” it is how he chooses or decides anything.
The most obvious implication is that when you begin your sales process with Jim by talking about what you do and when you make your final recommendation, how will you frame it? Will you frame your solution as helping Jim to move away from or avoid a problem, or will you frame your solution as helping Jim to move towards what he wants in life?
Neither tactic is better than the other; the key is learning to uncover your prospect’s strategy and then framing your solution in a way that fits their decision making style.
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