Do Your Buyers Buy From Grudge or Lust?

[Adrian Davis]

What kind of purchase do your customers make when they buy your services? Is it a grudge purchase or a lust purchase?

Finding Pain

If your sales people are like most, they have been trained to look for pain when pursuing sales opportunities. I don’t disagree. Finding pain is a critical piece in the sales process. It’s critical, but it’s insufficient. Of course, the better job your people do of uncovering pain, the better their chances of closing the business. However, their chances are improved only because it is more likely that the buyer will actually buy something from someone when there is real pain. In many cases, all your sales people are doing is preparing sale opportunities for your competition.

Here’s why:

If a prospect is motivated by pain, the best you can hope for is relief. If he or she has a headache and you provide an aspirin, you’ve provided relief but you haven’t provided joy or delight. That means four things. First, any purchase made is a grudge purchase. It’s not a purchase the prospect wants to make. It’s a reluctant purchase that the prospect feels forced to make. Second, pain relief is motivated by fear and avoidance. When one is in avoidance mode, any path will do. When one suddenly smells smoke, one looks for the nearest exit. If one has to make a grudge purchase, one looks for the lowest price. Third, over time, people learn to live with pain. When we initially experience pain, we are highly motivated to seek relief. Pain, when it is left untreated, eventually becomes tolerable. Finally, people have different fears. This makes the outcome of an opportunity unpredictable. One person thinks your solution is a good idea. Someone else thinks it will make their situation worse and behind the scenes they work to sabotage our company’s efforts.

Lust

To increase your probability for success, have your reps aim for a lust purchase rather than a grudge purchase. A lust purchase is based on the desire for pleasure rather than the fear of pain. Like fear, people have different desires. However, there’s a major difference. Unlike fear, everyone in a company shares a collective desire. You can’t guarantee that everyone fears the same thing, but everyone that works for a corporation had better share the same overriding desire or they will dismissed. That collective desire is known as corporate strategy. Every employee must do his or her part to move the company closer to its strategic objective. When you can position your services as an enabler of corporate strategy, you’re guaranteed to win unanimous support and to trigger collective desire. Rather than relief, the most senior people in your prospects organization will experience intense desire for your services. This means your prospects will experience a sense of euphoria when they imagine the implementation of your solutions.

Fascinating Loyalty

While we learn to live with pain, very few of us learn to live with intense desire. Desire, when it is not controlled, increases in intensity. Consequently, as long as you are selling something of real value, why settle for the risk of a grudge purchase when your team can enjoy the fascinating loyalty that comes from a lust purchase?

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