People love to buy but hate to be sold. You’ve heard this statement before, but it isn’t true. What is true is that people don’t want to be pressured to buy something they don’t want or don’t need. But they love to be sold the things they want.
Yesterday, Apple announced their new watch. They already announced the watch last year, and there wasn’t much new to share. But people who love Apple tuned in to watch the live event or spent time reading the news reports. Why? They want to be sold.
- We want to be seduced. We are aspirational. We want to be more, do more, and have more. We love it when we are shown how much better we are going to be when we make some purchase.
- We want to be told we belong. We want to be included. We want to be part of a tribe, some tribe that speaks to our values and our beliefs. We wear the clothes and marks of our tribes. We love it when someone shows us how to join that tribe.
- We want help rationalizing our decision. People love to buy, and they love to have someone help them rationalize their decisions. We love having someone provide us with a logical argument to justify our emotional decisions.
People generally like to be told that they can have what they want, and they want to be told how they can have it.
The challenges for those in business-to-business sales are the constraints that prevent our dream client from making the necessary investments, the distribution of different wants across different groups of stakeholders, and the power of the status quo and the accompanying resistance to change.
Even with these challenges, people still want to be told that they can have what they want. If you want to be a great salesperson, you will sell them on what they need to do to have what they want.