Hi.

I promised that I would reveal my best secrets of selling.

Here is the first of several letters where I will talk about the psychology of your prospective buyers.  If you don’t understand that, then you are seriously up a creek without a paddle.

By the way, I’m writing these pretty fast, as I have a lot to do before the launch.  My aim is to help you get quickly into a different mind set so that you can make the most out of SalesBully. 

So, please forgive me if these aren’t very polished.

Now, what motivates people to buy your product?
- Will it make them money?
- Does it make their life easier or better?
- Will it get them more people in the sack?

These are all strong motivators that we see all the time in advertising and the fact is that they aren’t nearly as powerful as you might think.

These are all benefits based upon desire-for-gain and using only that motivator means you’ll only be a fraction of the success you could be.

Most people are much more motivated by fear-of-loss, or more simply put, people have a very strong desire to NOT have bad things happen to them.

For many of you, this is not a great revelation.  It is well-known and documented that fear-of-loss is a stronger motivator than desire-for-gain.  Various tests have proved it to be up to five times more effective.

Even so, it is rarely used in Internet marketing.  We tend to create benefit-oriented sales letters based entirely on how wonderful your life will be after you buy the product.

Don’t get me wrong, desire for gain IS a motivator and should be used.

For example, I could tell you about when I started testing the concepts used in SalesBully in the GoTryTHIS launch.

Testing those techniques resulted in huge conversion rates.  I had a 12% click-to-sales ratio, which means that 12% of the people who landed on my squeeze page continued through the sales process and bought the product.  (Actually, one in four people who read the sales letter bought GoTryTHIS.)

Those weren’t the gains.  Those were the means to the gains.  The real gains for me was that I established myself as an expert in this industry, with my clients and, of course, I established myself financially.

The software I was selling wouldn’t have accomplished those gains without the strong motivational techniques that drove sales like a winning Nascar contender.

Those were nice gains.  Gains are good.  And just like the people who sent in the hundred or so success stories from using GoTryTHIS, I expect you to be sending me your success stories from using SalesBully… and soon.

There is nothing wrong with pointing out gains.  You should.  But, if you only focus on gains, you’re not motivating your users to buy your product nearly as much as you can.

Read the following two paragraphs and try to feel in your gut which one has more emotional impact:

1: “SalesBully will help you increase your conversions and improve your sales funnel so that you can make much more money from the same number of visitors, faster than ever before.”

2: “Your competitors with SalesBully will make more money per visitor than you do, allowing them steal away your affiliates by offering higher commissions than you can afford.  In the new marketplace you will have to work harder and spend more money just to earn what you used to, if you can manage to stay in business at all.”

I’m betting the second statement resonated with you a lot more than the first one.  Maybe the idea of having to spend all that extra money and time to compete sent a shiver up your spine.

Put it this way: It is simply more important for people to protect the tangible things they already have than to get one of the thousands of items we are exposed to each and every day that is supposed to make our lives better!

Once again, most marketers only tell their prospects about the desire-for-gain benefits and, to their own detriment, they ignore totally the much more powerful fear-of-loss motivator, which SalesBully unleashes to kick ass.

Unlike those marketers, I use BOTH motivators AND SalesBully techniques. This is the primary reason my products sell as well as they do, though the incredibly high quality doesn’t hurt either. 

SalesBully uses a number of fear-of-loss techniques to get your visitors motivated now.  It strongly enhances the desire to get your product by overtly linking it with the fear of losing the opportunity to do so forever.

Of course, it also uses other techniques at the same time, making the urge to buy almost unbearable.

So, even if you are one of the few who were more charged up by the desire-for-gain statement in my test above, I still win. 

I’ll talk about all those techniques in other posts.

Thanks for reading.  Please leave your comments below.

John.

Posted by John Reel on Tuesday, May 29th, 2007 at 7:25 pm.