10

FEAR SELLING

Fear selling leverages a prospect’s feeling of vulnerability to draw the person toward your product, service, or idea. It is a powerful approach, but it needs to be used cautiously. If the technique is used toward the end of the meeting, the close occurs when the prospect feels as though the purchase is empowering. It replaces the feeling of vulnerability with a sense of control over the threat.

In the article “5 Best Cinematic Sales Pitches,” Inc. magazine featured a corny opening to a 1962 movie musical as one of them. Inc. then pointed out how spot-on it is in the context of modern fear selling. First, the movie version.

In the scene, “Professor” Harold Hill is a con man trying to sell musical instruments to parents in a fictional Iowa town in 1912. His pitch is that he will prevent their sweet sons from turning into slackers and hoodlums by teaching them how to play music—something he has neither the ability nor intention to do. He’s trying to plot a way with his old pal Marcellus to put the fear of God into the residents of River City so they fork over their money for his instruments.

Hill: I need some ideas if I’m going to get your town out of the serious trouble it’s in!

Marcellus: River City ain’t in any trouble.

Hill: Then I have to create some. Must create a desperate need in your town for a boys’ band. (Sees people filing into the Pleez-All Billiard Parlor). So why does everyone keep rubbering into the billiard parlor?

Marcellus: Oh, they just got in a new pool table.

Hill: They must have seen a pool table before.

Marcellus: No. Just billiards.

Hill: That’ll do it! (Runs to the Dunlop grocery store next to the billiard parlor and approaches the grocer). Are you Mr. Dunlop? Well, either you’re closing your eyes to a situation you do not wish to acknowledge, or you are not aware of the caliber of disaster indicated by the presence of a pool table in your community!

With those words, he launches into “Ya’ Got Trouble,” the famous opening number from The Music Man. Of course, his solution to avert the degradation that will occur when boys spend their time at the pool table is to buy his musical instruments.

Inc. magazine followed the clip from the movie posted on its website with this observation: “He [Hill] begins his sales pitch by getting his potential customers to envision how horrible the future will be unless they buy his product. This is exactly how ‘enterprise’ computer companies pitch to top management. If Harold Hill were pitching ERP or CRM software today, he’d be singing that ‘there’s disruptive innovation in River City.’”¹

One thing that Hill gets wrong—which is okay because he’s a character in musical comedy—is that manufactured fears do not work in real-world fear selling. (The exception would be having prospects as gullible as the residents of River City.) A professional effectively using fear selling will point out an existing fear, demonstrate that he is knowledgeable about it and cares about the prospect’s need to eradicate it, and then gives that person the means to do so. Fear selling brings with it a number of risks for a sales professional, however.

The Risks of Fear Selling

Fear selling takes advantage of a reality that most of us do not want to admit: A great many of us are more strongly motivated to avoid pain than to gain pleasure. In business terms, a threat to financial stability or data security, for example, is often a more powerful emotional driver in making a buying decision that one based on revenue opportunity.

Because a person who feels under siege in some way is emotionally charged, you have to be very careful with fear selling. Whether the encounter is between two people is a sales meeting, a negotiation, or a humanitarian plea, if one individual is fueled by emotion and the other is maintaining a rational approach, the latter person has the upper hand. The reason is that a person goes into limbic mode when emotions surge and that results in a loss of cognitive ability. A person in limbic mode is not functioning at her peak—not by a long shot.

If you move a prospect to make a buying decision while his judgment is affected by strong emotion, you run the risk of derailing your relationship with him. When he realizes that he authorized a major purchase while his judgment was impaired, he will feel as though he lost something instead of gaining it. He could very likely resent the experience and the outcome, and possibly regret his decision. Some or all of this negative response may not even be on a conscious level. All you know is that one day you try to schedule a follow-up meeting only to find that the person won’t book an appointment with you.

Let’s step back for a moment and get perspective on why people have such a profound response to the alleviation of a threat. A classic explanation comes from psychologist Abraham Maslow. In 1943, he introduced his theory on the hierarchy of needs. It includes five tiers, with the theory being that a person struggles to progress up the tiers until the needs of the lower tiers are met.

The ground floor is biological needs: food, sleep, sex, and other elements essential to life. One level up, you find the things and circumstances in life that provide safety; people have a profound need to be shielded from threats. Above that is the human requirement for belonging and connection. Here we are talking about family relationships, romantic involvements, a sense of team at work, and the unconditional love you get from your dog or cat. At the fourth level are esteem needs, such as achievement and reputation. The top tier of Maslow’s hierarchy is self-actualization. People who have achieved and sustained self-actualization might include the Dalai Lama and a career nurse who finds great fulfillment in her work.

In the Maslow model, achievement and reputation can theoretically come only when someone feels as though he belongs. Similarly, the personal growth and fulfillment associated with self-actualization can only come after satisfying the need for achievement and reputation.

Maslow was more nuanced than any of these conclusions suggest, however, and the nuances make a difference in the context of our discussion of fear selling. In his famous paper, “A Theory in Human Motivation,” Maslow wrote:

So far, our theoretical discussion may have given the impression that these five sets of needs are somehow in a step-wise, all-or-none relationships to each other. We have spoken in such terms as the following: “If one need is satisfied, then another emerges.” This statement might give the false impression that a need must be satisfied 100 per cent before the next need emerges. In actual fact, most members of our society who are normal, are partially satisfied in all their basic needs and partially unsatisfied in all their basic needs at the same time.²

What is important for a sales professional to know, then, is that your relationship with the prospect or customer is just as important—if not more so—than the fear you are trying to allay. People can have fears and still seek and enjoy connections. The chances are good that the fear you trying to address for a customer is just one of many challenges and opportunities that she is facing in her professional life. If you focus too intently on the one issue that triggers fear, you may have a short-term win, but you will possibly have a long-term loss in the level of trust you want with the customer. Whenever possible, fear selling needs to be paired with relationship selling. It’s vital that the customer perceive your awareness of the spectrum of her needs, challenges, and desires, rather than a laser-focus on a source of threat.

Another risk you take with fear selling is skepticism about your motive. You may have the most honest intentions possible about eliminating a threat to a customer’s business, but consider the climate in which you are operating. Politicians, activists, advertisers, and a host of other loud and influential voices are spreading fear about everything from bed bugs to an environmental apocalypse to microscopic bacteria. Messages of fear are everywhere, and they fuel skepticism about the legitimacy of the issues as much as they fuel genuine concern about them.

Even if you’ve done excellent homework on the challenges your prospect faces, you probably do not know if you are walking into a meeting with someone who has been jaundiced by fear selling from politicians, activists, advertisers, or other salespeople. You could be in conversation with someone whose biggest, and rather antagonistic, question for you is “What do you stand to gain from scaring me?”

No matter what form the question takes, this is not one you want to sidestep. In other words, you do not want to give an answer like “Our product will prevent data loss potentially costing you....” That is nothing more than an attempt to brush the question aside, and you don’t want to do that with someone whose behavior is affected by strong emotion. If you want to turn the corner, you need to give a direct answer to a direct question. Say something like, “I believe I have a solution for you and, yes, I will earn a commission on it.”

In fear selling, never lose sight of the fact that you are leveraging emotions, but that those emotions need to be kept simmering and not boiling. In previous chapters, we covered the body language of positive and negative emotions. Use that to your advantage in understanding whether you are forging a better connection or creating distance from a prospect or customer.

Turning Fear Selling Into Relationship Selling

We can find countless examples of buyer’s remorse after a fear sale in the world of consumer goods and they provide useful models of how to make the shift in B2B selling as well. Essentially, buyer’s remorse is averted by shifting from a fear sale to a relationship sale.

In the consumer arena, many makers of skincare products know how to do this. If the target is young people, the ad opens with an attractive teen marred by bad skin. If the target is older women, there is a close-up of a face full of wrinkles. These images are the first phase of the fear approach, getting the viewers for whom this is relevant to stay tuned. They expect that what will follow is an explanation of what it will take to get rid of the unsightly condition. The ad meets the expectation by showing the same people with dramatically improved skin.

Then it’s time for the second phase of fear selling. Viewers learn that unless they act fast, they will miss a great deal on this normally expensive product. The imperative is to call or go online immediately or the miracle cure for their skin condition will be costlier.

What many of these companies seemed to have learned is that getting the consumer to make that call is not nearly enough. It’s easy to cancel a credit card purchase. To avert that, the companies quickly transition to relationship selling by expressing both concern and expertise in regular emails to the new customer: “We are here if you have any questions!” “Here’s a tip to make the product last longer!” “Do you have any suggestions to make our packaging better?”

In the corporate environment, a comparable turn from fear to relationship selling could be a crucial part of a sales encounter on certain technology and support services. The fear sell is that, without what you have to offer, the prospect will spend too much money on IT infrastructure, not have the scalability to accommodate growth, and be faced with costly software upgrades in a year. But the customer brings his own set of fears to the table. He thinks what you’re selling is more than he needs.

In other words, in your first meeting with a prospect, there could be a double-whammy of fear affecting the meeting: the fear you want to instill and the pre-existing fear that you want to dispel. Forget about closing a deal for now. Your primary goal for this meeting—at least in the beginning—is to inspire trust. You need to commit to building a relationship with this prospect before you try to focus him on the fear issues.

•   Ask a non-pertinent question. To recap, this is a question that shows interest in the person or her situation. The purpose is to engage the person in a positive way, preferably about business but not about the subject at hand. You could say, “Congratulations on the move! How has everyone adjusted to the new headquarters location?”

•   Maintain good eye contact. Show the prospect you are keenly interested in her answer.

•   Keep your hands and arms open and relaxed. Don’t cross your arms or grab a pen or interlace your fingers. You want to come across as centered, calm, and focused.

•   Mirror the other person, but remember that does not mean mimic. A head lean, an arm position, a shared nod in agreement—movements like these should be subtle. They come naturally to most people when there is a genuine connection forming.

•   Show you are friendly, not scary. Smile.

•   Return to the fear-related issues that need to be addressed only after you see that your prospect’s body language is much like your own: centered, calm, and focused. When you observe that, ask a good question, that is, a question that invites an explanation, description, or other narrative response. Listen well.

In shifting from fear selling to any other selling approach, you are managing change. Your ability to navigate your prospect’s channels of thought, and to take him in directions he had not considered, is what a successful sales professional does. All the while, it’s vital that you are able to read his body language to know when you are moving his thinking in your direction, and when he is pulling away.

People feel energized in a sales encounter when they feel they are in a position of authority and strength. They are not as afraid to trust. From your perspective in sales, you need to know if the customer stands to lose anything if the meeting goes the way you want (that is, you make the sale). As part of your conversation, try to ascertain if there are any potential negative repercussions as a result of his choosing your product or service. These might include:

•   Having to defend the expenditure to a boss.

•   Additional reporting requirements created by the purchase.

•   Facing a performance review that includes an evaluation of the solution you just sold him.

•   Protests from colleagues who wanted to go with a different vendor or solution.

The last thing you need is a customer going from a place of fear about a business issue to fear that the steps he’s taken will provoke other threats!

Through your words and your body language, you want to engender the perception that your customer is strong and is on a path to “winning.”

One of the pitfalls of fear selling is that removal of a threat and the accompanying sense of relief are not the same as winning. It’s more like not losing—and that’s a weak foundation for an ongoing relationship. With that in mind, you also need to be able to answer the question “What does winning mean for this customer?” Even though you thought you identified the issues causing him pain, you may still not have clarity on what constitutes a win for him. Ask questions until you two are speaking the same language about his needs and desires relative to the product or service you are offering. They will shed light on what he considers winning.

Finally, you make real progress with the customer when your conversation turns from solving a problem to identifying an opportunity. When you reach the point when your customer breaths a sign of relief that you have offered her what she needs to eliminate a threat, she’s done looking backward. Now she’s in the frame of mind to look forward.

Summary Points

•   Fear selling is powerful, but needs to be used cautiously.

•   When it works, fear selling replaces the customer’s feeling of vulnerability with a sense of control over a threat.

•   A big risk in fear selling that you are arousing emotions in your prospect. However, when emotions surge that results in a loss of cognitive ability. In other words, the buy might not be a fully rational choice for the person.

•   If you move a prospect to make a buying decision while his judgment is affected by strong emotion, you run the risk of derailing your relationship with him.

•   Another risk you take with fear selling is skepticism about your motive. It would be common for the prospect in a fear sale to wonder whose best interests you have at heart.

•   In fear selling, you are leveraging emotions, but those emotions need to be kept simmering and not boiling.

•   You run the risk of invoking buyer’s remorse when fear is a central component of the sale. You can avert buyer’s remorse by shifting from a fear sale to a relationship sale.

•   In managing the change to a relationship sale, shift away the issues causing fear. Only return to the fear-related issues that need to be addressed after you see that your prospect’s body language is much like your own: centered, calm, and focused.

•   One of the pitfalls of fear selling is that removal of a threat is not the same as winning. Use your conversation to ferret out what your customer perceives as a “win.”