Fear sells!

Sales people can use fear (perceived future pain) to create results right away.

Marketing man Seth Godin understands a fundamental principle of sales in this post : fear drives buying action. As he explains, "Fear is a universal emotion, it's viral and people will go to great lengths to make it go away."

How can sales people use fear? "Buy it or Knuckles here will continue the negotiations" would probably be considered ethically dubious. Here's a better approach. Most of us already sell around "pain" or "problems" (i.e. identifying, drawing out and investigating problems that a prospect has right now). For example:

Buyer : "We are on time with 85% of our deliveries"
Seller : (spotting a potential pain) "What about the other 15%?"
Buyer : "Well, half our trucks are over 10 years old, so they're falling apart a little."

The sales person has spotted a pain to draw out and investigate further. So what is fear in the selling context? Fear is the threat of pain at some point in the future.

Buyer : "Well, half our trucks are over 10 years old, so they're falling apart a little."
Seller : "If you stick with those trucks for say the next 5 years, what would you expect that late delivery rate to be?"

With a little more work from the sales person, what seems like a small pain now becomes a huge pain in the future. Could the late delivery rate reach 30%? How would that impact customer satisfaction and repeat orders? How much lost revenue would that result in? Would it attract negative press?

There's something even more interesting about fear. It's a well documented phenomenon that the fear (i.e. the perception of the seriousness) of the pain in the future is often worse than the pain itself when it actually arrives.

The bottom line? If they are skillful, sales people can use fear to significantly increase the seriousness of pain in a buyer's mind, right now.

More pain = more need for a solution = more chance of a successful sale.

Ask a buyer :

• What do you think (pain/issue) will look like in 3, 5, 10 years time?
• What happens if you don't (implement a system, solve this issue, reduce X, Y or Z)?
• What damage do you think Knuckles could do in the next 10 minutes?