We're sure you know this already. Selling is just as much about strategies or sales skills as it is about psychology. You also know that we make decisions emotionally, and then try to justify them with reason. And so, when selling, the trick is to engage with those emotions, ideally before the brain kicks in.
I bet you're still wondering how to actually apply that in practice, right? Well, luckily for you, that's exactly what we're going to talk about today. We'll show you three neuroscience tricks that will help you engage with your prospects and their emotions and make them love your proposal.
(Well, or at least, read it in full and respond.)
The end goal is to give them a better experience, which will lead to them making a purchase. Increasing sales in your company overall is the ultimate goal.
Does this sound interesting to you? Of course, it does, so let's do it together.
BONUS: You can download our checklist of 7 additional psychology-based and neuroscience-based tricks to build up customer engagement for your sales proposal. Get it here >>
I'm sure you'll agree that selling is closer to science than art these days. In the past, sales success could often be attributed to the "gift of gab," your "drive," or "control," or another personality trait. These days, it's a combination of skill and in-depth knowledge about the buying behavior.
This knowledge stems directly from psychology and neuroscience, but before we go deeper into that, let's do some due diligence and cover the basic terminology.
What is Neuroscience? The BrainFacts.org website explains it this way.
Neuroscientists specialize in the study of the human brain and the nervous system. They have the daunting task of deciphering the brain's commands of all these diverse functions."
In other words, neuroscience, and particularly its branch called Cognitive Neuroscience, studies how the nervous system reacts to different factors, such as thoughts, memories, and emotions.
For one, thanks to neuroscience, for the first time we can understand WHY buyers act, instead of just knowing WHAT they're doing.
Just think about it. Up until modern times, the only way to study sales was to analyze the results. Then, maybe we tried to guess or correlate their reasons to identify actions that have brought particular results. It was a job filled with anxiety, because you couldn't be 100% sure of your findings.
However, with the advances in brain study, biology, and neuroscience, we can now tell precisely why customers take specific actions and, in turn, how to evoke them.
So, let's examine three neuroscience discoveries that will help you engage more prospects emotionally and get them to act on your proposals.
Regarding social proof, you've learned enough about the benefits of including testimonials or reviews.
And it's true, they work.
Look at what Mirre Stallen and Alan G. Sanfey wrote in their research paper, "The neuroscience of social conformity."
"Recent innovative work in applied psychology has established that making people aware of the behavior of others is a useful technique for inducing positive behavioral change on a societal level."
However, reviews and testimonials don't work as well in sales as we might have thought.
Yup!
According to research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which we discovered via the fantastic Neuroscience Marketing blog (note that our writing staff added the emphasis in bold), we can examine some interesting findings.
"Whereas people generally conform to others' choices, this research documents that conformity decreases once others have acted on their chosen options. It suggests words speak louder than actions. People are more likely to conform to others' preferences than their actions."
The research suggests that the way you frame your social proof matters more than the proof itself.
If that is confusing, we'll explain in simpler terms.
We mostly offer what the researchers deem action-based social proof. We share statistics about how many customers have bought our products or hired us to deliver services. However, customers are more likely to engage with what the research calls preference-based social proof, which shows your preference for a solution.
In other words, saying that "300 people liked this product" will work much better than stating how many sales you've made.
Roger Dooley explains it like this. He is from Neuroscience Marketing.
"When shopping, consumers are swayed more by what other people would like to have, rather than actually have. When dining in a restaurant, people comply with their friends' choices only when they are talked about as desires before ordering, but not when the friends' food is already ordered."
Here's a fact! Everything that happens in our brains is somewhat generated by different chemicals interacting with brain cells to bring out various responses, including emotions.
And the crazy thing is that we can stimulate those chemicals in sales proposals, in turn, evoking the desired emotional response in prospects.
What's more, thanks to neuroscience, we know exactly what chemicals each element of a sales proposal should target.
(Quick note: the folks at Adaptive Neuroscience wrote a great piece explaining the role of different chemicals in selling. The following is just a recap of their ideas, but we'd recommend you check out the entire post.)
So, here are those chemicals and when to target them in sales proposals.
You know that facts and figures may work well to present your solution, but they make prospects process them on a single level. That would be on the language level.
According to an infographic (found via Hubspot), solid stats activate only two regions of our brains, which are responsible for language comprehension. Stories, on the other hand, fire up five additional regions, responsible for sensory sensations like touch, scents, sounds, movement, and color processing.
In other words, stories fire up our imagination, whereas we use our reason to process facts.
Take a look at what this article on Greater Good points out (our writing staff added the emphasis in bold).
"[...] as social creatures who regularly affiliate with strangers, stories are an effective way to transmit important information and values from one individual or community to the next. Stories that are personal and emotionally compelling engage more of the brain, and thus are better remembered, than simply stating a set of facts."
But wait, there's more. Stories stimulate the release of oxytocin, a powerful molecule that, as Paul J Zak, the man who discovered it, explains, increases prosocial behaviors.
(As a side note, it's also the exact chemical targeted in emotional advertising, such as images of starving children shown to elicit donations. And as I'm sure you know, it works incredibly well for that.)
We hope that you are now more familiar with the connection between neuroscience and sales.
We have shared several ideas that will help you boost your numbers and invoke certain emotions in your potential customers to sway them in the right direction, which is making a purchase from you directly.
There are many more tactics to make people want to buy something, no matter how obscure the item in question may be. If you employ the right tactic, you can sell anything.