B2B selling is becoming impossible. When you prospect in a B2B market, it feels like all your leads are blind folded just to ignore your sales pitch.
But leads are humans and humans are predictable. A little emotional push can make them jump from the “not now” fence.
People don’t buy for logical reasons. They buy for emotional reasons.
Zig Ziglar
Psychological triggers can help you give a friendly nudge to your leads to influence their buying decision and convert them into paying customers.
Let us dive deep into what psychological sales triggers are and the top 10 ones that can boost your sales cycle.
What are psychological triggers?
Psychological sales triggers are elements that have the capability to persuade your potential customers to choose your brand by tapping into human behavior and psychology.
These triggers play on different cognitive biases, emotions, and behaviors that shape how people make decisions. They make your products or services appear more appealing, prove that your business is trustworthy, or create a FOMO, eliciting emotions of consumers and influencing their decisions.
Top 10 psychological sales triggers
The following psychological sales triggers will give you the ability to affect the decision-making process of your consumers.
1. Urgency
Put in simple terms, urgency is nothing but pushing the consumers to take immediate action or else they might miss a great deal. This creates a sense of urgency that compels people to act faster and immediately.
Some of the common examples of creating urgency include:
- Time constraints: Mentioning a limited time for an offer encourages immediate action. Phrases like ‘Sale ends in 24 hours!’ or ‘50% off until midnight’ would trigger an urgency.
- Countdown timers: Placing countdown timers on your pricing pages for one or two hours creates a ticking clock effect that demands urgent action from the consumer.
2. Scarcity
People act immediately when there is a FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) situation. FOMO can act as a psychological trigger and escalate how a consumer reacts and decides. Similar to urgency where limited time offers push the consumers, scarcity displays limited edition products to create demand.
For example, you can add a premium feature to a standard plan and advertise that it’s available only for the next 10 standard plan buyers. This demands immediate action from the prospect because of the scarce number of accounts left. Selling so adds value to the buyer and also boosts your ROI.
But do not make false claims in both urgency and scarcity. If your consumers find out that they aren’t getting what made them click, the brand reputation gets damaged.
3. Social Proof
Speaking of reputation, social proof is something that can build credibility and trust. Seeing loyal customers who are in the same industry or business model as your prospects builds credibility and will influence them into wanting the product or service for themselves too. Even user counts or product download numbers can help here.
Showing customer reviews, testimonials, case studies, user counts, or influencer endorsements on your website page are some of the ways to display social proof.
4. Authority
Authority is persuaded by positioning your brand as knowledgeable with an expert figure in your focused industry. Experts or influencers have a lot of ears always listening to them and when they endorse your brand, people tend to trust your business.
Adding to this, you can also showcase digital awards, industry certifications, or quotes from experts to increase credibility.
5. Reciprocity
A give and take psychological trigger strategy where something you give makes people feel like they should give something back. Know your prospect well and offer something that will be valuable to them, like free trials, downloadable case studies, free tools or something that suits your market.
This will make the prospects feel like they must return the favor by purchasing your product or service. The most effective reciprocity method in B2B is free trial, because during a free trial, your prospects can clearly see how you can add value to their organization.
6. Commitment
Once an action is made, you can expect more clicks from a consumer. Consistency to commitment is something that can be seen in the B2B consumer behavior. So, if a prospect or a lead makes a small action on your website, it is more likely that the prospect may take bigger steps like booking a demo.
But to reach there you’ll need to ensure that your prospects feel like they are taking smaller steps. Start with a few low-stakes requests like subscribing for updates or newsletters, short online surveys, and share blogs on topics with preferred interests.
7. Curiosity
Curiosity is a desire to know and explore more, just like the curiosity rover exploring Mars!
Making your target audience curious about something intrigues them to learn more. To pique the interest of people with curiosity, you’ll need to create intriguing campaigns that can make them click.
Curiosity can be built using intriguing subject lines, product teasers, revealing some unique features of the product before the product launch and unconventional marketing strategies. These specific ways leave the consumers wondering about the other side and persuade them into deciding to purchase the product or service.
8. Storytelling
The way your content talks to the visitors can be altered to become emotional triggers.
Content can easily connect with the audience, so it can control the emotions of your target audience and affect their decision-making process.
Storytelling can be done through customer success stories, social cause, social identities, adding nostalgia to your messaging, and more. These act as emotional triggers to improve customer loyalty and boost conversions. Placing these emotional sales triggers on your website will drive engagement by providing them an image on how their business can succeed with the help of your product or service.
9. Contrast
It is easier for your prospects to understand why they should choose you when they can see that you are better than your competitors.
To make them see that, you can directly compare your company with your competitors and highlight the benefits that your consumers get by choosing your business. For example, you can show a comparison chart that contrasts the features of your product with the top ones in the market.
10. Anchoring
The first numbers that people see while they enter a pricing page are what influence the perception of what comes next.
For example, when consumers enter your pricing page, you can first display a higher or the original price then the discounted one. This makes them feel like the price is already bargained.
You can also add a premium plan near a normal plan for them to see what they are missing out on and go for purchasing the premium one.
These psychological sales triggers can help you accelerate your sales process and build trust, credibility, and customer relationships while doing so.
