Marketing Your Services to “Invisible Buyers.”

Whether we are offering coaching or consulting services, our clients and prospects are always trying to reduce the risks of using our services.

One way they try to reduce risk is to conform to the attitudes and preferences of others. Family, friends, coworkers, and other groups influence your prospects and their buying behavior. Sometimes called reference groups, I call them “invisible buyers.” Your invisible buyers are a point of comparison for your prospect’s own choices and attitudes. Sometimes the influence of others is subtle; other times it is quite apparent.

For example, if you are a coach, your invisible buyers can influence prospects by. . .

– Directly recommending a specific coach or training approach they already know about or have used themselves.

– Giving your prospect a frame of reference and an opportunity to compare your coaching service to what is acceptable to group members.

– Influencing the prospect to change his or her attitudes about using a coach so that they are consistent with those of the group.

– Providing reassurance and approval to the prospect’s decision to use your services.

Occupation, memberships, social class, and education are all good indicators of which groups are important to your prospect. The prospect may even mention having had a conversation about using your service with a friend or coworker.

By noting how others in the prospect’s reference groups have used similar services, you can reassure your prospect that working with you is a smart choice.

I would strongly suggest that in your first contact with a prospect that you ask if they or someone they know has used a service similar to yours before. Probe a little into that area if they say “yes.” What kind of service did they use? Was it a positive experience for them? Would they do it again? How much weight does your prospect give to their prior service experiences or those of friends and coworkers?

The next step is to adjust your conversation to respond to concerns or experiences that might negatively influence a sale. Similarly, you can reinforce positive experiences and subtly refer to them during your conversation to help establish the value of your service.

Service Guarantees As A Strategic Weapon.

Service guarantees are a strategic weapon in the continuing battle to differentiate and gain a competitive advantage.

This is especially important for online businesses because customers often feel more assured when they can walk into “brick and mortar” stores and offices. Even if the company is selling an intangible service, the company somehow seems more “stable” because the customer can physically see and feel the business surroundings.

By offering a service guarantee, you can increase customer satisfaction and retention by reducing consumer risk, improve service quality and establish service standards for your business. An effective service guarantee can have a substantial impact on your bottom-line.

But which is more effective — an unconditional or specific guarantee? And what is the difference between the two?

A major challenge is to design a guarantee that is appropriate for your business situation. Guarantees specify what the consumer can expect (the promise) and what the company will do if it fails to deliver (the payout).

The pure unconditional guarantee does not specify either the coverage or the payout (e.g. Satisfaction guaranteed. Period.) The most common unconditional guarantee does not specify the coverage but does specify the payout (e.g. Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back.)

The pure specific guarantee details both the coverage and the payout (e.g. Delivery by 10:00 a.m. or your money back.)

Finally, a specific guarantee might contain a detailed coverage and an unconditional payout (e.g. Delivery in 30 minutes. Period.) although it is seldom used in practice.

The guarantee selected will have an impact on the costs and benefits for your firm.

What marketing researchers have discovered is that when it comes time to select a firm, consumers prefer the unconditional guarantee. To them it signals that the firm offers higher quality overall.

When it comes time to actually use the guarantee, consumers prefer a specific guarantee for both its clarity and ease of use.

The researchers concluded that if a firm were in the process of choosing which type of guarantee to use, the creation of an unconditional guarantee with a specific payout would have the greatest positive impact on the business.

Why Are Customer Testimonials So Effective?

Some marketing pitches are so over-loaded with testimonials from “satisfied customers,” one wonders if the business is really that good, or if the owner has a long list of friends and family members who are willing to say nice things about the company.

In fact, most testimonials do create a favorable impression — that’s why we use them! The question is: why are they so effective? A recent article in Scientific American gives us an answer.

“How Anecdotal Evidence Can Undermine Scientific Results” explains why clients sometimes reject the “facts” you might mention during the course of a consultation and instead adhere to unscientific, subjective stories they have heard or experienced, such as customer testimonials. According to the authors, this tendency to reject factual evidence in favor of personal anecdotes has its roots in our primitive survival instincts:

“We have evolved brains that pay attention to anecdotes because false positives (believing there is a connection between A and B when there is not) are usually harmless, whereas false negatives (believing there is no connection between A and B when there is) may take you out of the gene pool. Our brains are belief engines that employ association learning to seek and find patterns. Superstition and belief in magic are millions of years old, whereas science, with its methods of controlling for intervening variables to circumvent false positives, is only a few hundred years old.”

In other words, this behavior reflects a primitive survival instinct. That’s not likely to change anytime soon.

There are several lessons here. If you are a consultant or coach trying to help a client “get real” about their business or personal circumstances, don’t take it personally if the client rejects your factual “evidence.” When they balk at letting go of attitudes or beliefs based on personal experiences or stories, they are just being insanely normal!

Second, you can alert your client to this very human behavior. Explain that your information might seem to contradict what the client has come to believe anecdotally. Having this explanation upfront might at least open up the client to considering information that contradicts what the client already “knows” to be true.

The third lesson actually uses this primitive instinct in a positive way.

There’s a reason why so many effective marketing programs rely on testimonials to “make a case” for a product or service: they engage our basic human instincts. We tend to pay attention and give high value to stories from other humans. That’s just the way most of us are wired.

Even though our rational, logical selves tells us that four or five positive testimonials from satisfied customers are not scientific proof that the service is good for us — perhaps there are, unknown to us, two hundred dissatisfied customers! — our primitive emotional side tends to place greater weight on the positive, anecdotal evidence we read in an ad or on a web site.

Although this Scientific American story seems to contradict other studies about the way humans process information — for example, high-risk, high-involvement decisions often drive consumers to seek factual information before they make a purchase — it explains a human characteristic that most of us have experienced as consultants (at least, anecdotally speaking!).

Bottom line: you can use this lesson to help clients come to terms with facts they might otherwise be reluctant to accept. As for all those testimonials on your web site or blog saying what a great business you have — keep them! Now you know the real reason they are so effective.