Are you familiar with the “bully-kicked-sand-in-my-face” Charles Atlas advertisement? Charles Atlas is the 1950’s equivalent to the Arnold Schwarzenegger of today. The Atlas ad sells the idea of never being bullied by someone bigger and stronger. The deliverable was a body building program, but what people were buying, emotionally, was the transformation from scrawny wimp to muscular hunk. It was a person’s desire to change who they were now into the person they wanted to become. The program was the means of accomplishing that.
When you’re canvassing, what are you selling? If I polled 100 canvassers, even canvass managers for that point and asked, what business are you in? I’d probably hear we’re in the home improvement business, the replacement window business, the siding, roofing, bathroom remodeling business, insurance, cable TV, etc. etc. And in every case they’d be wrong. The things I just mentioned are the things we promote and sell, but it’s not the business we’re in. We’re in the business of marketing and selling the emotional hot buttons that make people want to meet and buy from you.
A fundamental truth about successful marketing and selling, or more accurately, customer’s successfully buying what we sell is based on emotion. People make their buying decisions based on emotion and justify it with logic. Unfortunately most canvassers speak and present to homeowners in logical terms. We’re taught to sell features, advantages and benefits. This is an old model and if you want to be successful you have to change your ways. You have to do different things different ways.
“Sales is a transfer of feelings.” Zig Ziglar
We need to be unique to succeed. What is unique? Canvassing offers you uniqueness over all the other mediums out there; when TV, radio and print mediums speak to the unwashed masses of people (most who are not even prospects to you). They’re largely distracted by all the other advertising and marketing going on around them, canvassing gives you the opportunity to go after your target market. When they’re spending billions of dollars trying to attract the audience, you as canvassers, have the opportunity to dominate the market by capturing those people who are still on the fence, and haven’t taken action.
When canvassing for home improvement products, or any product for that matter you have to understand what the buyer’s motivation for buying is. That’s what the Charles Atlas ad addressed. It talked to a very specific target market, in this case, skinny scrawny boys, and sold the idea of them becoming strong, buff, well fit men who would attract the ladies and never be picked on again. It solved the problem of insecurity in the mind of the prospect.
Quit marketing and selling your product or service on the merits of its quality and start selling it on the benefits of what it will do for the customer. You wouldn’t be selling your product or service if you didn’t think it was good.
You can hear my complete conversation about using emotion in canvassing with much more detail on this subject by becoming a Silver Level Telecoaching member. Click here to enroll.
Or you can learn more about implementing a field trainer position on a one on one Jump Start Canvassing call with me. To find out more, click here.