Pleasure and Pain: The Seemingly Dark Art of Manipulation
One of the most powerful ways to generate direct marketing responses is to set out reasons why responding to your offer brings wonderful pleasure and why not responding sustains or even increases pain.
Whenever you can, set up pleasure and pain offers. You can do this even in face to face presentations.
Tell your prospects all the good things that come by working with you or buying a particular home…
And then suggest the bad things that may occur (or remain the same) by not responding.
Articulating pleasure and pain offers simply means telling people the favorable consequences of accepting your offer and the undesirable consequences of doing nothing.
Here are a couple of examples:
Why They Should Choose You as Their Agent
• Pleasure: “Sell your home for the most money, in the fastest time and simplest way because I use proven marketing methods and have a vast network.”
• Pain: “Choose a different agent and you may end up working with inexperienced, careless, even thoughtless agents that will drag the sale of your home own for ages, refuse to negotiate and market the home as minimally as possible.”
Why They Should Buy That Particular Home
• Pleasure: “End constant frustration with limited storage space, enjoy vaulted ceilings, ample sunlight and a vast, fenced in yard.”
• Pain: “Skip this opportunity now and the next buyer strolling up may beat you to the punch.”
Why It Makes Sense to Put an Offer On This Home Now
• Pleasure: “Position yourself to move into this home sooner rather than later, besides…”
• Pain: “Waiting to put an offer on this home might allow another buyer to come in and put an offer on it and then the seller may like the idea of a price war, which means the highest bidder wins.”
Pain Is Not Torture, If…
To some this may seem like manipulation. In my mind, as long as you are telling the truth and not withholding certain truth…it is not manipulation.
You are giving facts to a person to help them make a decision. Ari Galper’s got this down pat.
One thing that is extremely helpful when working with pleasure and pain offers is that you believe in yourself–and what you are doing.
If you don’t believe in yourself and don’t believe or enjoy what you are doing…then your resistance to this approach maybe a symptom to something deeper: job dissatisfaction, low-self esteem, insecurity.
I confess: I struggled early in my career with face to face sales simply because I was insecure. But that was not all…
Then I discovered I was an introvert. And that explained a lot.
Figuring out that I was an introvert [and being okay with it!] helped me to operate where I could be the most productive.
Writing is infinitely easier to me than face to face. I eat, sleep, read writing. It comes very natural. Face to face, on the other, is a vicious exercise of the will.
What that tells me is that I need to spend most of my time behind a keyboard. I’m very comfortable behind a keyboard, and salesmanship in print is very easy for me.
Still Not Comfortable with Manipulation? Think About This
Now, if telling people the truth about the pleasure and pain of certain decisions still feels below you and you are certain you are not insecure or introverted or in the wrong job altogether, then consider other issues outside of buying or selling a home.
Like drug addiction.
Would you be manipulating someone if you told them the pleasures of not doing drugs (stability in your life and freedom from worry about cash, cops or crashes)…
And then the pain of drug addiction (broken relationships, poor job performance, financial ruin)?
Consider this approach to other weighty issues, like teen pregnancy and smoking. Then move across the spectrum to subtler issues, say choosing a college, and finally buying a home.
I think you’ll see that it’s not manipulation when you are sincerely concerned for the other person and are simply putting all the cards on the table.
Even better is this: If you can remain objective during the process and even say, “You know, this may not even be the home for you. I just wanted you to know all the facts.”