Selling | Desire For Gain | Fear Of Loss

There are primarily two fundamental factors controlling your prospect's buying decision: desire for gain and fear of loss.

When people want to make a buying decision, they need to decide that they will be better off as a result of buying or using your product or service, than being worse off. And it is up to you to help them make that decision through your presentation.

Selling, desire for gain, and fear of loss are three concepts that are interrelated, and the nature of the relationship between them in every specific case determines whether you are going to make the sale or not.

Desire for gain simply represents the things that we expect to gain as a result of making the buying decision. We all want to be admired, liked, respected, successful, and healthy. We all want prestige, recognition, social status, power, influence, and popularity. We all want comfort security, companionship, knowledge, security, and self-actualization. We all want to feel that we are growing toward our full potential. The more of these we can obtain as a result of buying some product or service, the more likely we will be to make the buying decision.

Fear of loss simply represents the things that we expect to gain as few as as possible as a result of buying some product or service. You can think of those simply as the opposite of the examples given above. For example when we buy something, we want everyone admiring us for what we bought, and we never want anybody telling us that we made a bad decision. We never want to part with our money to gain something that will give us none or only a few of the things that we like.

The relationship between the fear of loss and desire for gain in the case of every specific transaction, and every specific person determines whether or not the person is going to make the buying decision.

When you do a sales presentation, if the person says that, "Let me talk it over to someone." or, "I'm not sure.", what they are saying is that, "You have not aroused my desire to own or enjoy the benefits of your product to the point that you have overcome my fear of loss, or making a mistake." or "You have not given me enough value reasons to cause me to make the buying decision. My fear of loss is still greater than my desire for gain, and it is up to you to put more on that scale to add more to my desire for gain, and to take away from my fear of loss."

So if you want to make the sale, you should always talk to your prospect in terms of what they want, not in terms of your product. You should analyze the person, and understand what is important to them, and then point out to the characteristics of your product that interest them in particular. Or if you have a good knowledge of your product, you could remind them that it could also be used to fulfill such and such needs that are by the way important to you.

A digital camera is usually used for taking pictures by most people. If you, as a salesperson, were talking to an ordinary consumer, and you want to convince them that they should buy the camera, you could talk about for example, the picture quality, or the number of pictures they could take before they had to recharge the battery, etc. But if you were selling the very same camera to an entrepreneur, those reasons might be interesting to them, but not enough. You could then include the fact that they could use the camera as a video camera as well, shoot videos, upload them to the Internet, and ultimately make money. In any case, the camera does not change, but you need to change your presentation so you can make the sales. In short, you need to discover the reasons that are interesting and important to them, and then structure your presentation around those specific reasons. Moreover you have to make sure that your presentation manages to remind them that desire for gain is dominant over fear of loss so they can easily make the buy decision. Thank you for your attention.