A so-called selling “best practice” is actually creating the perception that you are a commodity, according to new research.
Turns out that introducing your prospects to “unconsidered needs” — ones they didn’t identify — increases your messaging effectiveness in terms of perceived quality and uniqueness, along with attitudes and choice. While asking questions and positioning your offerings relative to known, stated needs doesn’t create any differentiation.
Four pitches, one difference-maker
I’ve long touted the idea that messaging to prospects’ unconsidered needs can defeat the status quo by highlighting inconsistencies in their current situation, as well as creating differentiation from your competition. But fresh research done by Corporate Visions in conjunction with Stanford Business School Professor Dr. Zakary Tormala validates just how much of an impact this approach can have.
For our study, we recruited 400 people and divided them equally into four groups. We then developed a specific scenario, telling everyone in the study to imagine themselves as a business owner whose company had enjoyed a recent run of success, but is now facing an economic downturn and struggling to stay open. To cope with cash flow challenges created by slow sales and customer payments, they’re looking for a financial lending partner to offer them a $10 million line of credit. This cash infusion represents the “stated need.”
We then delivered four different lender pitches to each group:
• Pitch one responded to the stated need, as indicated in the situation above with a competitive offer for the money and typical corporate presentation content.
• Pitch two responded to the stated need with similar positioning, and also introduced “value-added services” in a typical effort most companies employ to create differentiation.
• Pitch three responded to the stated need with similar content as the first two, but then introduced an unconsidered need at the end of the presentation.
• Pitch four opened with the unconsidered need first and then responded to the stated need later in the presentation.
In the third and fourth pitches, the unconsidered need was based on the insight that 42 percent of businesses that take cash infusions during a recession actually fail due to underlying problems they were unaware they had.
Both of these lenders then said they could come in and analyze the business to make sure there were no hidden problem areas that might prevent them from maximizing the line of credit. Both lender pitches also touted their in-house expertise at conducting this kind of assessment.
So which of the four conditions proved the most powerful?
In the areas of uniqueness and quality, there was a statistically significant effect based on presentation type,
and it suggested that both of the unconsidered needs pitches outperformed the first two conditions. Interestingly enough, pitches one and two — stated need and value-added services — did not differ on these measures.
One clear winner
When Tormala took a look at the more important choice and attitude measures, he concluded that the unconsidered needs first condition outperformed the other three pitches, which didn’t differ from each other.
By combining the choice and attitude measures with the uniqueness and quality findings, the data suggest that only when unconsidered needs come first do they increase the persuasive power of a pitch.
This, according to Tormala, is consistent with uncertainty principles, which hold that when you inject unexpected information into a conversation, you can actually boost decision processing.
So what’s the key takeaway? Basically, you stand to significantly improve your customer conversations by introducing your prospects to unconsidered needs — but only if you do it early.
