Mass Persuasion (part 18): Sincerity: getting around proving your product

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The true power of relationships:

“I’ll gladly buy, although I don’t know what I’m buying”

In our last post, we looked at putting together better offers, simply by treating your customers as time-starved executives. If you include tremendous bonuses to entice or reward them for buying, make certain you’re valuing their time. How? Include well-thought-out overviews or executive summaries.

Recently, I purchased an information product that delivered tremendous value. Yet, the bonuses were 637 minutes of video footage — that’s 10.5 hours of my time that I’m not going to invest.

Today, we dig into the strategy of how to get around the important need for testimonials, showing buyers happily using your product, and other forms of “proof.”

I used this exact same strategy to sell shares of stock in one of my partnerships . . .

Getting around “proving” your product:
Your customer is your friend

You learn in marketing that testimonials and showing actual customers in action with the product is important. This is known as proof. Yet why do people need proof from you in the first place? I’ll tell you why: because you don’t have a close, trusting relationship with your audience. In short, they don’t trust you.

Compared to your list of prospects where you show your product works, how much proof does your signficant other need? Or your best friend?

They might be curious about how or why it works, but they will bypass all that resume-checking kind of stuff to protect themselves from you — because they trust:

You’re not out to screw them
You know something about what you’re suggesting

and most important,

If things foul up, you will protect them from harm and loss.

For those of you who have ever had to hire an attorney for special purposes, such as asserting your rights, you had to place your trust in their guidance that they know what they’re doing on your behalf, and are working to protect you against harm.

It’s the same in the case of handing your life over to a surgeon.

It’s the same in the case of handing your financial life to a CPA or financial advisor.

In these examples — attorney, surgeon, CPA/financial advisor — can you see the common key element?

Forget about whether any of these are regulated by the government or require testing and licenses . . .

The key element is this:

Perceived risk and loss in the case it doesn’t work and how difficult it is to clean up the mess

And here’s the most important question:

How do you as a business person lower the perception that there can be any possibility of:

Risk or loss
It not working: whether at all or just for your customer
A mess to clean up

Answer: make sure they have already lowered those perceptions themselves even before you come into contact with each other and begin your relationship.

Wait a sec, you’re screaming now. “You’re saying you don’t even have a relationship with them and yet like someone naïve country bumpkin, they’re supposed to trust you?! And how in the heck do you pull that stunt off, Houdini?”

Here’s how: your audience comes through people you already know and have a close trusting relationship, and they in turn have the same with their audience that comes to you.

Just like a friend introducing their friend to you. Carefully notice: I said friend, not acquaintance or stranger.

It’s called networking, and it has built-in safeguards to protect buyers from those possibilities above.

We’re not talking about online social networking or business social networking, such as Linked In. And we’re not talking about in-person networking, where you meet and greet, get a stranger’s someone’s business card, but still need to begin the relationship and build the trust.

We are talking about arriving on the scene as a trusted advisor or consultant focused only on how you can help them. There’s no absolutely selling involved.

Just like your significant other or best friend, there’s no need to prove to them:

Others have used your product: they can be your very first customer
Others are satisfied: just because someone else is satisfied doesn’t mean they will be, so why compare them to others?
You are legitimate: no need to invest $250,000 in a fancy office
You are successful and profitable: they don’t care if you roll up in a rust bucket jalopy of a vehicle or wear ripped t-shirts and jeans.

There’s no need to prove anything. Proof elements are all just ways to calm down the nervous ego whose job in everyone’s life is to seek satisfaction and pleasure and warn of discomfort and danger.

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