Fear is universal for humans. Business is no different -- fear of loss, fear of missing out, fear of competitors leaving us flat in the dust. This is why employing fear is one of the most effective sales tactics you can ever use.
Why?
We’re chemically wired to react to fear at a primal level. Whether someone’s putting a knife to our neck or you’re falling short on your sales numbers this quarter, your brain will start pumping chemicals throughout your body to create a fight-or-flight response.
Marketers and advertisers have capitalized on this for centuries -- everything from warding off scurvy and various diseases to protecting yourself from cybercrime.
In sales, fear often introduces the urgency needed to close a better deal or convince a prospect to open, read, and reply to an email.
But before you go peddling doomsday scenarios to all your prospective clients, it’s important to understand there are correct and incorrect ways to apply fear. Knowing this distinction will help you motivate and inspire rather than scare and paralyze. Here’s what you need to keep in mind:
1) Know Their Pain Points
First thing’s first: You need to know and understand the other person’s fears. Offering up a bunch of random, scary business scenarios isn’t motivation by fear; it’s just plain old fear-mongering.
Start by researching your prospect’s pain points. What are the market forces at work in their industry? How do they stack up against the competition? Are there internal struggles at their company? What do their customers need right now that they’re not delivering?
The IT sector, for example, is a major playing field for fear motivation right now. The pressure is on for companies to cut costs, and there are dozens of cloud solutions claiming to do just that. Many of them promise the same results for their customers: Faster and cheaper than the clunky, expensive legacy systems many still use.