Preference Destabilization

Getting Clients to CHANGE their Minds

It's not as complicated as it sounds, and it's very useful.

Let's talk about preference formation and preference destabilization.The formation of your preferences today occurs mostly during the preliminary research phase. Let's pretend for a moment that you want to buy a computer. Well, you go online and you do a search, and you have a certain idea of what you want. You may know that you want to buy, let's say, a PC as opposed to a Mac. You may be looking at the brand, but then you start to consider some of the details of what you want in terms of specifications. You may look at memory, maybe CPU, screen size, and other things.

As you do your searching through the internet, your preferences begin to format themselves. In other words, they begin to form in your head, what you're looking for.

Now pretend that you're a salesperson and somebody's walking through the door, and their preferences are already formed. In other words, they know what they want. It's hard to change somebody's mind when they know what they want, but what if what they want isn't what you're selling? What happens when they walk through that door and what you want to sell them isn't what they have in their head?

  You have to find a way to change their mind. But as you know, if you've listened to my other podcasts, when people walk in and their preferences have been formed, it's really hard to change their mind. The only way to convince somebody to consider a new product or a new service is to destabilize their preferences.

Let's walk through a simple example, and then I'm going to give you some strategies that you're going to be able to implement to destabilize a customer’s preference. Again, the goal of destabilizing their preference is to get them to buy your product when they're already sold on buying another product.

Let's go back to our looking for a computer example again, and let's say that a customer has been searching online and is going to go with a PC. Your top buying criteria are the following.

1. Memory. You want a lot of memory, and let's say, you're in marketing, you're a graphic designer, and you need a lot of memory.

2. CPU. How fast is that computer going to be? Speed is important.

3. Screen size.

However, the product you offer may not have those preferences or criteria in that order.

Tactic number 1: Minimize one of their criteria.

Let's say that I have a computer that's very fast, but doesn't have a lot of memory.

"You know, memory shouldn't be your number one priority Mr. Customer. Because of the fact that hard drives are going down in price, you can buy a small external hard drive, or you can move your data, your information into The Cloud, having a big memory shouldn't be your number one priority. It should be a fast computer. In other words, your CPU time is what you really should be looking at as your number one deciding factor."

Now what I've just done, is I've now moved CPU, speed of the computer, from the number two position to number one by minimizing the importance of having a lot of memory.

Sometimes we want to minimize the importance of something because we don't offer that feature. In this case, by minimizing memory to the position number two as opposed to number one in terms of deciding factors, I now have a better chance of selling my computer. Strategy number one is to minimize something by telling the customer, "Hey, you don't really need that. That shouldn't be that important. That's a lesser priority." Again, all this is to position your product as number one.

Tactic 2: Elevate Preferences

Let me give you an example. Let's say, for example, that screen size, was number three. If one of our biggest strengths is the big screen sizes we offer. What we want to do is tell the customer or ask the customer, "What are you going to use this computer for? How much time a day are you going to spend on this computer Mr. Customer?" Well the more you ask questions, you realize that the customer's going to spend a lot of time on that computer, which means they're going to need a big screen.

What you're now doing is telling the customer, "You know, right now you have a screen size as your number three priority. I think you should move that up to maybe number two." Now what I've just done is elevate the importance of screen size, which was originally a third priority, to maybe the second priority.

How does this apply to you? When you're selling a product, sometimes the customer doesn't really appreciate or discounts how valuable that feature or function is with your product. What you need to do is to elevate the importance of that feature or function by asking the customer questions.

Tactic 3: Insert Preferences

Last but not least, to destabilize preferences we need to insert a new preference. Something the customer hasn't thought about, and originally wasn’t on their list.

 For example, battery, weight, and life. Maybe the customer hasn't thought about battery life for their laptop. Let's assume this is a laptop. They haven't thought about battery life. Now, by the way, I would insert something that we offer that our competitor doesn't, or something I know is a big differentiator that our competitor doesn't have. Let's pretend, our competitors rather, don't have great battery life with their computers, but we do. However, he  hasn't thought about this because it's not in their top three criteria.

By inserting, having the discussion, "Mr. Customer, have you thought about battery life?" Mr. Customer says, "What?" "Yeah, I mean battery life. I mean, you told me you’re a salesperson. You tell me you travel quite a bit, and you also told me you travel international quite a bit, which means these are long rides where you'll probably going to get some work done, and you need to maximize your battery to basically do work while you're flying." Customer goes, "You know what? I never really thought about that." Now the customer says, "You know, that's even more important to me than memory."

 Now, what I've done is I've inserted new criteria into the preference formation. In other words, I've destabilized the top three by inserting a new thing, a new feature, battery life or weight, that they haven't thought about.

 I've now reshuffled, destabilized the preferences, and now the customer has in their mind that CPU time, speed is number one, screen size is number two, battery life is number three and memory is number four. When I look at those top four criteria, they align perfectly with the product I have to offer.

As salespeople, we have to learn how to work with the products we are given; customization is not always possible. Learning how to minimize, elevate or, insert feature sets that play to your advantage.

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