Buyer’s remorse is the bane of every marketer and sales person’s lives. Nobody wants their product to be associated with regret. The disappointment that comes with achieving a great sale only to be met immediately with “I’m not sure I want to commit anymore” is super frustrating.
Avoiding buyer’s remorse can be difficult, too. Especially when your emails and phone calls every now and again can’t always help you gauge exactly what your contact is feeling. We have three simple tricks that should help you say bye-bye to it, though – and all before you’ve made the final sale.
First, don’t pressure your contact
You might think that your communications with a prospect are going fabulously. It feels like you’re calling them all the time, and they have absolutely no problem with it. They love your calls – you just know it! With every conversation, you feel like you’re bounding toward a sale.
It’s possible that you’re being overly confident. There’s a difference between an enthusiastic customer and a pressured one, and if you’re good at what you’re doing you should be able to tell. A pressured lead is never a good sign, and will either lead to heavy buyer’s remorse after a sale or end up in a tightly closed rejection of your services.
Don’t force yourself, or your product, onto a contact. Ask them what they need or want, and how they feel about your company further down the buyer journey. Keep everything on their terms, and always take their perception of your product, their needs, and their schedule into account. If they seem interested but unsure, try offering a free trial or demonstration. This way they can dip their toe in without diving into a purchase, avoiding that feeling of an impulse-buy.
Never talk in temporary terms
The biggest problem for buyer’s remorse is the fear that you’ve bought a product you can only use once or twice, for a price that really doesn’t match that value. That’s why you should never sell or market in temporary terms.
If focusing on the idea of competitors, for example, there is a right and a wrong way to do this. The wrong ‘temporary terms’ way would be saying things like “None of your competitors have a product this good right now, you’ll be the first”. That implies that, eventually, the product value which you have sold will depreciate. In this case, it will depreciate very swiftly.
Instead, show your customer that your product is a long term investment. By getting in on the product now, they will be ahead of the game and can look forward to sooner results than those around them. These results, in turn, could lead to further, larger benefits that their competitors will miss out on by not getting this product earlier. Make sure that you are always aware of the timeframe of the value you are selling. It could come back to bite you later on.
Turn your back on buyer’s remorse with stats, facts and figures
Post-sale remorse can often be triggered by the idea that the client has made an uninformed choice. They may start looking into other choices that they hadn’t previously consider and decide that buying your product was a bad idea and they’d like to choose another provider.
This is easily avoidable by doing some of the work for them. Provide leads with all the information they need to make the choice on their own. Send them case studies, comparisons to your competitors and any other relevant information that they might like to know about.
Show them that you have a lot to offer without expressly selling. If they seem uncertain in a call, suggest that you send over some helpful information and call them back in a week’s or a few day’s time. Hopefully, by the point you get back in touch, they will have had time to mull over what you’ve told them and realise your company is the best fit.
Want more tips on lead generation best practices like this? Check out our lead generation best practices whitepaper.