The human brain is wired in such a way that a person comes with decisions instantaneously and then finds reasons to justify that decision. These reasons could be fact or fiction; it doesn’t matter.
If the person has to come up with a lot of reasons, they will regret the decision later. In fact, the 2 are directly related to one another meaning the more reasons they have to come up with, the more regrets they will l experience later.
And if they wind up openly discussing these reasons, then the regret is even worse.
That’s why it’s extremely important to remember that when you gain the decision to comply from someone, immediately shut up and move on to the next step. Never encourage your target to think about what a great decision they made because it will backfire on you.
If you begin asking them for reasons why they decided to comply, they’ll wind up backing out a few days later.
Once you gain compliance, the next step is to set yourself up to gain it again. So if you do business with someone, the key is to be able to do repeat business over and over again.
One way to ensure that is to limit the amount of choices of what you have to offer. Choices confuse people and give them reasons to procrastinate. Instead, find the driving need (or at most the top 3 needs) and fill them for your customer.
Anything that does not fill an immediate need will just cloud their judgment and when they do finally decide, will cause them to be unhappy with the choice they made.
You must also be sure that you don’t present what you have to offer in a way that resembles anything that may have burned them in the past.
I came across this a lot when I was selling fitness. The truth of the matter is that most people who join a gym don’t stick with it. So unless it was their first time joining a club or they work out regularly and were choosing my location simply for convenience, the odds were that they joined a gym in the past and didn’t stick with it; hence wasting their money.
When performing my needs analysis to determine what brought them in, I would always find out if they did in fact join a club in the past only to not go. And if they did, I had to structure my presentation very tactfully as I know that past regret was still lingering in their mind; as it will be for some clients of yours.
Regret can also work in your favor if the regret stems from them not taking action the last time and wondering what could have been.
The key here is to discover how they feel about previous decisions as they relate to what you’re offering.
Do they regret acting or not acting?
Whatever you do, never make them feel stupid about past decisions. Let them know that any intelligent person probably would have done the same thing if the situation presented itself in a similar manner.
If you show even the slightest inkling that you think they made a foolish mistake they will not only NOT give you their business but they may go out of their way to give it to a competitor or co-worker just to avoid giving it to you.