Do your sales pitches and advertisements not result in a high conversion rate, no matter how high your budget is?

The problem may be your lack of psychological understanding of your prospects.

Trying to sell your product to a prospect without knowing their needs is similar to firing an arrow in the dark. It may hit the bull’s eye, but the chances are quite low.

Understanding the mind of your prospects is the key to the entire sales process that converts them to actual paying customers. Without the knowledge of what they desire, it becomes an uphill task to persuade them to buy your product.

The ultimate aim of any product or service is to make the customer’s life convenient in some way or the other. In other words, your product/service should be solving an actual problem that the consumer is having, in the best possible way.

In fact, the 4 P’s of marketing, i.e. Product, Price, Promotion and Place are based on the prospect’s needs and wants only. As a marketing manager, you have to devise the strategies to reach and convert maximum prospects, and the better you get inside the mind of your prospect, the better are your chances of becoming the market leader.

How to Mind Map Your Prospects to Turn them Into Customers

People Buy Because of Emotions, Not Logic

It is imperative to get into the prospect’s mind so that an emotional connection can be established. The reason for this is that most people make buying decisions based on their emotional beliefs and rely less on logical understanding. If the product can strike a chord in their minds, they feel more than happy in spending money and buy the product. On the other hand, product messages that lack empathy fail to establish an emotional connect with the prospect and therefore, go unnoticed.

There are in general six primal emotions that compel an individual to buy or not buy any product. The final decision is often a mix of these feelings and is different for every unique person. As a business, you should know the persona of your target group so that you can target these triggers to connect emotionally with them.

Let’s have a look at these emotions:

1. Fear:

People often fear that if they don’t take a decision now, they may miss on to something important. This is often called FOMO or “Fear of missing out” and is most commonly seen in cases of products that are trending and becoming popular by the day.

2. Greed
   

This emotion triggers urgency in the minds of the prospect so that they are compelled to take a decision quickly. Companies offer heavy discounts or some free gift to evoke this emotion in their target audience so that their sales increase exponentially.

3. Altruism

Some people make a buying decision if they feel like their purchase will create a positive impact on the lives of other people who may be in dire need. Many companies often tell their customers about a CSR or philanthropic activity that they might be doing if they buy a product from them. For instance; if you buy a notebook, we’ll donate one notebook to a child in need.

4. Love

It is undoubtedly a very powerful emotion and is great for the sales of your products too. Understand what your customers love and who they love. Keep in mind that people buy stuff not just for themselves but for their loved ones too.

5. Pride

There is nothing better than a customer feeling proud of their purchase. If your product is something that may have some esteem value attached to it, make sure to highlight it. We all know why Apple products are best-sellers, don’t we?

6. Guilt

This is another very powerful emotion that drives the sales of many companies, especially those that sell gifts and cards. If you can tap into the reasoning behind the guilt of any prospect, it becomes easy to highlight the attributes of your product that eradicate it for them.

How to Connect With Your Prospects?

Now that we have established the importance of understanding your prospect’s minds to make them our customers, we can work on improving our emotional connection.

Ask these questions and you’ll significantly improve your conversion ratio since you’ll get to know exactly what your prospects want to buy.

1. Is Your Prospect Really A Prospect?

Before you even think about pitching to someone, make sure you are not wasting your time with someone who is far from interested in your product or service.. It means that you have to ask certain questions to the prospect in order to ensure that they are fit for your product/service.

These questions are generally designed to validate that the prospect belongs to the target market segment and qualifies for your pitch.

Let’s say your company sells digital smart watches through e-commerce channel. A visitor comes to your website browsing for some watches and is greeted by a customer service executive through live support chat window. Your executive’s script should be such that you are able to find out whether the visitor is actually in need of a smartwatch or simply browsing. Are they willing to buy the product? If yes, then what’s the urgency?

Of course, you should not bombard your visitor with these questions directly. Instead, design your script with disguised questions that fetch you the answers to these questions without being too intrusive and rude.

The benefit of differentiating a prospective customer from a visitor is clear and simple. You don’t bother spending your time on the mere visitors. And on the other hand, you put all your energy and effort in trying to convert this prospect into a customer.

2. What’s Their Pain Point?

Once you have determined with your questions that the person is, in fact, a prospective client, you should proceed with knowing more about their needs.

The next logical step is to find out what are they currently using and why they want to replace the same with your product or service. This “what” and “why” would enable you to understand the prospect’s thinking clearly, and you’ll be able to pitch your product to them in a much better way. Your chances of conversion dramatically improve because you will speak in the language that the prospect comprehends by specifically telling them those features of your product that satisfy the pain points of the prospect.

Let’s continue our previous example of smartwatch e-commerce store. When you know that the visitor on your website is a prospect, your sales script should ask questions to establish the type of watch that they are using at present. Is it a conventional watch or a smartwatch? Or they don’t have a watch in the first place? Are they wearing a premium brand right now or a regular brand? What problems are they having with their existing watch?

3. What’s Their Version of Their Solution?

So, now you know the pain points of your prospect. It’s time to focus on what they think should be the ideal solution that would satiate their needs and resolve their pain-points. While you are at it, it’s important to understand that the prospect’s solutions are often based on emotions instead of logic. This is a vital aspect of pitching your product or service. Always try to connect emotionally with your prospects and understand what they feel while using a product.

Their version of the solution sets out clear expectations that they have in their mind regarding your product/service. Your job now is to pitch the perfect product that is a literal incarnation of their manifestation. The point is though, that you may not have a product range to suit the exact requirements of every prospect. But, you should modify your pitch in such a way that it highlights those features of your product that matches their version of the solution.

Moreover, you should always import your live chat transcripts from your live chat software to understand what your prospects generally demand from your products/services. There is no better way to get this qualitative data about the preferences of your prospective clients, which is invaluable in designing a better-suited product for your target audience.

4. Why Don’t They Have It Right Now?

The final aspect that needs to be understood from the insides of your prospect’s mind is the reason they are not able to get the ideal solution that they need.

This question is particularly useful while designing the marketing and sales strategies for your product. You need to take feedback from these prospects and try to modify your existing product or add a variant to your range that fulfils the requirements of a group of your prospects.

If your product is perfect, but it is not available easily in the market and the prospect is facing difficulty in finding it, work on your market placement. Or if the pricing is not as per what they feel is right, restructure your pricing strategy to better suit your target group. Maybe your product is targeted towards college students, who would want an affordable price tag.

While promoting your product, it is necessary to connect with your prospects so that you can effectively convey the message that your product is the ideal product that they need.

If your promotion or advertisement is unable to convey the exact message, your complete marketing budget is wasted.

Conclusion: How to Mind Map Your Prospects to Turn them Into Customers

Most businesses often overlook the fact that their products are not just objects, but a solution to someone’s pain point. Products and services must always be designed with that in the mind and the effectiveness with which it is conveyed to the target audience determines the sales that you would be getting.

Your prospects are humans and they need an emotional connect to feel the urge to buy your product or service.

Work your way towards it and enjoy your increased customer conversion and sales!

 

About the author:

Jason is a technical writer currently associated with ProProfs Chat. He enjoys writing about emerging customer support products, trends in customer support industry and the financial impacts of using such tools. In his spare time, Jason likes travelling extensively to learn about new cultures and traditions.