Aaron Hoos

There are 7 basic human emotions: Anger, Fear, Disgust, Contempt, Joy, Sadness, Surprise.

These are root emotions from which all other emotions spring. (Read more about them here). These 7 emotions are at the core of what drives our decision-making.

If you understand these emotions and build your sales funnel around them, you can sell more.

HOW TO USE SURPRISE IN YOUR SALES FUNNEL

I really like that surprise is one of the 7 basic human emotions. It’s so effective when used in the sales funnel. Ironically, it’s not used often enough.

There are two ways that sales funnels can use surprise and both of these ways can have a very positive or very negative result.

Surprise in marketing: When businesses use surprise in marketing, they capture the fleeting, hard-to-get attention of their target audience. Used well, surprise can rivet the attention of an audience member so they stay engaged throughout the entire marketing message.

This truth in marketing was highlighted for me when I got my PVR. I would watch my shows and just fast-forward through the commercials. But sometimes a commercial (even at a high speed) will appear funny and shocking — surprising! — and I’ll stop and watch the commercial.

Unfortunately, surprise is so rare in marketing. Too often, marketing might start out as a great idea but it is pushed through various corporate departments — each with competing agendas — and what comes out on the other side is a mediocre result.

Surprise in sales: This is another area that has huge opportunity for many businesses but they fall short. When selling, businesses barely live up to expectations. They promise all kinds of things when selling and then meet (or almost meet) those expectations. Consumers are left feeling like they got what they paid for… and nothing else. Is it any wonder that businesses can’t figure out why consumers aren’t “extremely satisfied” when polled?

When I bought my furnace/air-conditioner, I was promised all kinds of things. When the company delivered and installed it, the installers told me that what was promised during the sale couldn’t be done because the salesperson wasn’t an installer and wasn’t aware of the peculiarities of my house. We got the issue resolved after A LOT of frustrating negotiation (and after I contacted the consumer affairs ombudsman). And then I pay every year for a 5 minute inspection. Ultimately, I got what I was promised, but nothing more. So, I’ve never recommended their service to anyone else.

On the other hand, they could have surprised me by delivering what they promised… and more. Even with a little extra courteous service and some proactive follow-up.

Consumers who are surprised by the value of their purchase and the company that sold it to them creates a wow factor that people will remember and return to again and again.

If you want to surprise people in your sales funnel, surprise them in your marketing with clever, unexpected, daring, push-the-envelope marketing that they aren’t expecting. And, surprise them in your sales by delivering more than you promised and providing higher value than they were expecting.

Success in business or the markets used to be impenetrable unless you looked and acted like Gordon Gekko.

But the internet has become the great leveller, allowing entrepreneurs, capital market investors, and real estate investors to break in and succeed like never before.

No longer is pedigree or the “old boy’s network” a factor. Today’s success stories come from scrappy capitalists who have broken the old rules and are building businesses or investing with new tools and new information… and guts.

A scrappy capitalist lives by a set of six rules. Here’s the second one:

SCRAPPY CAPITALIST RULE #2: FIND A MODEL THAT WORKS FOR YOU

I should note first that when I say “model” I could mean “business model” or “capital market investment model” or “real estate investment model” — and sometimes other people use words like “system” or “formula” or “algorithm” or “blueprint”. I also talk a lot about sales funnels on my blog, which are a way to talk about models for businesses.

Ultimately, you’re looking for a clear, simple way to analyze opportunities and act on them to profit. Think of it as a step-by-step operational plan that you follow regularly.

For a day trader, it might look something like this (Note: This is an incomplete example for illustrative purposes only):

1. Use a stock screener tool to sort stocks based on fundamental parameters.
2. Narrow search to the top 10 stocks to watch for the week.
3. Watch technical indicators for specific technical events that signal opportunities.
4. Trade with the goal of making a minimum of $500/day without dedicating more than 25% of my investable capital into any single stock
5. Place trailing stop-buy or stop-sell triggers if the stock goes more than 20% in the wrong direction.

A freelancer’s model might look like this:

1. Sort projects on Elance or Guru to find the top 10 projects that apply to me.
2. Bid on 2 projects per day.
3. Write a blog post and comment on a minimum of 5 other blogs per day.
4. Spend a minimum of 6 hours a day doing billable work.

Now that I’ve showed you some really basic examples, here are some tips to help you find a model that works for you, whether you are a scrappy capitalist who focuses on business, the capital markets, or the real estate market:

• Don’t start from scratch and don’t reinvent the wheel. Find what other people are succeeding with and use it as your starting point. Build from there.
• When looking for a model to follow, start with the experts. If I were building a value investing model, I would pull my copy of Graham and Dodd’s Security Analysis from my bookshelf (one of the best books ever, by the way) and start there. Figure out the model THEY use to invest in undervalued stocks. I can always augment but they have a great approach. As a side note, remember to only build a model based on successful models. I used to take advice from someone I respected until I realized that they didn’t actually own a successful business. Once I started ignoring their advice, my business model changed and my business grew.
• When building your model, augment it based on what you’re comfortable with and what your skills and strengths are. When I was first starting out, I had a lot of time and no money (just like every other entrepreneur! haha) so my business model was one that leveraged all of that time I had.
• Build measurables into your model. Your model becomes a to-do list and a way for you to make sure that you are doing enough to succeed in whichever business/market area you’re in. Early in my business, for example, I knew that I needed to send out 2 proposals per day, 5 days a week. Based on my numbers, I knew that would give me the amount of business I needed.
• Constantly test and refine your model. I just mentioned that I used to send out 2 proposals per day, 5 days a week. That was part of my model. But as I built my business, my proposals improved and so my close-rate improved and I no longer needed to send out quite as many proposals. Soon it was 1 proposal per day. Then 3 a week. Then even fewer. All of this comes from testing and making changes based on that testing. The same goes for capital market investing: Maybe you find that you have success in junior resource stocks and, as your investing continues, you discover that you do particularly well with junior resource investing stocks that specialize in gold. Your model changes slightly to reflect that. The same goes for real estate investing: Maybe at first you try various types of real estate investing and you refine your model. Soon you discover that you prefer wholesaling houses under 1500 square feet in the midwest. As you refine your model, your business becomes leaner and more profitable.
• If your business doesn’t have positive cash flow, there is something wrong with your model. If your business is unprofitable, there’s something wrong with your model. Go back and look at each step in your model to find out what the problem is. Some examples: Businesses without positive cash flow might be invoicing clients too late; investors without positive cash flow might not be selling with fast enough turnover.
• If you want to change your business, you have to change your model. For years, I wanted to work a little less (because freelancing can be VERY busy work!) but I never changed my model. I had to go back to basics and retool my entire model in order to change my business.

Scrappy capitalists create their own opportunity and claw their way to the top of the success ladder. They do this by finding a model that works for them and building on it.

Stay tuned. I’ll reveal the next rule of the scrappy capitalist soon.

In a previous blog post, I showed you how to draw your sales funnel. I showed you the sales funnel for a typical (but made-up) business.

Now, I’m taking that same made-up business and using it as an example case study to show you how to find new opportunities to run a more successful, profitable business.

One way you can optimize your sales funnel is:

Reduce the people who fall out of your sales funnel

There’s a reason that a sales funnel is funnel-shaped. Lots of people come into your funnel from the top but only a few make it to the bottom. Everyone else either drags their heels or finds some other way to solve whatever problem that your product or service solves. So, I guess a sales funnel is actually more like a sales sieve!

It’s okay that SOME people fall out of your sales funnel. You don’t want or need everyone to buy from you. But you should try to keep more people in your funnel than you have been. Some people need a longer-term relationship before they are willing to buy.

So, one of the opportunities we can see in this case study sales funnel is to add some “stickiness”… something that keeps people in the loop if they aren’t ready to buy just yet.

Email newsletters and autoresponders are perfect for this. They offer you an easy way to capture some basic information and then stay in touch.

Here’s what I would do to integrate an autoresponder into this sales funnel:

• Measure to see what my close rate is on people who are getting to the ebook landing page… and instead of offering the ebook for sale on the landing page, I’d offer a free newsletter and see if that captures more people’s information. Then offer the ebook in an email.
• Put the email sign-up form on my home-page and make that my primary offer. Get people signing up to it.
• Create a special email sign-up page just for people from the Chamber… an exclusive list that keeps them up-to-date on my speaking and answers questions about what I do.

By doing these three simple things, the business would capture more leads and prospects and keep them in a holding pattern. The ones who were going to buy would buy anyway but the ones who weren’t going to buy right away would be nurtured until some of them were ready to buy.

There are 7 basic human emotions: Anger, Fear, Disgust, Contempt, Joy, Sadness, Surprise.

These are root emotions from which all other emotions spring. (Read more about them here). These 7 emotions are at the core of what drives our decision-making.

If you understand these emotions and build your sales funnel around them, you can sell more.

HOW TO USE SADNESS IN YOUR SALES FUNNEL

It’s amazing how many of the 7 basic human emotions are negative. And yet, we can still use them in our sales funnels. Sadness is one of those basic emotions and even though you don’t see it a lot in sales funnels, it is present.

I should make a disclaimer here: Selling with sadness seems callous and I don’t mean to come across that way. But there ARE situations when it is necessary to sell in a sad situation. For example, a funeral home or a fundraising campaign for a catastrophe are both selling into sadness. There’s nothing wrong with it as long as it is done ethically and sensitively and responsibly.

So, how do you sell into a sad situation? Well the first thing you need to do is highlight the emotional connection between the buyer and the victim. It might be a family connection or it might be something broader (such as: We’re all humans and are saddened to think that someone else is facing such difficulty).

In situations where it is a widespread problem, the story needs to be humanized to help establish that emotional connection. That’s what those late night World Vision commercials do: They introduce you to one child and that child stands in as a surrogate for all starving children and helps to build that emotional connection much more effectively. (It’s hard to sell into sadness when there is no human connection).

You also need to keep in mind the benefits when selling into sadness: The purchase/contribution is not going to bring happiness or even necessarily peace-of-mind to the buyer. Don’t promise that! Rather, the buyer’s benefit is a sense of relief at having made an appropriate response.

The biggest risk in selling into sadness is using guilt and it is a very fine line between appropriately selling with sadness and laying on a heavy dose of guilt. I think the difference is this: Appropriate selling into sadness says “If you contribute, you’ll help” while inappropriate selling with guilt says “If you DON’T contribute, you’ll hurt.” That’s a hard line to walk and your sales and marketing copy will need to need to be closely reviewed for guilty selling.

There are many occasions when selling into sadness is okay. When done appropriately, it’s an easy sell because people are driven by a human connection to help each other. But it’s an emotionally draining effort and it’s one that is fraught with pitfalls for the seller.

In a previous blog post, I showed you how to draw your sales funnel. I showed you a fictional (but pretty typical) business and drew a sales funnel around it.

Over a few blog posts, I’m going to show you how you can examine the sales funnel you’ve drawn to find new opportunities to run a more successful, profitable business.

One way you can optimize your sales funnel is:

Reduce the number of steps in the sales funnel

Although there is a limit to how fast people will move through your sales funnel, there are ways you can speed up your sales funnel by reducing the number of steps in it.

The sales funnel (above) we’ve drawn for the case study is already pretty minimal (many businesses have much more complicated sales funnels than this!). There aren’t a lot of steps that move people from one stage to another but there ARE things we can do.

One opportunity to streamline this sales funnel is to stop splitting traffic between the homepage and the landing page. Since the landing page is the page that sells the ebook, and (presumably) ebook revenue is a key way for this business to make money, there is a risk that only a portion of potential ebook buyers are actually getting to the landing page. The ones who are sent to the landing page from articles get there (obviously) but other marketing efforts are sending potential ebook customers to the main page where they have to navigate to the landing page.

So two solutions to this problem are:

1. Sending more people to the ebook landing page instead of the homepage
2. Moving the ebook sales letter to the homepage

The other opportunity to reduce the number of steps in the sales funnel is on the right-hand side: Face-to-face marketing at the Chamber of Commerce leads to a contact (email or phone) and then signing a contract. But this can be improved further to save the business owner time and freeing up to allow more marketing and delivery.

A couple of solutions include:

1. Automating the contact stage with a website that answers questions and provides a downloadable contract to sign
2. Outsourcing the contact stage for 24/7 coverage
3. Stop sending people to the website

Neither of these ideas might seem like much but even a slight increase sales funnel speed can increase your business by moving more people through, faster. (Plus, a streamlined sales funnel frees up more of your time to focus on other things).

Stay tuned. There are many more opportunities we can derive from this sales funnel.