It’s a massive source of frustration. You’re trying to sell your service or product to a prospect, but they just don’t get it. Here are 25 common reasons why people don’t buy from you or hire you. By learning what’s stopping them, you’ll find it easier to turn things around.

Here they are in no particular order.

1. You’re connecting to them using the wrong medium. You’re using email instead of sending a letter. A letter instead of a phone call. A phone call instead of Zoom. A Zoom instead of in-person.
2. They make decisions slowly. You move quickly. They’re still trying to process things.
3. They make decisions quickly. You move slowly. They’ve lost interest.
4. You’re assuming too much about what they know or what they need, etc.
5. They’re short term focused and you’re selling a medium to long-term benefit. Or vice versa.
6. You’re dealing with the wrong person.
7. You have a closing problem. Read this.
8. They’re under a great deal of stress. Which is really common right now.
9. You’re using too many words to describe your proposition. This is extremely common.
10. You’re using too few words to describe it. This almost never happens.
11. There are too many steps in your sales process. You’re losing them. They get half way through whatever you’re communicating, and they’re already forgetting the start.
12. You’re using incompatible marketing ideas, approaches or strategies from a different industry. This is a huge, HUGE problem for service providers. I wrote about how to avoid the problem, here.
13. They can see the value, they do want it, but are lying to you because they’re broke and embarrassed.
14. Your product or service, if purchased, would force them to admit they failed in some way.
15. You’re attracting poorly targeted leads, so they lack the need, the finances or both.
16. You haven’t given them a deadline to make their decision. Deadlines sharpen the mind.
17. They don’t trust you enough yet, to lower their guard and let your message land.
18. You’re confusing them, because there’s a disconnect between what you say and what they see. This is very common. The vendor says they’re professional and reliable, the vendor IS professional and reliable, BUT their marketing gives the opposite impression.
19. They’re very visual and your marketing or sales presentation isn’t.
20. You’re not enthusiastic enough, about your product or service, so they’re not enthusiastic enough to hire you.
21. You haven’t demonstrated the full value of your product or service to them. So, they wrongly believe it’s too expensive.
22. You haven’t explained the core benefits of what you’re offering, so they don’t even know they need it.
23. They’re apprehensive about making the purchase or hiring you and your level of reassurance isn’t cutting it.
24. They’re expecting the approach or marketing from someone in your industry, to look or sound different.
25. You haven’t made it easy enough for them to switch to you from their current provider.

I hope you find these examples useful.

Photo: Shutterstock.

Marketing relies heavily on creativity. It takes creativity to attract your prospective client’s attention. It takes creativity to stand out against your competitors. It also takes creativity to write a great marketing message or land a new client. 

The enemy of creativity is fear. Specifically, the fear of failure.

Today, I’m going to show you how to overcome this challenge, so you be free to create without fear and improve everything about your marketing at the same time. It’s based on a strategy I discovered in the mid 1990’s and it’s worked for me ever since. I hope you find it as valuable as I have.

It looks like this

I decided to improve how I felt about creating, by reframing my marketing as a series of experiments. This was not only extremely helpful. It was also factually correct.

Think about it.

Everything you do to market your business is done to achieve some kind of result. That result is feedback. By measuring the feedback, you learn, and can then improve the result next time. It’s a process of testing and measuring akin to scientific experiments.

Marketing experiments

So, I switched, mentally, from spending my day on a series of projects, to spending my day on a series of marketing experiments. It was such a powerful exercise that I even renamed my first office ‘The Lab’.

What I loved about this approach is that it made me vastly more productive. That’s because the more I experimented, the more feedback I received.

And that feedback is extremely valuable.

• Sometimes the feedback is what I expected.
• Sometimes the feedback is a total surprise.
• Sometimes the feedback leads to a major success breakthrough.
• Sometimes the feedback leads to a massively more profitable, new direction.

However, no experiment ever fails! 

That’s because the feedback you receive equips you to make better and better marketing experiments. With better marketing experiments, comes better marketing results; more new clients, more product sales, better client retention, higher profitability, more enquiries, more subscribers and every other sales metric you need.

As such, fear was eliminated from my creative output. This freed me to become vastly more productive.

You and your business

Could this approach work for you?

Yes. Yes it could.

However, you’ll never know if it works for until you give it a try. So, go ahead. Test, measure and improve your sales results. As often as you wish.

P.S. Here’s why people criticise you and how to deal with it, in just 3 steps.

Photo by Yassine Khalfalli on Unsplash

If you want to make dramatically more sales, you need to start by knowing what your prospect’s buying style is. Once you uncover the way your prospects like to buy, you massively increase the likelihood you’ll make the sale. Over and over again.

It starts by understanding that people buy based on feelings far more than logic. [Note] I explain why, here.

We also need to understand that the prospect is right. And that they’re right every single time.

• They’re always right about what constitutes value for money.
• They’re always right about their past experiences of the type of product or service you provide.
• They’re always right about the last experience they had with someone from your industry.
• They’re always right about their attitude to risk (real or perceived risk).
• They’re even right about whether pineapple belongs on a pizza or not.

That’s because THEY are always the most informed person in the world regarding what they think and how they feel. And as their thoughts and feelings are what determine their actions, you need to discover them fast!

This might include, what they value most when making a purchase, whether they’re in the low price crowd or the premium quality crowd, if they’re someone who likes to take their time or prefers to move along, what their past experience of your industry was, how they feel about risk and any other factor you would like to know.

If you try to get them to make a purchasing decision without you knowing that information, your chances are radically reduced.

• You’ll be making assumptions based on what you know about your service and what you feel are the most important points.
• You’ll be focusing on things that don’t motivate the prospect.
• You’ll be missing things that they need to hear from you before they will buy.

In short, you’ll be trying to sell to them based on hunches and guesswork, rather than knowing exactly what they need to hear or see from you.

How to get it right

Only when you have a good idea of how they think and feel from their answers to your questions, should you start to explain how your service will benefit them.

By matching the focus and tone of your conversation, or presentation, to your prospect’s thoughts and feelings, you’ll be fully aligned with them. Yes, this makes the sales process a great deal smoother and easier.

But more importantly, it can dramatically increase your sales results.