Don't Let Your Sales Drown in Doubt

Have you ever made a buy­ing deci­sion only to have that gut instinct called “buyer’s remorse” creep up on you imme­di­ately after you’ve left the store?

Or, worse yet, have you ever felt the need to ratio­nal­ize a pur­chas­ing deci­sion to save your­self from this conflict?

This very thing hap­pened to me just a few days ago. How­ever, this time it was the ven­dor who ini­ti­ated the remorse. (The result was the loss of a four-​​figure sale!)

Read on to find out their grave mis­take… and the mar­ket­ing les­son behind it.

Hav­ing lived in Ari­zona for the past 33 years, I have endured many, many hot sum­mers. My per­sonal motto is, in Ari­zona, “It’s not the heat, it’s the stu­pid­ity” (for liv­ing in the desert in the first place, that is!).

Nev­er­the­less, all jok­ing aside, I’ve never owned a swim­ming pool, and I elected to have one built this sum­mer for the first time. With tem­per­a­tures boil­ing at 116 degrees last week, I knew I made the right decision.

When I orig­i­nally chose the pat­tern last April for my new pool, I selected a tile and grout that, to me, looked absolutely fan­tas­tic. It was classy, and didn’t have that “hotel pool” look to it, which I wanted to des­per­ately avoid.

Fast for­ward to this week, and the very day before the tile com­pany was sched­uled to install the tile.

I received a call from the pool com­pany, and I was shocked as to what they asked me:

“Hello, Mr. Bern­stein? This is Joe Blow (not his real name, of course) from (com­pany name). We were call­ing to find out if you were sure of your tile selec­tion for your pool.”

I said, “Am I sure? Absolutely. I spent over an hour pick­ing it out myself.”

The con­ver­sa­tion could have ended there and the instal­la­tion car­ried on as scheduled.

But it didn’t.

What hap­pened next was per­plex­ing. You see, just when I thought the con­ver­sa­tion was over, they then felt a need to explain:

“It’s just that we’ve never had any­one pick out the com­bi­na­tion of tile and grout that you did.”

To fill you in, here’s what hap­pened: I chose a mar­bled cobalt tile with char­coal grout. Usu­ally, the com­mon grout color with this tile is white.

The core rea­son for my choice was to make sure that the empha­sis was on the tile, not the grout. And I wanted to make sure that the cobalt “popped” out or at least blended in, since too much con­trast would have caused the white grout to become the cen­ter of attention.

(Remem­ber, I didn’t want that “hotel pool” look!)

The bot­tom line is that the tile com­pany put so much doubt in my mind that, even though I was orig­i­nally happy with my choice, I told them to post­pone the instal­la­tion until I had a chance to think about it.

Let me repeat those words: “a chance to think about it”.

(I wouldn’t mind that they ques­tioned my color selec­tion if, and only if, they felt I made an error. That would be just good cus­tomer ser­vice. But I made it abun­dantly clear that I was happy with my selection.)

Well, the next morn­ing, I went into the pool deal­er­ship, looked at the tile again, and con­firmed my orig­i­nal choice.

How­ever, in the process I also dis­cov­ered another tile that I liked even bet­ter… one that was man­u­fac­tured by a dif­fer­ent company!

So on the same day of what would have been the pool’s instal­la­tion, I changed my decision.

And the orig­i­nal com­pany lost a four-​​figure sale — all because they cre­ated doubt in my mind by ques­tion­ing my buy­ing deci­sion, par­tic­u­larly AFTER I made it.

Now, what has all this got to do with us mar­keters and copywriters?

Whether through a show­room (like the pool com­pany) or our mar­ket­ing abil­i­ties, we spend a lot of energy and time show­ing peo­ple the ben­e­fits and beauty of our prod­ucts, and assist­ing them in mak­ing a buy­ing deci­sion that makes them comfortable.

So why on earth, then, would we ever want to jeop­ar­dize a sale by intro­duc­ing buyer’s remorse, espe­cially directly to the client?

Believe me, it’s more com­mon than you think.

For exam­ple, have you tried buy­ing your own prod­uct just to test it? Have you looked at your order page and “thank you” page copy? Heck, do you have a “thank you” page at all?

More impor­tantly, do you praise your cus­tomers and edu­cate them on how to use your prod­uct after they buy? (This is often called a stick let­ter, also known as prod­uct con­sump­tion education.)

The moral is this: when your client pur­chases some­thing from you, espe­cially when it’s a high-​​ticket item, praise them on their deci­sion. Sup­port them. Even edu­cate them on how to con­sume your product.

For exam­ple, if you sell soft­ware, then show them how to use it. If it’s an auto­mo­bile, show them how to care for it. Prod­uct con­sump­tion edu­ca­tion not only reduces buyer’s remorse, it also reduces refunds and returns.

And do ask ques­tions to make sure they’ve made the right deci­sion… while they’re mak­ing it. It shows that you care, and builds trust and credibility.

But never, ever, ask them if they’ve made the cor­rect deci­sion! (Par­tic­u­larly after the deci­sion is made, let alone on the eve of the delivery!)

After all, your job as a mar­keter or copy­writer is to remove doubt, not cre­ate it. Oth­er­wise, you will be the one who suf­fers from a case of seller’s remorse.

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