Looking for a tool to help prospects quickly understand how you can help them? How about an instant credibility tool? How about a prospect shorthand for decision-making? It’s all in…
The Proof is Social
Wendy Weiss, The Queen of prospecting®
The great Robert Cialdini wrote about the concept of ‘Social Proof’ in his book, “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.” (If you don’t have a copy run out and get one now.) He said, “…the concept of social proof equips us with a wonderful kind of automatic-pilot device…. With it we can cruise confidently through a myriad of decisions without personally having to investigate the detailed pros and cons of each.” Social proof is a very powerful selling tool.
Here is an email that I recently received from a reader of this newsletter:
“…everybody from Art Sobczak to Brian Tracy to Wendy Weiss recommends using social proof as one of the key components of scripts. In the finance world, this is illegal. I cannot refer to satisfied sources. What is an elegant way to get around this? How can I compensate for not having this tool available?”
This reader brings up an excellent point. In most industries it is perfectly fine to give examples of customers that have been helped by your product or service. There are other industries where confidentiality is an important issue. There is a solution, however, and it’s rather simple.
It is perfectly ok to talk about how your product or service has helped customers, you simply cannot use customer names or identifiers. Instead of saying, “ABC Company found (fill in how the product/service helped the customer)…” and naming the specific customer you say, “One of our customers found (fill in how the product/service helped the customer).” While this is not quite as strong as being able to name a specific customer it is far stronger than not using social proof at all.
Social proof is very powerful. Always try to incorporate social proof into conversations that you have with prospects. You will be astounded to see the response.
