Increase Customers Perceived Likelihood to Achieve their Dream Outcome
TL;DR
There are 4 key components to communicating your value effectively, we are focusing on increasing your customers perceived likelihood they can achieve their Dream Outcome if they work with you.
Leverage social proof, guarantees, and scarcity to build your prospects confidence that you will help them achieve their dream outcome
There are many ways you can increase your prospect’s perceived likelihood of achieving their dream outcome. Implement as many as you can and you will see your close rates skyrocket!
I’ll reiterate… Communicating the value you bring to your target customers is essential to getting new ones. The best marketers are hyper focused on the value they bring and are great at communicating it in a simple and quick way.
Marketing can have many goals but in the context of creating demand and helping drive more new business, marketing’s job is to create an offer your ideal client would be foolish not to accept.
There are 4 components to demonstrating value (shout out to Alex Hermosi for this framework):
Dream Outcome (DO)
Increase perceived likelihood to achieve DO
Reduce time to achieve DO
Reduce effort & sacrifice to achieve DO
Today we will cover the 2nd part of value, why it's important and how to increase the perceived likelihood to achieve DO.
Reducing Risk
It's impossible to talk about increasing the perceived likelihood you can help your customers achieve their dream outcome without talking about risk.
In fact, all three remaining components of how to demonstrate value all have to do with risk. Particularly, how to lower risk in the eyes of your prospects.
This is where credibility, experience, and authority come into play. Let's take a look at an easy example.
Let's say you want to learn how to play the piano and you have 2 options that are identical in every way EXCEPT, 5 of your friends already took lessons from one of the instructors and are now amazing piano players.
All things equal, you will choose the option that you have a higher degree of confidence will get you to your desired dream outcome. In other words, the perceived risk that you won’t achieve your goal of being an amazing piano player is much lower with the option where you already know people like you have been able to achieve the goal you want.
There is always a risk your purchase will not transform your life the way you hope it will. It's crucial to reduce that perceived risk your prospects internalize as much as possible.
Build Confidence
Building confidence is the other side of the coin from reducing risk. This is where you need to use specific language, and take specific action to build confidence you are the ONLY way your customer will achieve their dream outcome.
Let's look at some practical ways to do that.
Social Proof
In most cases, this is the best way to increase your prospect’s perceived likelihood of achieving their goals if they work with you.
Like the example I gave earlier, if you have dozens, hundreds or thousands of people you have already helped achieve their goal, it's very easy to convince one more person they can achieve the same result.
Raw, unfiltered video testimonials have proven to be one of the most effective means to share social proof. Get as many happy customers as you can to record themselves on their phone telling prospective customers how great you are and how happy they are that they chose to work with you.
Great Google reviews or reviews on Amazon, Trustpilot and other “ratings” based sites have raven invaluable as well.
People want to know you have helped others like them so the more you have, the higher the perceived likelihood a new prospect will have (NEED TO REWORD THIS).
Guarantees
People love guarantees because they set a minimum level of expectation they can expect to achieve. This is SUPER powerful.
Some of the best offers I have ever seen are so powerful because the guarantees are so valuable, potential customers would be foolish not to take the offer. The risk is virtually nothing and the upside is massive. That's the power of a great guarantee.
Great guarantees have 3 components:
Focus
If you can focus your guarantee around the areas you know your prospect is most nervous/hesitant, it will be more likely to push the prospect towards a sale. For instance, if you sell SEO services your potential customers are usually worried they won’t see a return on their investment. They may think, “What if we just can’t generate enough traffic?” or, “what if we can’t convert the additional traffic we get?”. Build your guarantee to address these concerns. Something like, “We guarantee more page 1 rankings for your target keywords and we implement our proven Traffic Trap visitor conversion system to maximize the value of every new visitor to your site.”
Set a high bar
If your guarantee is a significantly higher perceived value than what you are charging, you will convert sales at a very high rate. Remember, the guarantee is the “floor”. It's the base value your customers can expect even if everything goes wrong. So set the floor high enough where you bring the risk to 0.
Believable
Although you want to set your guarantee at a high bar, it needs to be believable. Outlandish guarantees will be perceived as exactly that… ridiculous! Make sure your guarantee strikes a good balance of setting a high bar and being believable.
I hope this goes without saying but your guarantee needs to be something you can actually fulfill. PLEASE do not propose a guarantee you have no intention of holding to. We’ll have more content on how to build really valuable guarantees that you will always be able to hit but for now, just make sure you are an honest and good faith actor and hold to your word.
Create Scarcity
Creating scarcity is one of the most powerful yet underutilized strategies in B2B marketing. There are significant psychological gains from placing scarcity in the minds of your prospects as the fear of missing out is a massive motivator but for the sake of staying on topic, we’ll focus on how scarcity can be used to increase the perceived likelihood your prospect will achieve their dream outcome.
There is an assumption when there is little supply… there is significant demand. And where there is perceived significant demand there is perceived value.
You want your prospects to see you as being in high demand.
You can do this in a lot of different ways but classic examples are having limited time or expiring offers. One of my favorite scarcity “plays” is having a no rebooking policy for people who do not show up for our sales calls.
We tell people before they even book that if they ghost us, we won’t rebook a call with them. This increases the perceived value of us and increases our show rates for sales calls. Plus, if someone is going to book a call and not show up without any warning, are they really someone we want to work with? Probably not.
Let's wrap this up
There are so many ways you can increase your prospect’s perceived likelihood of achieving their dream outcome. It's time to implement as many as you can and you will see your close rates skyrocket!
In the next post in the series we’ll cover why it's so important to reduce the time it takes for your prospect to achieve their dream outcome.