To grow your business, sell the sizzle, not the sausage

If you’ve ever not fancied a bacon sandwich and bought one anyway, you’re well on the road to understanding a sure fire route to growing your business.

By appreciating the perspective of the buyer and re-learning to think like they do, you can attract legions of new customers. It shouldn’t be hard. We all buy stuff. We’re all buyers. But it’s too easy to get caught up in thinking in a propriety way where you can’t see the wood for the trees. You’re not thinking straight. You’re too close to the action. Step back.

For example: you are walking down the street with a friend or colleague. It’s just before 9am in the morning on a lovely sunshiny day. You’re hungry, so you decide you need something to eat. You ask your friend if they want something, they say: “no I’m alright, I’ve had my breakfast.”

You go inside the deli. You order a bacon sandwich; the bacon is tossed onto the hotplate. Fresh bread is sliced before your very eyes, the butter comes out – and it’s real butter.

Somewhere between the sounds of bread being sawn into, and the sizzling of bacon crisping up – and of course the aroma of that fresh, warm loaf and the smoky waft of bacon on the air, your friend makes an order. They get the same as you.

“I thought you weren’t hungry,” you laugh. “So did I,” they say, “but I am now.”

No-one can resist the sizzle!

I’ll bet a version of this story has happened to every single one of you. It’s a prime example of the important business idea that people buy into experiences.

You friend wasn’t interested the details of the product. They didn’t want to know where the bacon was sourced from, if it was organic, how many millimetres thick it is, none of that.

All that matters is the taste. Simple as that. The taste of your business is the experience that it creates. So build your brand around that. You must stand for something beyond the features and functions of your offering. Define the experience. Work out what your offering means to people. Get to grips with the emotions behind it.

To go back to the example of the breakfast deli, it’s the sensory triggers creating an emotional, not physical hunger. You want to eat, even though technically you don’t need to, and you know you shouldn’t really, but the feelings are so strong.

Use emotions to build connections to your product

There’s all sorts of emotions that could be popping off in a bacon butty shop.

• Nostalgic
• Comforted
• Excited
• Satisfaction
• Gratitude
• Happiness
• Greed
• Desire
• Love (the love of bacon!)

The best tip I can give you is sit down with a pen and pad, and write down every possible emotion a client could feel when using your kind of service or product. Good and bad. Work out the ones that apply most, then start describing your business that way in person, in writing, the whole time.

The experience you provide is the very essence of your brand; thinking beyond the functional into the true human emotional benefit is the hallmark of an entrepreneur.

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If you want to soup up your sales, and imbed the concepts of selling throughout your whole business, for for massive results drop me a line at bkench@thebusinessbooster.co.uk

Now read:  5 things will happen when you take a proactive view on business spending 

Image Credit: with huge thanks!

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