What is Better for Your Business to Sell with Pressure or Not?

pressure

As a first advise I want to give you is to sell thoughtfully, not with the pressure. The question from this title was in my mind probably from one year ago. I am a not big fan of the pressure of every type of activities because I have worked previously where everything must be accomplished with the pressure. But, when I talk with some people with experience, they tell me that every sale that they made must be made with the constant pressure of their potential customers. Wrong, wrong, wrong…

On the other hand, if I take the place of the potential customers, I wouldn’t like to be under constant pressure.

Selling With Pressure

What is the process of this selling technique?

You have a list of the potential customers. Let’s say that you have targeted some potential customers and with your marketing and selling technique your job is to transform those potential customers into real buyers. This transformation as a part of the pressure technique is made by pressure on the decision-making process of your potential customers. In some cases the results can bring the success, but sometimes not.

What does the pressure mean?

I will use a physical definition of pressure from Wikipedia:

Pressure is the force per unit area applied in a direction perpendicular to the surface of an object.

In this physical definition what I can extract for this purpose is:

  • Pressure is a force. In business vocabulary, this is a marketing and selling force compatible with marketing and selling activities of the business.
  • This force is applied to the surface of an object. This is an important part. The object in our case is the potential customer and surface of that object are human senses for what they are hearing, what they are seeing and their touch.

With this selling technique business uses different marketing and selling channels to make a pressure on the potential customer’s senses.

What Results Can You Achieve?

Because with the pressure potential customers will be constantly bombarded through different media (as a phone, mail, e-mail, TV, radio, social media, etc.) they have two choices or two different decisions:

  • Become a buyer in order to escape a future pressure from your company. This is not something with a higher level of probability, especially today when customers have unlimited choices. If they feel the pressure, they will not be friendly to the businesses that make such a pressure to them.
  • They will try to find the ways to escape from the pressure. They will block and not answer the phone calls, they will change TV channel, they will pay less attention for mails in their mailboxes, they will not open and will delete unwanted e-mails, will ignore such a social media profiles, etc.

In these days when customers are more cleaver, and they use different technology to escape different pressures from different businesses the second decisions will be more likely. Who wants a pressure? Probably, nobody is the answer to this question.

My Recent Experience

I want to share my recent experience when I must decide what technique to use. I was contacted by one potential customer about my services for their business. They come to my office, and I give him an offer with different service levels and prices. When we finished the meeting, they tell me that they will think about my offers and will contact me if they choose to use one of my services.

After one month, my business partner tells me that we must to call him, or send them an e-mail because they cannot decide to buy if we don’t bother them. In that time simply I just don’t want to use the pressure technique of selling. So, my decision was to continue to wait for their answer. In that time, one of my clients are seen by that potential buyer, and they asked them about what is their experience from working with my company. The testimonials from my current client were crucial to that potential client to become my buyer.

What Was the Process that I have Used Here?

  • First, they found me somehow and contact me.
  • I give him promise and offer where I put my services and price that was higher than my competition.
  • They add to my promise and offer credentials from my current client.
  • They decide to buy my services.

To get found from potential customers is the most important part of this process. These are inbound marketing techniques for which I write in Inbound Marketing – Marketing for Today and Future. They found me probably from my blog on Macedonian language (Pretpriemac).

You must give your promise related to what you can do for your customers and that you can really do this. But, the promise is not enough for today’s customers. They need credentials that are the simple proof of your promise. Without credentials probably they will not decide to buy from my business.

Yes, this is a simple but very powerful process: to get found, to give claims and credentials and wait for the answers.