FEAR Products: Not to be Scared Of!
Nobody wants to buy a product that they’re afraid of.
And the good news is that there’s nothing to be scared about FEAR products.
FEAR products are not going to lose you money.
They’re not bad for you.
And they’re not bad for your customers, either.
In fact, FEAR products are going to help you increase the profit you make from your sales. And the great news is that they can do it really, really easily.
Let’s break it down…
FEAR products are products on your quotes and proposals that let your customers know what they are NOT getting rather than what they ARE.
They let your customers know what they are missing out on.
Emotion in B2B Sales
We’ve all heard of FOMO – Fear Of Missing Out – and using FEAR products translates this largely consumer and social-media focused emotion into a business-to-business sales environment.
So, how we do this in a sensible, professional and seemingly non-emotive way?
I say seemingly non-emotive because in a B2B sale, we don’t want to overly lean on emotion. Buying decisions tend to get flagged up to finance/procurement/management teams for approval and who themselves tend not to have so much of an emotional buying gene!
However, it’s a generally accepted rule that 80% of a buying decision is based on emotion, and 20% on logic.
When you share with your prospects and customers exactly what they are missing out on and you make it an active decision for them to say ‘no’ to, you trigger an emotional response. You trigger the buyer’s FOMO. And by doing this, you prompt them to consider the items/products that they are NOT getting and use this to increase your potential to sell.
If for no other reason, using FEAR products mean that your sales reps can’t forget to mention them!
A Practical Example
Let’s imagine a quote that you send a customer for a single product – say it’s the Espresso Machine Deluxe… Here’s your quote line item:
1 x Espresso Machine Deluxe $3,495
Now when we dig into the details of this machine and a typical sale, there are a few options that buyers can swap-in or swap-out and there are a few cross-sell products as well.
Ordinarily, you’d trust your sales reps to ask the right questions to get these into the deal.
But, if your quotes displayed the options and cross-sells, explicitly listing out what your customer could be buying but is choosing not to, your quote would look more like this:
1 x Espresso Machine Deluxe: $3,495
- Basic Finish
- No installation assistance
- No ongoing support
- No spare knobs
By including a list of what your purchaser is missing out on, you give your buyer a really clear picture of what they are buying – there’s no ambiguity or mis-interpretations on what to expect
And, the ‘missing’ options interrupt their normal thought process to trigger a FOMO response
Just look at the two options above again… it’s really difficult to ignore what you’re missing out on.
Introducing these ‘missing’ options turns the buyer/seller conversation on its head. Now your buyer is asking you whether they should have (in this example) installation assistance. How much is it? How difficult is the machine to set up? Why would I need it? Do most customers buy it?
The FOMO buyer is now giving you a really easy way to improve the deal and sell them the items that you have highlighted they are missing out on.
Using FEAR Products in FlexPricer
You can use FEAR products in Flexpricer by utilising the Simple Product Configurator – just create the ‘missing’ products and add these, together with your extracted options, add-ons and cross-sells as Group Relationships associated with the master project.
