You have two choices during a sales cycle. You can present the benefits of your product or service and hope the buyer makes the right decision. Or you can gain a competitive advantage in the mind of your buyers by leveraging how their brains interpret and respond to specific stimuli. The choice is critical, and it’s a matter of life or death in a sales cycle.

 

Only one of these methods uses human psychology to generate a powerful emotional reaction to your offering. It’s called the contrast principle. Without it, your buyers will form their own views about your product or service, and you’ll lose the opportunity to control the outcome by influencing their emotions.

 

How Contrast Highlights Differentiation to Improve Sales Results

The human brain is hardwired to be on high alert and react to contrast. An area of the brain called the amygdala is constantly looking for exceptions to what it expects. Then it produces a potent positive or negative emotional reaction to the unexpected stimuli. This is often the reason we break out into laughter or cry uncontrollably. Once you understand how to harness this emotional power using contrast, you’ll start seeing opportunities to leverage it everywhere, from sales presentations to marketing collateral.

 

Contrast Provides Clarity

No matter what you’re selling, your customer ultimately wants to know one thing: what’s in it for them? In other words, what will their life look like after they purchase your product, compared to what it looks like now? Maybe their costs will go down or their market share will go up. Maybe they’ll have more time on their hands or they’ll have a happier team. Whatever the benefit is, your job is to make it crystal clear using contrast. In this case, you want to paint a vivid before-and-after picture where the differences are so stark that it strikes a psychological chord.

 

Another highly effective way to influence your buyer using contrast is to conjure up two scenarios in your buyer’s imagination. Use well-researched pain points and descriptive language to compare what doing business with you vs. the competition will be like. If you can activate the amygdalas of your audience with unexpected stimuli, you can elicit emotional resonance that sticks with them. Selling suddenly becomes a lot easier because you’re pulling a proven psychological lever. That’s the beauty of contrast. 

 

Contrast Amplifies Value

Now that you know buyers’ brains are triggered by contrast and develop a positive or negative emotional response, you can use that information to emphasize the value of any product or service. One technique is to highlight the contrast between you and your competitors. Armed with effective research and the right presentation, invite your customer to directly compare your service with a key competitor whose offering isn’t as robust.

 

Let’s say your service offers 24/7 support, and your competition offers support during business hours only. That’s an incredible value that any customer would appreciate, but the knowledge of that benefit may not be enough to get your target audience over the mental hurdle of what it takes to switch providers. However, you can put the contrast principle into action by walking the buyer through two detailed versions of a future late-night emergency scenario, one where they went with your service, and one where they stayed with your competitor. Now your buyer’s brain is forming a strong emotional connection that can override any previous hesitation. And it didn’t cost you a dime. All you had to do was use your knowledge of contrast.

 

But It Won’t Happen by Accident

To enable differentiation using the contrast principle, you have to be deliberate. You have to present critical differences, either side by side or one right after the other. Hoping your buyer will discover your differentiators on their own won’t cut it. It takes research and experience to optimize the use of contrast in any go-to-market (GTM) strategy. 

 

You can explain the benefits and value of your product or service all day long, but if you don’t actively build contrast into your GTM strategy, you’ll miss key sales opportunities—and the revenue that comes with them.

 

Motum is a market leader in revenue performance consulting, working with clients from large enterprises to entrepreneurial organizations across five continents to create sustainable revenue growth and develop an “unfair” competitive advantage for the long term. Please connect with us on LinkedIn and get services details at www.motum-us.com.