With all the demands on our time, it’s not surprising that for the most part, most of us value our routines and aren’t about to embrace every conceivable new possibility that comes our way.
We’re willing to examine options when we’re excited about a new product or service, or frustrated by what we have. But if we’re enjoying our current condition (or disliking alternatives), we will be in no mood to change, much less spend any time listening to a sales pitch. “Give us more of the same, and don’t bother us with the newfangled stuff,” we say. Like the worker who prefers his familiar job to the uncertainties of promotion, we resist any unfamiliarity. We would rather spend our time preserving and building on what we have than exploring what we could be doing instead.
When buyers aren’t ready to change, they see the abundance of choices in today’s markets as a potential disruption of their status quo. New suppliers aren’t going to get their attention unless they recognize and find ways to deal with that problem.
One alternative, of course, is simply to give the customers more of what they have been getting. But even in businesses firmly rooted in the bottom half of the matrix—commuter railroads, for instance, or heating oil suppliers—there are, in fact, two ways to persuade customers to accept change.
The first method is to ease into it: Don’t put pressure on the customers‘ time, make no sudden moves, disrupt them as little as possible, and gradually nudge them to the realization that yes, there is merit in making a move. Automatic payment by bank transfer, for instance, would make commuting or feeding the furnace even more hassle-free, and change-averse consumers can be persuaded to try it.
These customers respond better to gentle and gradual changes than they do to drastic ones. A lot of the prevailing wisdom about customer service and nurturing repeat buying patterns is based on this concept: the mantra “Make it easy for the customers to do business with you, empathize with and delight them, and above all, don’t rock the boat.”
This is the logic underlying the no-haggle approach to selling cars that has gained popularity in the past decade. The idea was to appeal to people who disliked the usual experience at a car dealer’s showroom so much that they would drive their old car for a few more years rather than undergo it. To win these customers, companies such as Saturn and dealers such as CarMax and AutoNation offered fixed prices, so that customers wouldn’t have to spend time, effort, and psychic capital to negotiate a deal. This method also minimized disruptions and intrusions on the showroom floor, again helping to soothe customers‘ nerves.
Many clients welcomed this civilized approach and rewarded these companies with their business. But it was not an unqualified success. When the new dealers’ sales numbers were compared with those of the more assertive old-style showrooms, the latter typically did better, primarily because, though the customers in the low-pressured settings enjoyed the experience, they took longer to decide. The conventional dealers knew how to exert pressure to get wavering clients to make up their minds.
The second way to persuade reluctant customers to accept change is to blast them through it: Make it imperative for them to act, then vide them through the process with as much speed as possible. “Just get it over and done with” is their watchword. A dentist’s patient, for instance, knows that having a tooth pulled will hurt only briefly and will soon be forgotten. Customers tend to approach buying a new computer system in the same fatalistic spirit.
Even the most change-averse customers will endure intrusions if they are perceived as inevitable, sporadic, and brief. Still, a begrudging assent to a onetime big change doesn’t mean that a steady stream of disruptions will be tolerated.
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