Using Seduction in B2B Marketing

Good marketing is a lot luck the art of seduction. Convincing a new business to purchase your product or service is a lot like trying to win over a potential suitor. All the pieces of the puzzle are the same. There are two parties, one wants to convince the other of their value. There is a goal in mind and there are powerful emotions. To put it another way, seduction follows the same process as marketing;

1. Make the prospect feel the need to buy the product or service
2. Make the offer attractive
3. Use emotions to engage the prospect
4. Make the prospect comfortable with buying the product or service, reduce fears
5. Escalate the prospect towards a completed transaction.

In the world of “professonal” seduction, there are set patterns and plays that have been accepted as the best ways to attract a member of the opposite sex. One of the leaders in this world is Neil Strauss, who wrote the bestseller “The Game”. Using the main ideas behind his book, you can see how a business can use the rules of attraction to pursuade a new customer to buy from them.

Pre-Game

Like any good project, good preparation prevents poor performance. Understanding what you are trying to sell, and how you are going to sell it goes a long way to building a marketing program that delivers results. In this stage of the marketing process, an organisation would look at past sales, the competition, the current market, their budget and their current product or service to build an offer that will be attractive to potential clients. In the book “The Game, ” the author went through a make-over process, shaving his head, having his ears pinned back, and joining a gym. Businesses could also follow this lead, but rebranding, or reinvigourating their marketing programs.

Select a Target

Targeting is the most important step in the marketing process. Finding and understanding your customer will allow you to build a thorough picture of their mindset and desires. In seduction terms this would mean a quick scan of the bar or venue to find the girl or boy you are going to target. In marketing terms this means going through your customer list, looking at lists of potential new customers and narrowing down the field. Targets can be selected by demographic, by industry, by buying location, by budget etc. The main aim is to narrow the field to an acceptable number of targets that all have something in common. You also want to be able to talk to the target customer as if it is a face to face meeting.

Approach and Open

The seduction community says you have 3 seconds to approach and start a conversation with a girl. This should be no surprise, because first impressions are the most important. In order to attract their attention, PUAs (Pick Up Artists) use “peacocking”, a method of wearing outrageous or loud clothing to attract attention. In marketing, you have 3 seconds to grab and maintain the attention of the customer. A businesses “peacocking” might be using outstanding design and original marketing. This also means using a headline that will interest your customer. The best headlines are short, punchy, use simple language and convey the most important piece of value of the product or service.

Demonstrate Value

The best description of what constitutes good value, is adapted from this website

1. There is a clear distinction between, and balance of, customer benefits and the offer.
2. Value involves the psychological and physiological effects of both the benefits and the offer.
3. Good value harnesses the difference between surface attraction and deeper neurology based attraction.
4. Value includes practical applications and call to action to increase the overall odds of converting.

In order to demonstrate clear value to your prospect, you need to show what they will get, how it will improve their lives and how they will feel by purchasing from you. Demonstrating value is also showing that other people have bought from you before, that you have delivered on your promise, and you are not going to let the customer down. This might come in the form of a testimonial, a review from a magazine, or just some facts about how much of a difference your product makes to people.

Disarm the Obstacles

There are many reasons for a customer to not buy from you. In a B2B transaction this might be no previous business relationship, that you are new to the market or that they are “not looking for” your product right now. Having pre-prepared lines to counter these situations are important in telemarketing and face to face selling. In the PUA world, this would be equivilant to being “not really looking for a boyfriend“. To translate this into a business context might be the prospect being “happy with their current provider“. To counter this situation you don’t want to bash their current provider, you don’t want to claim to be better either. You want to put the seed of doubt in their mind, and show you have value in your product. Something like “Does your current provider give you XYZ? Because if when we work with our other clients, not only do we offer ABC but also XYZ“, where you fill in the blanks with your core values.

Isolate the Target

Meeting face to face is an important part of the buying process. We more easily buy from people than we do an automated machine or a website. In the seduction community, moving the target into a position where you are one on one reduces the opportunities for the bond to be broken. In a sales environment, this would mean trying to get a one on one with the prospect, without the distraction of being in the office and around other people. This also means isolating

Create an Emotional Connection

Again, here is paraphrasing from a pick up routine, applied to a B2B transaction.

Find out if the prospect has any business problem or desire in business they feel “passionate” about. Most likely, these may be their sales team, not spending enough time with their customers, cash flow, gaining new customers, anything they would do even if they did it for free.

Ask them “what’s important to you in doing (activity)?” “What do you feel about(activity/business)?” At this point, you are looking to recreate the feeling of doing that activity, and moving them into the states they feel while doing the activity.

Then, feedback these nominalized “feelings” and link these to your product. “What would it be like if we could get you feeling different? ” “How would you feel if we could remove that frustration?”

Emotional connections in business are rare, and hard to achieve. However the goal of all marketing is to get the prospect to recreate the feeling they would have when using your product or service. If they can see themselves using your product, and they can feel themselves in that position, you are most of the way to completing the sale.

Blast Last-Minute Resistance

Most rational people know when they are being sold to. Sometimes it is obvious when someone is trying to sell us something, eg telemarketing, and other times it is less obvious, word of mouth etc. Instinctively people will throw up conscious and subconscious reasons to NOT buy from you. In the case of the really desirable TV or car, the nagging feeling that you can’t afford the purchase is the subconscious urge to not buy that product. It is the job of the marketing professional to smooth the way through those rough waters. In the seduction community, disarming the obstacles might be dealing with a girl who wants to leave with her friends, or getting the guy to move to a quieter location. In  the marketing process this would be focussing on the value of the product to the customer, offering payment plans and guarantees to reduce anxiety or giving them a money back guarantee.

In the pick up world, targets almost always go for the person who isn’t completely available to her. In the business world, we always want to deal with partners who are busy with other clients too, because it shows they are valuable. We all want something we can’t have. We want what there is a limited supply of, because by the sheer fact there’s limited supply of it means it must be good. Many pick-up artists know this so here are a few things they do that can be applied to marketing;

* Always be the first one to end the conversation, if on the phone

* Set a time constraint on any offer, or for the conversation

* Say the product will only be available after a certain date

As you can see there are many ways good marketing is like seduction. Going through the websites on seduction unearths a great range of methods for breaking down a prospect and turning them into a client.

Creative Development is a marketing and web design agency based in Sydney.