Archive for urgency
Hard Sell or Soft Sell – What’s the Difference?
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I came across this post today by Michel Fortin and wrote the following. You can see the original post at http://www.marketersboard.com/fry-customers-tactic/
Jim
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Michel,
Ed Dale’s example misses the point entirely. There’s no conflict between Soft Sell and Upsell. As a Soft Sell marketer my wife, Judith, and I use upsells all the time. So it’s not the technique that is hard sell. It’s how you approach the customer that makes the difference.
In your piece you use words and phrases such as:
“Leaving an insane load of cash on the table.” What is insane about money? This is a term a lot of Internet marketers use as though it somehow describes some reality.
Yes it’s an image, but it’s also very hard in it’s point of view, to say nothing of a dreary cliche.
“Force a customer.” This has nothing to do with the technique of upselling. It has everything to do with the marketer’s dominant/submissive relation to the buyer. Any technique used with that relationship at its base is going to be hard. Instead of pointing to the technique, rather point to the marketer’s cynicism and lack or respect for human beings who happen, in this case, to be customers.
Several other example are — “churn and burn,” “hit them over the head,” “almost taunting you.” Why would anyone want to do business with someone who shows so little care and connection.
You also that you “believe that (the marketer) must ask for the order,” implying that asking for the order is somehow aggressive. That’s just plain wrong-headed. Asking for the order with respect and a sense of the emotional connection between you and the buyer is not aggressive, it is respectful of the human relation as fundamental to the transaction and that is NOT soft, but conscious and discerning.
How Does Soft Sell Differ from Hard Sell?
Hard Sell Urgency/Scarcity Leads to Death
Posted by: | CommentsSorry for this day-after-Thanksgiving darkness, but a major story on various Internet news sites this morning caught our attention making a powerful hard sell point:
Judith saw a Wal-Mart ad on AOL indicating a Black Friday sale.
The original meaning of the term “Black Friday”came from a market crash in September, 1869, when some financiers failed to corner the gold market. The crash was followed by a depression. So Black Friday came to generally mean a day when a public calamity occurs
More recently, the term Black Friday refers to the day after Thanksgiving during which retailers create discounted sales and make enough sales to put themselves “into the black ink.”
The Wal-Mart ad indicated that the sale would begin at 5 AM and last until 11AM that morning, and that prices would be seriously discounted during that window.
By limiting the buying time, Wal-Mart purposely manufactured urgency and ratcheted up the frenzy by limiting the discounts to only that period creating a manufactured scarcity.
And the result?
Wal-Mart shoppers break down the doors of a store on Long Island, NY, to rush in for their Black Friday discounts, and a worker is trampled to death.
