Hard Sell or Soft Sell – What’s the Difference?

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?

This is an excerpt (pg 41) from our recent #1 besteller, The Heart of Marketing: Love Your Customers and They Will Love you Back.

There are many differences between soft and hard sell, and we will detail them as we answer the other questions in this book. But here we want to describe a core difference from which all the other differences follow.

It’s the difference between emotional connection and mental technique.

An Emotional Decision

A bottom line truth in marketing and sales is that—people buy emotionally and justify logically. In other words, buying is fundamentally an emotional decision not a mental act.

To illustrate the power of this difference we turn to the world of acting where there are two major schools of thought about how an actor can best move an audience with his/her performance.

Method Acting teaches actors to draw their performances out of their real life experiences. This leads to actually feeling the emotions that the character feels in the situation of the play or film. Why? Because if the actor is literally experiencing what the character goes through the chance that an audience will believe the performance and be moved emotionally will be high, because the performance will be authentic and, therefore, believable.

Technique Acting relies on the application of a set of techniques—vocal modulation, gesture, line readings, etc.—that give the appearance of what the character is going through without the actor actually experiencing it. The risk with this approach is that it lowers the chance that the audience will be moved because it can’t be as believable. The audience is watching a mental performance rather than something emotionally real so they can’t become deeply involved.

Now, how can these two approaches be used in looking at a sales document, say an online sales letter?

Believability

The goal of any of your sales letters is to emotionally convince your readers that the product you’re offering will do what your letter claims it will do and that they will receive all the benefits you promise. You want the letter to be so believable that it moves your readers to take the action they want to take and you want them to take and buy your product.

Given that, which approach do you think has the best chance for success?

A sales letter that comes directly out of your sincere and authentic experience, filled with the feelings you actually feel about the product or service—whether your own or an affiliate’s offer. Your reader can feel your feelings through your words.

Or a letter that’s been written using techniques that are supposed to give the appearance of your authenticity and genuine expression—a letter at arm’s length.

The Internet is jam-packed with pages and pages of “techniqued” documents that, although they work for the hard sell mindset, they are a death knell for the soft sell consumer. They feel like  hype because they are.

Only Mentally Involved

There’s an emotional distance—many times an emotional absence—inherent in a technique letter. That’s because the writer is only mentally involved. It’s only an appearance. To get beyond that distance the writer has to overstate, embroider, bend the truth, or create gimmicks to compensate for the lack of genuine feeling.

In order to stimulate action, the writer has to rely on and impose an inauthentic urgency— “Orders are coming in like crazy. Don’t miss out!”

Or an inauthentic scarcity—“You won’t be able to get this (product) after midnight tonight. SO  ACT NOW!”

For the soft sell customer, reading this kind of copy leaves a bad taste because it’s mostly emotional manipulation.

Let Your Feelings Come Through

When you let your real feelings come through your sales promotions—whether written or spoken—you have a high probability of creating a real connection with your prospective customers because you are believable. Your genuine emotional experience is the basis of your authenticity and your offer. And your open, direct, and honest expression is the basis of the connection both you and your reader are looking for. You won’t need to manipulate because you speak from your heartfelt authority.

And why is that so important?

Because people buy emotionally!

With All Due Respect  . . .

Neither you nor Ed understand what Soft Sell means. You both have been so steeped in the hard-sell, aggressive point of view that everything is interpreted through that lens. So, of course upsells and asking for the order can only be understood as hard, when, in fact, that is only one way of marketing — and we submit, an approach that is dying out as Internet marketing continues its exponential growth.

Judith & Jim
http://www.theheartofmarketing.com