No matter what business you are in, overcoming skepticism is a very important thought that has to go into your marketing efforts. This is so important. And why should you learn on how to overcome skepticism? It’s very simple. If you don’t you won’t make sales and if you don’t make sales you don’t have a thriving business.
The 3 Things Needed For A Sale To Happen
People need three things before they will buy from you:
- The first thing is they have to WANT what you offer.
- They have to have the money, the disposable income to purchase what you are offering.
- They have to believe you’ll deliver on your claims.
So if you came to me and said, “Look, Val, I know you really a nice little place that you can retreat to in the winter so you can get out of New York, when it’s cold and go somewhere nice. So I’m going to sell you this awesome piece of property down in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s great, and it’s only going to cost you $3,000.”
And I’m going to say, “Wait a second here. I’m skeptical. This sounds too good to be true. Can you show me that? Can you overcome my skepticism?” They’ll be like, “No, just trust me. Just trust me.” I’m not going to buy that because I don’t believe them.
So you have to make your claims are believable otherwise you won’t get a sale even if somebody wants what you offer and they have the money to purchase it. So that’s where most of the sales are lost is on that third thing — is they do not overcome skepticism. That’s why it’s so important that you learn this.
So what’s the easiest way to overcome skepticism?
1. Enter the Guarantee
By far the easiest way is with a strong guarantee. This is absolutely the best thing. I talk to clients, and man, if you use a guarantee in industries that don’t normally use guarantees, you just kill it. The best kind of guarantees are tied to specific results. So let me show you what I mean.
Example:
You just launched a product called 4-Minute Squeeze Page. There’s a couple good illustrations on how do an effective guarantee. I do this. This is how you can tie it together: “This package comes with a double your money back guarantee. If, in the next 56 days,” — a very specific number — “you can show me one squeeze page you created that took you longer than 4 minutes to create and it didn’t convert at 25 percent or better, just let me know and I’ll send you double your money back.”
So in this example you can make the guarantee bold. Tying it to a specific result is key here.
–If you can’t make it, if you can’t create a squeeze page in 4 minutes or less and have it convert at 25 percent, just show me in the next 56 days.–
So it’s tied to a specific result. We are not saying guaranteed your money back. Instead we are guaranteeing you’re going to have this amazing result or your money back. Make it part of the opening copy. The goal is to make it stand out with the double your money back guarantee.
All of these things are super important because it’s absolutely going to sell out, especially if you are in an industry that typically does do a money back guarantee.
So when you’re creating your guarantees, you should do the same thing. And I learned this from Gary Halbert. So what you’re going to want to do is find all the great ads that have the best guarantees you can find that tie them to specific results and really stand out. Then what you’re going to do is you’re going to, whenever you have to write copy, you just look at those as examples. And pretty soon you’ll be able to write it in your head like I do now.
2. Enter the Testimonials
The second thing that you can do to overcome skepticism is create testimonials, and these are in order. Be mindful of where you are using testimonials, limit places where people have already seen your testimonials in the past. I don’t use a lot of testimonials when I launch to my list because they’ve already been exposed to my testimonials in the past. But if you’re starting with a cold crowd, it’s always good to have them.
Sometimes if it’s going to delay you from getting it out there, just put it out there anyway and then get the testimonials later. Testimonials guarantee that you’re going to help you overcome skepticism. So the more, the better. So if you get too many, figure out another way to do it.
I also use multiple modalities to make my testimonials stand out as proof. In one of my sales letters I show 16 pages. All are testimonials. And the other thing about testimonials is you want to make them look like they’re real, too. That’s something that I forgot to put in here, but the “realer” the better. The more authentic, the better. The more relative to the product your launching is even better.
People can tell I did not make these up. It’d be very hard for me to make these testimonials up because they can tell they’re taken right from my social media pages, and I snap shot them into my marketing pieces. This looks a lot better than just writing them and reproducing them on the page.
So I did this again with my Internet Marketing product, where here I took the testimonials, and I snapped them from my inbox in my Gmail account. In this case — boom. It’s right off of my e-mail Gmail account; so they got it.
The second thing here is I put these headlines above them so people could actually see the products. So if you look at it — the more, the better; the more authentic the better; and it’s optimized for prospects that won’t read the sales page, they just skim it.. aka Skimmers. So even if you don’t read the testimonials, which a lot of people don’t do — ” So you’re going to see that this kicks some butt just by optimizing it for the skimmers without even having to read it.
3. Enter the Gathering
You will need to create a testimonial campaign, if you’re going to use them in your marketing pieces. So what you can do is before the launch you can ask for feedback on social media, your email list or by phone tel-seminar.
Find people interested in whatever you’re creating a product for and say, “Hey, I’m going to be offering this product, and I’m going to sell it in the future. But first I wanted to get people to have review copies. Would you be willing to give me some feedback on this product — what you liked about it,” and so on and so forth. “I’ll be giving this away to five or ten people.”
So when your product’s done, you give it away. You get some feedback and then you ask them once they give you your feedback, “Can I edit this and put it into a testimonial and put it on the site? Would that be okay?” And a lot of them will say yes — 8 out of 10 of them say, “Okay. Yeah, sure. No problem.” That’s how you get testimonials. It’s the easiest thing in the world.
What I personally like to do now because I favor speed is I launch it in a public format. So in this case you could either launch it for free on the blog and then have people post their feedback right on the blog to get the second half of the report or a bonus, or you could simply launch it in a forum where people actually can reply in a public format on the forum by giving you their feedback right there in the launch.
Or this is another one that I do. After the launch I send out an auto-responder asking for feedback. I basically say “What results have you gotten so far with __________?”
4. The Google eMail Trick
So with the product you created you could say “What results have you gotten so far? Could you please tell me how it’s helped?” So I send that out four or five days after their purchase because it forces them to consume, but at the same time a lot of people will send me e-mails. They’ll say, “Wow, Valerie I did this. I did this. I did this.” And then instant testimonial. In fact, I get so many testimonials I don’t even really use them anymore. There’s just too many of them. I actually have a little tab in my Gmail account here for testimonials. If you implement this strategy very very soon you will have more than you can use as well.
And the last thing is you can create a bribe. You can simply say, “Hey, I want your feedback. I want to get your testimonial, and if you give it to me, I’ll give you something special like a free report or something for free.” In my case I usually will give them 1-2 free 20 minute coaching sessions as a way to really get to know the needs of people in my niche. So get your testimonials. That’s how you overcome skepticism.
5. Anticipate and Prepare
Another very important thing for overcoming skepticism is anticipating it. I learned this from Eugene Schwartz. He had a headline that said “Whoever heard of 17,000 blooms from a single plant?” In this case he could get 17,000 roses to bloom from a single plant, but that sounds so incredulous that you’re like “Yeah, right.” If you just came out and say “17,000 blooms,” they’re going to say “Okay. I don’t believe it. I’m skeptical.”
So you anticipate it with the copy your right.
Example:
First the headline — “How to Write a 400-Word Article in 7 Minutes or Less Including Research and Proofreading.”
Here we go — perfect.
“Dear fellow article writer, did you watch the video above? It’s hard to believe so many people would send me such raving unsolicited testimonials about my product.” It’s hard to believe — I am immediately addressing their skepticism and then actually go right into my pitch on the guarantee.
By anticipating it you’re able to deal with it and you’re reading their minds so you’re gaining rapport with them.
6. The Smaller Commitment
The other thing you can do is start with a small commitment. This is great for overcoming skepticism. People are generally willing to suspend their skepticism if you’re only asking them for $7, $17, or $27, not $97 or $297 or $1,000. So if you could start with a small commitment and deliver on it, then people are going to be less skeptical in the future. I made a business out of this. I sell a lot of front-end products, and then I move those customers up the ladder to make bigger commitments later because I know I can deliver more value than what I can deliver in a $50 product. But I don’t try to sell them my $800 coaching program right off the bat. No, first I start with a small commitment to let them know that, yes, I’m a real human being; that yes, I deliver on what I say; yes, I over-deliver on what I say; and yes, if you go deeper you’re just going to get more and more and more of my good stuff.
So that’s the best way to start with overcoming skepticism. You can do that for free. You can do that with lead generation. You offer them something for free that’s very good, and then you say “Look, if you want to go deeper on this, we really deliver even more value to these people.” And so that’s a great way to overcome skepticism.
7. Share Personal Results
Share personal results! Again, I have a saying called “proof before product.” That simply means I don’t create a product unless I have proof for it in advance. So almost all my products are created this way. So I basically share personal results. One of the products that has sold pretty good for me is my 45 Days to $100k, and that was simply my whole story. It was basically proof. This is how I overcame skepticism. I share my story with my clients.
Then I talk about how I got started in insurance and then went to internet marketing and then to real estate. I can now almost print money at whim. This path allowed me to make certain money, which allowed me to create these products. Then I created these products; so people wanted to know how I created them. So I showed them how I created products. As simple as that..
But the fact is your own personal results are going to be a huge factor in overcoming skepticism, sharing your story and expressing to others your desire to help them. If you don’t have personal results, there’s two options:
- You either go out and get them and then create the product,
- Or, you make somebody else the “star” of the copy. In this case you find somebody else, you interview them, and you share their results.
- Or you find public domain. You take that person who created the product initially and use their results as leverage.
But you’ve got to share some results, especially in a lot of these competitive markets if you’re going to overcome people’s skepticism.
8. Use Modalities
Finally, use multiple modalities. These are basically all the things that you can use: the written word, audio, video, charts, and pictures.
Now I’m not big on charts because they just take too long for me, but it’s something to consider if you have a chart in your hand.
So the written word is the things that you talk about your guarantee; you talk about your testimonials and stuff. But for example, what’s stopping you from taking somebody, calling them on the phone, and getting their testimonial? I do this a lot, especially with my higher-end coaching clients. I get them on the phone, record their testimonial. Also what’s to stop you from making Power Points of what they’re saying so you have video testimonials from everybody? Nothing is stopping you. This is a really good exercise, and you can do this very quickly.
So then you can put the written testimonial underneath the video, if you had it transcribed; or you could have the audio and the video playing with the written words inside the video, and the audio is playing so they can hear it while they read it and while they see it in front of them. That’s a very powerful tool for engaging them on multiple modalities, and it’s going to make you whatever proof you have to overcome their skepticism even more powerful.
The same thing is true with guarantees. You can talk your guarantee out and record it — good. You can do it on video so people can watch as you speak your guarantee — very good. And then you could put the written word next to it, which is what I like to do, and that’s powerful.
Pictures, charts, videos, audio, and the written word are great. Anything you have for proof, you can make it even better if you somehow figure out how to present it in the written word and audio or video, a chart, or pictures. And all of these things together will overcome skepticism.
In closing: As you noticed, I don’t use just one; I use all of these. I tie a strong guarantee with straight testimonials. I anticipate their skepticism. I typically ask them for a smaller commitment up front before I sell them something big on the back end. And then I use my own personal results to fuel it, and I tie all these in with multiple modalities.
That’s all you have to do, and that’s how you overcome skepticism. Very simple, but extremely effective.
Put it to use and share with me your results.
If you enjoyed this article and got value from it please comment below. Also please feel free to reach out and connect with me on LinkedIn.. You can’t miss me! “The lady with the Red Dress”. https://www.linkedin.com/in/valthecoach
Cheers,
_____________________
Valerie Adams, CMA / Investor, Coach & Mentor
If this article is helpful please like and leave a comment below. For more information on starting a career as a real estate investor please contact me so we can set up an appointment to discuss.
Valerie@ConversionMarketingExpertz.com
(951) 268-4305
Valerie "The Coach" Adams 