How do you reframe efficiency so that the savings or benefits of a given project help your prospect satisfy some other goal or desire? If your prospect is family-oriented, it’s likely that they value leisure time and want to maximize the hours that they have away from work – hours that can be spent enjoying time with their family. You may be able to reframe the benefits of your efficiency project so they resonate with this value by comparing the amount of money your project would save with the cost of fun family activities (e.g., vacations, tickets to see movies or shows, etc.).
One of the best examples I’ve heard of this kind of reframing comes from a top-performing sales professional in Connecticut. For the sake of anonymity, we’ll call him Bruce. Bruce told me, “You know, I use the same winning sales strategies that I use at work when I go home to my wife. My wife was recently interested in buying a station wagon for the family, and she wanted the Subaru Outback (which is far from the cheapest alternative). She told me that she’d always admired the Subaru from afar and that she really wanted to own one.”
So, Bruce said, “Honey, that’s a really expensive car. We could certainly get by with that used Saturn station wagon we saw at CarMax the other day.” She said, “Well, I drive the kids around all day. I'm in the car a lot and I really want a Subaru.” Bruce responded, “It’s $60 more a month…” She said, “That’s fine. It’s just $2 a day – not a big deal.”
Before I continue with this story, let me stop and remind you that people don’t make decisions; they make comparisons. The minute she heard $60, it’s not surprising that her mind immediately compared it to “$2 a day... that’s half of what I spend on a cup of coffee at Starbucks every morning.”
Bruce, being a sales professional (as opposed to a salesperson) says to his wife, “Wait a second, honey. You know, we’ve been looking at getting a Jet Skifor the family and if we actually bought one, the payment on it would be about $60 a month. So, which would you rather have, the Subaru Outback and no Jet Ski, or the more reasonably priced station wagon and the Jet Ski so our kids can learn to do watersports at our lake house?”
As soon as he reframed that $60 from, “Eh, it’s only $2 a day,” to “Wow, that’s a filmable moment every weekend with my kids on a Jet Ski... memories that we’ll have forever,” you can imagine what car they agreed to drive home the following weekend... and you can also imagine what it was pulling: that Jet Ski on a trailer!
Now, this story isn’t about an efficiency sales situation; however, it certainly underscores the fact that comparisons really do drive decisions. It’s your job to frame each comparison optimally so that the most likely outcome is a thumbs-up for your proposed project.
