Motivate buyers with a 'heart and brain' narrative
How to motivate stakeholders with emotional enemies and economic incentives
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At Kayako, we wanted to burn down the existing concept of customer service software that was focused on ‘tickets’ and ‘departments’ using the all-too-often emotional experience of being treated like a ticket number, and getting passed around from pillar to post between teams.
We all know what that feels like, and we used this emotional enemy – a concept that our audience had experienced, could believe, and can rally against – to our advantage.
At the same time, we talked about how better customer service is not just a nice concept, but it’s good for business: improving your service builds loyalty, leading to repeat orders, and more word of mouth referrals that grow your business. This is the economic incentive that aligned with our audience: raising customer service from a cost-center to a profit-center.
See this framework in action
Hubspot: inbound marketing
Hubspot popularized inbound marketing. Display advertising, PPC, and tradeshows weren’t working as well as they did, but deep down, in our hearts, it’s not the way we want to win customers. We want customers to find our company organically and to like us so much they buy our product or service – we don’t want to spam them with hard sale messages or trick them into a purchase. The “old way” was an emotional enemy that passionate marketers and CEOs wanted to kill.
The inevitable upside – growing your business with more traffic and more leads that drive more sales with this new inbound marketing concept – is the economic incentive. Who’s going to say no to more sales?
Drift: forms suck
Drift has a similar story. Why on earth are we gating content, when we want people to actually read it? The emotional enemy is the form: we’ve all closed a page that asks us to complete a ten-field form before getting a one-page PDF. Is that the way we really want to treat our potential customers? Is that how we would want to be treated?
The economic incentive? “Connect your sales teams to future customers, now.” It aligns with their audience of marketers, sales leads, and CEO on the economic level against their incentives: more conversations equals more opportunities, which leads to higher (and faster!) revenue growth.