Every time a customer buys from you they are taking a risk. If you reduce or eliminate those risks, it makes it far easier for them to do business with you and your sales will soon grow dramatically.
If you’re good at what you do, offer good products, etc. there shouldn’t be any problem in guaranteeing what you sell. It’s critical that you or your product is good. If you don’t have a good product or service or you get lots of complaints about it, you need to solve that problem before you start using risk reversal.
Here is an example of risk reversal from a horse dealing business…
A couple wanted to purchase a pony for their daughter. They went to one dealer who said if the pony she chose wasn’t right, she could bring it back and exchange it for another. The price of the pony was £1,000. This is commonplace amongst horse dealers and is their idea of risk reversal. The customer is still locked into having to get another pony from that dealer.
Compare this to what a horse dealer who really understands the full extent of risk reversal…
The dealer says…
This dealer knows the pony is a good pony, there is a trial period and there’s nothing to pay until completely happy. The dealer also understands that once the daughter gets the pony home, she’s going to fall in love with it. Even if the price was more at £1,250, which one do you think the parents would choose to buy from? That’s the power of great risk reversal.
Proper risk reversal gives you the competitive advantage to outsell your competitors many times over.
Another example of fantastic risk reversal is a publication that offers to give a refund and buy you a subscription to a competitor’s publication if you are dissatisfied with them. It’s fair to say that the publisher has a good product and are very successful at what they do. Their product may be similar to competitors but by providing such a guarantee they are completely differentiating themselves from those competitors.
The additional benefit of offering such guarantees is that it makes people think you must be good, or you wouldn’t offer them.
To find your guarantee(s), look at what your customers want to hear, that no one else dares to make and then fulfil it better than any of your competitors.
Think about what your clients get and want from your service, how they would suffer if they didn’t have it, what common objections, or irritations they may have about your industry. Then work out how you can guarantee this for them.
Common objections are cost and they won’t get the result they are expecting.
Also look at what guarantees your competitors are offering. Often they aren’t but if they are, just figure out how you can make your guarantees even better.
A few other examples of guarantees…The more you offer, the more meaningful the guarantee. For example, with the last guarantee it would mean more if the customer didn’t have to pay until the 30 days were up and you paid the return carriage. How far you go or is sensible will vary from business to business and what you are selling but the further you go, the more impact it has.
Guarantees make customers feel comfortable doing business with you and make it easy for them to do business with you.
To add credibility to your guarantee it helps to explain why you are offering it.
You can’t guarantee that you’ll never get a customer take advantage but what has been proven time and time again is that if you offer a good product or service the additional sales from offering proper risk reversal will outweigh any downside many times over.
Powerful risk reversal can increase sales by 300% and the attrition rate will rarely exceed 5%.
The vast majority of people buy for perfectly good reasons. They want a good product, not to take advantage of your guarantees.
Trainee Development – Platinum
Practicing Certificate – Development
