Humans have an inborn desire to make connections with groups, whether it’s through a formalized social club or an informal interest forum. Psychologists find that group members hold a blind loyalty to their associates. People impulsively place value on the thoughts and opinions of affiliates and blindly ignore the thoughts of others. Psychologists label this phenomenon of illogical preference as “ingroup bias.”
This tribal instinct is at work in the decision-making processes of every prospect. Marketing and sales professionals can either go with the flow of ingroup bias or swim upstream against it. Here’s how marketing and sales teams can harness this fact of social psychology to win the sale.
MARKETING teams are familiar with creating a bevy of social groups surrounding their in-house product or service. But, it’s just as important to become active participants in social groups that are unrelated to the company’s own service or product.
At the brand level, marketing teams must ally the company with different local or loosely related organizations and clubs. The team ought to donate time, money, deliverables, and more, to unrelated endeavors. With every shared event, the company becomes a member of another group, and wins over a group of biased members.
At the personal level, marketing should encourage employees to interact with other brands and causes in the public sphere. Social media is an ideal place to start. Content writers can help employees to expand LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook networks, and most importantly, teach them to interact. With every visible share, comment, like, forward and follow interaction, they’re establishing themselves as an active participant in a new group, and a social ally to its members.
If you want to bring it back to basics, you can imagine this as a marketing-driven sales enablement solution. Your interactions in various social spheres that form impressions in the mind of the target buyer serve as possible value-drivers during a sales presentation. You forward these insights to your sales team and create ammunition for them to use, should the situation arise.
For example, during the sales call, you can illustrate the various ways that the selling company identifies with the buyer's values, beliefs, preferences, etc. and present it in a well-informed manner.
SALES representatives ought to be quick to align themselves with a new prospect. Reps must find a commonality, whether it’s age, gender, family situation, nationality, sports preference, or otherwise, and voice their membership to the same group. This should be a significant component of a reps sales process.
When it comes time to close the deal, successful reps should remind the prospect of their group mentality by making an “us vs. them” comparison. For example, “The competition doesn’t cater to people like us, who...” This subtly reminds the prospect where their bias lies: with the sales rep and their brand, who belongs to their ingroup. Don't forget the immense potential for closed loop marketing, this deep buyer insight can be relayed back to marketing for further content enhancements and improved acquistion potential.
If it's not immediately apparant, this kind of semi-guerilla style social media usage requires a fair amount of sales and marketing alignment.
Are your sales and marketing teams effective in establishing rapport? Do you find it helps to be in the buyer's "in group"? Or, is some roadblock holding your teams back? We may have the solution!
