Persuasion Comics

Banner_dilbertblogYou may have noticed (and you may not have noticed) that the great majority of your customers are quite a bit like you. You have your own buying style that informs your selling style. You’ll always sell more to people who share more of your personality traits.

Old School Sales would tell you to find more of those people and make more presentations, hence you’ll sell more. And who cares if 75% of your prospects fail to buy something? You just need more traffic from more people like you.

New School Sales says traffic works, but it’s expensive. What if, by adjusting your selling style just a bit, and only when needed, you could sell twice as much. Are you willing to “compromise” just a bit to double your income? Hmm?

Scott Adams has a great post about how he changed his Dilbert comic strip to accomodate his readers. He describes how comic readers fall about 20% into a Gag Lovers group that loves cleverness, 20% into a Visual group that loves the art in comics, and 60% that want relevance.

“When Dilbert first launched, I was aiming for the gag lovers, and they responded. But there weren’t enough of them to make the comic a success. Dilbert was published in fewer than 100 papers and it stalled. But I noticed – thanks to readers sending me e-mail – that the Dilbert strips people liked the most were the relatively few that showed Dilbert at work. So I took the hint and moved the focus of the strip to the office. That’s when I hit the mother lode – the Relevance People. Dilbert shot to over 1,000 newspapers in just a few years. Now it’s in over 2,000.”

Did he sacrifice his “artistic integrity” to make a buck? Nope, he did it to make millions. I don’t think he sacrificed anything. He accomodated his readers and it enabled him to make blog posts from a beachside condo in Hawaii as he watches whales swim past.

Are you accomodating the diners in your restaurant? The shoppers in your store? How about the visitors to your web site? Yes, your web site.

Persuasion Architecture is about making sure your site is relevant to more personality types than your own. It’s how you can have multiple sales paths through one channel. You should give it a try. Hey, I like hanging out with people like me. But, I’m happy to sell to everybody.

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