Weekly Sales Tips: The Sales Trigger Event
You’re thinking that the buying process begins when your customer talks to you for the first time, right? Think again. Oftentimes something happens, there’s a sales trigger event and it’s critical to understand why your customer is going to buy in the first place.
Think about the last time that you bought a car. If I were to ask you why you purchased that car, how would you respond? You’d probably tell me that you needed better gas mileage, or that your last car was totaled, or you had a kid and needed something other than a convertible. Regardless of how you answered the question, you probably answered it not by thinking about the car that you have now, but by talking about the car that you got rid of.
The fact of the matter is that nobody is moving to anything until they’re first moving from something else. So when you think about that last car you bought, you’re probably able to identify a specific trigger moment when you knew it was time to buy. A car accident, for example, is a trigger moment. Falling in love with a friend’s new car is a trigger moment. For me, it came when I was on a business trip and I rented a car that I really loved. When I got back home from the trip, I got into my car and I felt disappointed. I shouldn’t enjoy a rental car more than I enjoy my own car, and that’s when I went to the dealership.
The fact is, everybody buys for the same reason. They have a desire to improve their life. Now you’ve heard me say before that the starting point for every buyer is what we call current dissatisfaction. It’s the problem in their life that needs to be solved. Sometimes that current dissatisfaction creeps up over time, sometimes it suddenly skyrockets. For many customers, there are life events that suddenly cause their current dissatisfaction to shoot up skyward and we call those moments trigger events. It’s the moment when your customer thinks it is time to buy. The trigger event answers the “why now” question.
Trigger events will always have emotion tied to it. Once we decide to buy something, we feel really excited about that opportunity. I’m thinking of a home buyer in Leander, Texas. This was a younger guy who was shopping for a home that was going to cost over a million dollars. Didn’t make sense that somebody at this young age would be able to even think about buying a million-dollar home. He didn’t fit the profile for this particular community. But the young man told the salesperson that he had recently sold his startup company for tens of millions of dollars and that suddenly he was sitting on more money than he had ever seen in his entire life. He started the company from nothing, bootstrapped the entire way, and was now very, very wealthy.
The moment that he got paid for the sale of his company was the trigger event.
It doesn’t have to be nearly that dramatic or traumatic for your buyers. It might simply be the fact that they sold their home for more than they thought they could get for it, or perhaps it was just that last straw moment when the water heater broke.
The trigger event teaches us so much about our customer’s history and their motivation. So the key question to determine the trigger event is very simple, why now? Or what changed? Try to isolate the specific moment when the customer made the decision that this is the right time to make a move.
When you learn the trigger event, you learn invaluable information about the motivation of your customer and you can use that to guide them to the purchase that will solve their problem and change their world.
