Lesson 33: Limiting your offer to improve response

All about takeaways

You may have noticed that people want what they can’t have.

The opposite also tends to be true.

This has important ramifications for sales psychology.

If Sam senses that you need him to buy, he feels repelled. If he senses that you are disinterested about it, he feels at ease — neutral; neither inherently attracted nor repelled. But if he senses that you might prevent him from buying, that you need him so little that you might just say no to him, he starts to be involuntarily attracted to your offer — because he automatically pushes back against your resistance.

This is called a takeaway. When you use a takeaway, you are completely turning the sales dynamic on its head. Instead of creating backward resistance in Sam by trying to pull him into a sale, you are creating forward pressure on his part by trying to push him away from it.

You go from trying to sell him on buying, to making him sell you on his buying.

Takeaways combine four powerful psychological forces:

1. Exclusivity. Often called the “velvet rope” effect — Sam wants to be part of in-groups. No one likes being left out, and everyone likes getting something others can’t. So when an offer becomes exclusive in some way, Sam desires it more.

2. Fear of loss. Scarcity, of course, is a kind of takeaway. When Sam knows he can take you up on your offer at any time, he puts it off until tomorrow — and as Garth Brooks will tell you, tomorrow might never come. But when he knows that he might miss out if he doesn’t act immediately, he can’t do that — so his fear of loss creates an urgency that compels him to buy.

3. Reverse psychology. This is far from just something that works on kids. We have a powerful instinct to resist other people — perhaps most particularly in the modern day. So when they resist us, we still resist their resistance...and end up defeating ourselves. This is extremely hard for Sam to fight against, because doing so requires that he basically be apathetic about your offer. Which, if he is a good fit for it, isn’t going to happen. Thus, even if he knows what you’re doing, the reverse psychology effect still works.

4. Self-consistency. Takeaways force Sam to evaluate his reasons for buying — and then not only justify them to himself, but actually argue to himself that he should be allowed to buy; that he should be accepted. This is immensely powerful because, while he is skeptical of the conclusions that you draw, he almost never doubts the conclusions that he draws! Making him argue himself into the sale is much more likely to stick — especially in the long term. He will own his decision far more, which means less buyer remorse, fewer refunds, and higher customer loyalty. Big wins.

The two types of takeaways

Takeaways can be finessed in various ways, but they are always along the lines of saying, or implying, “No, you can’t have it.” There are two basic approaches to doing this: