Use Your Customer’s Imagination to Close More Sales

Posted by Andrew on September 4, 2007

How do you start your online sales pitch? You have spent good money bringing someone to your website. They have a problem they need solved. Do you ask them to imagine a life with your solution? If so, it could translate to your bottom line.

A professor named John Carroll was the first person to examine the use of imagination to persuade. Before the Carter/Ford election he divided his students into two groups. One group was asked to imagine that Carter won the election, and was asked to think about detailed items such as Carter’s victory speech and Ford’s concession speech. The other group was given the exact same task but asked to imaging Ford winning the election. After it was all said and done, each group was asked to calculate the odds of each candidate winning the election. You know what happened. Compared to control groups, the groups that imagined a candidate winning gave higher probability estimates of the likelihood that the imagined candidate would win.

Similar studies have continued to verify this effect. Imagination does have an impact on perception. If you encourage your site visitors to imagine using your solution, they will think of it in more favorable terms, and will think it is more likely to solve their problem. Imagination helps counter the inherent skepticism many people bring to a web purchase. But one word of warning - don’t over-do it. Don’t ask them to imagine your product curing cancer when all it does is relieve common cold symptoms. Brains adapt to tricks, so if you use them you are only hurting your own chances for a future sale.