Increase Sales Using Drive Reduction Theory In Your Marketing Strategy

As you can see, this is pretty powerful information and knowing these things will help you to develop a deeper relationship with your customers as well as what to offer them, when to offer it to them and how to offer it to them.

Kinda cool, right?  😉

Let's get started!

Before you watch the video tutorial on how to build your marketing funnel using Drive Theory make sure to read this blog post.  Otherwise, you may not understand the campaign built out in the video.

As we begin down the path of discussing psychology and the principles of Drive Theory I first want to state that I am not a Psychologist. I am a Marketer that happens to know some things about psychology that have worked and I find very useful (and cool).  

If you are reading this and are a Psychologist, I would love to hear your thoughts!  Any deeper level of enlightenment you can provide is encouraged.

What is Drive Reduction Theory?

Drive Theory, also known as Drive Reduction Theory, is based on the principle that humans are born with specific psychological needs and that a negative state of tension is created within this person's mind until the needs have been satisfied.  

When this need has been satisfied, the mind's state goes back to a level of relaxation and satisfaction.  This theory of motivation is credited to Clark L. Hull.  If you are nerdy like me, read this blog post first, then watch the video I included and feel free to check out the Wikipedia page documenting the history of Drive Theory research here.

How many of you have experienced this?

You are busy working and forget to eat.  Hours pass by and, all of a sudden, it hits you.  You are starving! Your co-worker or significant other asks if you want to grab some food and you're already at the door ready to go before they can finish their sentence.  

You get to the restaurant and the waiter/waitress is taking forever.  You glance around and quickly calculate that you certainly could have waited on every table, refilled all their drinks and bussed all the tables within the time it finally takes your waiter/waitress to finally get to your table.  

You force a smile but immediately state your order.  Your co-worker/significant other tries to make small talk about the day and you want nothing of it.  "OMG, shut up! I'm starving.  What in the world are they doing back there?  Waiting for the lettuce to grow?", you think to yourself as you act interested in the small talk.

Your order finally arrives, you engulf the food and then.....

Everything in the world is right.  Things are not so bad.  The waiter/waitress is actually pretty nice.  Conversation is good.  You're relaxed.

What happened there?

Your mind determined that your body needed food.  Your mental state rose to a high level of tension and everything else became less important until you satisfied that need and reduced that tension.  You were in a state of agitation, urgency and irrational thinking.

Make sense?  

Using that example, now imagine your customers.  Not just some of them but ALL of them have, to some extent, this war of balance raging in their mental state right this second.  And as primary needs are met, the mind then moves to the next need to satisfy based on perceived importance.

The human mind is designed that way.  It cannot stop trying to solve a problem. This war of priorities, problems and solutions rages inside all of us 24/7/365.

We, as marketers and business owners tend to forget this at times.  I'll admit it first.  I have worked with clients reviewing their customer's behaviors and buying trends and scratched my head thinking the data doesn't make sense until I realize we didn't factor in the principles of Drive Theory.

Let's now dig in to the first set of key principles.

The Pain Point

Understanding the pain point of your customers is the crux to effectively selling to them. If you do not properly understand what it is exactly that they want to solve then how can you satisfy their need?  

More importantly, how can you solve more of their problems and create a deeper bond with them so that they associate your business with the resolution for a set of specific needs?

Your goal should be that your customers do not even have to think about your business when they need you.  

It should not be a thought but an instant truth that your business is the solution.  Their mind made the connection that for that specific need your business is not just the solution but the only solution.  Their brain has wired your business to that solution bypassing the need to expend energy to contemplate other solutions.

So how do you achieve this?

You ask them.  

No rocket science here folks.  You are going to create a dialogue with them.  You are going to actually talk WITH THEM and not AT THEM.  

As a side note: If your emails are talking at your customers then you are doing yourself and them a disservice.  No one likes someone who only wants to talk about themselves and never asks you how you're doing.  So don't be that person!

In my video tutorial in this blog I show you how I designed an email that engages the customer asking them how I can help them.  My question asking them is really asking them what their pain point is.  

I control the response by giving them 4 answers that focus on the 4 principle pain points.

Here is the email I used to ask that pain point question.

The 4 Principle Pain Points Are:

1. Lack of Time
2. Lack of Tools
3. Lack of Knowledge
4. Lack of Money

Now once you have identified their pain point you then need to understand what their motivator is to solve that pain point.  

Drive Factor

The motivator is the driving force propelling them forward to take action to resolve that pain point.  This is what we call The Drive Factor.

You can achieve this next step by creating a complex tracking hierarchy to watch clicks and consumption rates of content to map out the consumer's behavior and then determine what their drive factor is.  And you can implement all this fancy site tracking tools and....

That is still not going to get you the level of precision and automation to save you time and make you money if you just ask them.

Here is how I chose to ask the drive factor question. (I used a web form.)

I know, I know.  I just dropped another knowledge bomb on you, didn't i?  

Crazy idea to actually talk to your customers.  Removing my smart ass comments from this and being serious, if you are emailing or engaging your customers and leads with valuable content that asks them to take action, to answer something, to self identify then you are missing a powerful basic human need.  

The need to socialize and express oneself.  

It's pretty powerful.  People are itching to tell you about themselves.  Don't believe me? Log on to Facebook, like my Daniel Bussius Consulting page by clicking here and then check out all the posts.  

What are they?  

They are people telling you about themselves.  Same with Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn.  By the way, click any of those links and follow me.  (Like how I used this example and threw in some shameless plugs?  If your answer is "yes" then you really should like my Facebook page.  LOL)

In case you want to see how I used the initial question of asking the customer's pain point to then transition that in to asking their Drive Factor take a look at the example below.

Quick Review

So we asked a question to our customers using the baseline of "How can we help?".

But the question was really focused on identifying their pain point specific to our business' products (IE: if you are a hair salon you are going to focus on hair and hair products)

Once you know the pain point, you then base your response to them asking what their drive factor is (Their motivation to solve the pain point. IE: "I want to have six pack abs so all the girls notice me at the beach". Pain point might be wanting to get abs. Drive factor would be to get noticed by women)

We then take this data and then ask the final question we need to wrap this up in to our strategy.  The final question is identifying the level of pain they are in as well as their threshold for pain.

Identifying the Pain Threshold

If you can identify the customer's level of pain and their pain threshold then you will ultimately know how quickly they wish to resolve the issue.  

Knowing how fast they want to solve their problem provides you with a precise sales pipeline for your entire customers.

This is incredibly powerful so I am going to restate it once more in different way.

Understanding what your customer's pain point is why they want to solve and when they are ready to solve it providing you with a master timeline of  who to sell to first, what to say to them and how to present your solutions to them.  You'll know for the next year, who to pitch products to and what exactly to say.

Cool, yes?

This is why we want to use automation.  

Building this entire strategy would require hours and hours of labor without having a powerful automated CRM like Infusionsoft or other solution.  In case you didn't know, I am an Infusionsoft Certified Partner and Digital Marketer Certified Partner so if you don't have a system like Infusionsoft you can contact me and I can sell and custom build it for you.  

If you have Infusionsoft and would like to get my complete automated funnel I built and used in this presentation you can purchase it and I'll drop it right in to your app.

The Pitch Process Using Gain, Fear, Logic and Scarcity

The final step here is taking everything we know and then pitching our solution to the customer.  During the pitch process we are going to add another layer of psychological factors in and address them using:

1. Gain (look at what you can get from this)
2. Fear (look at what you are going to lose from not doing this)
3. Logic (doing this makes sense)
4. Scarcity (this is rare and it's disappearing soon)

Now, there are plenty of articles that discuss Gain, Fear and Logic so I am not going to go too deep in to this.  The folks over at Digital Marketer do a great job teaching this.  So here's the Cliffs Notes version:

For your pitch on Day One, I suggest using Gain 

You have this issue that's very important and you want it resolved.  I have the solution that is going to solve this for you and you're going to have so much more joy/success/freedom by doing this.

For your pitch on Day Two, I suggest using Logic 

It makes sense to do this solution I am presenting because I asked your issues, you answered and I am now providing you with the solution.

For your pitch on Day Three, I suggest using Fear

You have this issue and it's creating so many problems in your life.  By not solving this problem it's going to grow, multiply, get worse and affect you and your loved ones.  Do you want that?  

For your final pitch on Day Four, I suggest using Scarcity  

I want to help you.  I offered the solution for you but you didn't take action and now it's going away and you won't have this.  Act now before it disappears.

Final Thoughts

As you can see for this training the important take-aways are that you need to engage your customers with a conversation that opens a dialogue.  

You want to ask them questions that will empower you to segment them and then ask deeper questions once they are engaged to identify motivators in which you can then market with.

You'll then segment once more to find the hot buyers now, the buyers in the next fiscal quarter, the next 6 months and by year's end.  

This gives you, the small business owner with a highly segmented pipeline with the knowledge to effectively communicate and sell directly to the core problem and core motivator (this is your game changer folks).

Finally, you'll roll all of this data up and within your timeline you'll pull the trigger and sell to those people using Gain, Fear, Logic and Scarcity.

After you are done counting your money from the boost in sales you'll be getting please do me a favor and tell me what you think below and share this with others that might benefit from this post.

Each of my blog posts take me roughly 14 hours to produce so your feedback and sharing with your friends on social media is always appreciated.