Selling to Introverts: 10 Ways to Appeal to Introverts’ Marketing Preferences

Whether you're an introvert or an extrovert, you probably have an unthinking tendency to market to people the way you yourself prefer to be communicated with and treated. If your target audience resembles you, that approach succeeds. But if your target audience differs greatly from you, you're shooting yourself in the foot when you do that. Worse, unless you've investigated or learned about the preferences of those with a different personality, you may not realize the extent of this disconnect.

For best results, you must market to people the way they prefer to be marketed to, not the way you prefer to market or be marketed to.

When you are selling to people who are reserved, quiet, comfortable with themselves, independent thinkers and not the life of the party – in other words, introverts – here are 10 important guidelines to keep in mind.

10 Ways to Sell Successfully to Introverts

1.Third-party credibility boosters. Introverts tend to be less gullible than extroverts, because they're less swayed by enthusiasm or the desire to follow the crowd. You want to win their respect, and they respect media coverage, awards, certifications, credentials and endorsements from industry leaders who are known as the most competent in their field. Any relatively objective indicator of excellence influences introverts to become more interested in what you offer.

2.Confidentiality. Introverts treasure privacy, and they retreat when they see that you might not keep their patronage of you private. Coaches and consultants who illustrate their points with examples from clients raise this suspicion, even if the clients are identified only by a first name. Likewise, offering feedback as part of a package but only in public can make introverts hang back. Explicit reassurances about confidentiality can be crucial to earn the trust of introverts.

3.Opportunity to ask questions before the sale. Because introverts are less likely to get swept along by the breathless enthusiasm of a sales pitch, they value the chance to contact the seller to clarify something that's important to their decision-making process. Saying there will be an opportunity to get questions answered after the sale helps, also. If the question-asking occurs in private rather than in a group setting, all the better.

4.No gratuitous videos. Don't force a prospective buyer to sit through a video in order to access introductory information about your product. Introverts enjoy watching videos for entertainment or for demonstrating how to do something, but when you deliver information on video that that could easily have been conveyed in text, they'll resent you for wasting their time. Forget about "talking head" videos for this group.

5.No fluff or filler. Introverts hate hype. They also dislike it when people don't get to the point. High-content communications with some promotion woven into it or appended at the end therefore go over best with introverts.

6.Samples. Because introverts prefer substance to fluff, they're more eager to buy when they've seen a sample that impresses them. So if you are selling a book, provide a free sample chapter; if you are selling a coaching program, make a sample session available, with the participant's permission noted.

7.No name dropping. Some marketers like to refer to colleagues as "my good friend (or buddy) so and so," but if you do that too many times, introverts may lose respect for you. They'd rather have fewer, closer friends, and they'll think you're blowing hot air when you claim to have close relationships with a lot of people. In addition, the mere fact that you know someone important doesn't raise your status even a millimeter with an introvert.

8.Personal attention. Introverts prefer to interact one-on-one or in small groups. They don't like crowds. So if you offer seminars, coaching, tours or workout facilities, do so on an intimate scale. You won't catch introverts yearning to cruise on a thousand-passenger ship, enjoying stadium-sized lectures or belonging to a crowded, cavernous gym if they have another choice.

9.Minimal pressure. If you sell overly aggressively and don't give an introvert time and space to think through their decision, they'll duck out and go elsewhere to buy. Deadlines are fine, but not ten minutes down the line.

10.Practice what you preach. Introverts value consistency. They're put off by a proofreading service that has a typo in its marketing copy, a purportedly "green" company that wastes paper or someone who says he's not selling something yet proceeds to do exactly that. Make sure you embody the principles you espouse in the way you promote your offerings and the way you treat customers.

Above all, communicating in a calm, respectful, content-rich manner wins over introverts. Be prepared, be succinct, be substantive with them and you'll be successful.

About the Author:
A bookworm as a child, Marcia Yudkin grew up to become the author of 11 books, including 6 Steps to Free Publicity, now in its third edition. To learn more about the strengths and preferences of introverts, download her FREE Marketing for Introverts manifesto: http://www.yudkin.com/introverts.htm

Keyword tags: marketing,sales,introverts,introverted,selling,market,promotion,tactics,like,dislike

Marketing to Introverts: Seven Marketing Pitches That Leave Introverts Cold

According to Dr. Marti Olsen Laney, introverts make up roughly 25% of the population. Yet when you look at high-IQ people and high earners, the percentage is far higher. So if you hope to capture the attention and patronage of introverts, it's vital to downplay or avoid marketing tactics that don't influence them to buy – or send them running in the opposite direction.

Unlike extroverts, who thrive on social interaction, introverts recharge their batteries by being alone. They tend to be more private, quiet and to-the-point than extroverts.

Here are seven types of marketing pitches that are common in Internet marketing – and elsewhere – that leave introverts cold.

1. Earnings brags. Screen shots of earnings as they appear in a shopping cart program or merchant account report are pervasive in Internet marketing promotions. Some proponents of this tactic claim that this is the only way to prove that the seller is as successful as he says. Introverts aren't swayed by such "proof," however, because someone who shows exactly how much money they made is utterly unlike them. To the introvert, what such a person made doesn't indicate how much they themselves might make. The introvert is far more likely to take an interest in customer testimonials from people who sound like themselves.

2. Name dropping. Introverts make decisions on substance, not on who knows who, so referring constantly to big-name people as your friends doesn't influence them at all. Likewise, some speakers boast that they "shared the stage with so-and-so," but to an introvert that is no credential – not even a weak one. Trotting out the names of famous clients and sharing things they said is considerably worse, because it gets introverts thinking that you do not respect confidences.

3. Numbers served or sold. A bio in a direct mail piece I received yesterday starts off: "Dr. XXX currently owns and operates a clinic in YYY with over 20,000 patients." To an introvert, this fails to impress at all. Who wants to be one of 20,000? Introverts dislike being part of a herd, following the crowd or being treated as a number. If this bio said instead that Dr. XXX deliberately keeps his practice small, so he can give each patient personal attention, and that there's a waiting list of several months to see him, that would make him far more interesting to the introvert.

4. Saying large is small. "We're limiting this seminar to just 150 people, so act fast," said one promotion I heard recently, but to an introvert that statement is totally absurd. A room containing 150 people is a crowd, not by any stretch of the introvert's imagination an intimate event. To the introvert, any group larger than about 12 is no longer small. It's fine to run large events. Just don't call them small!

5. Pressure to decide fast. Introverts have certainly been known to make impulse buys, but since they pride themselves on thinking things through, they resent and reject pressure to make up their mind before they're ready. Introverts generally want a lot of information before pressing the "buy" button, and if you use a countdown clock saying there's only XX minutes or hours until the offer goes away forever, they're gone instantly, never to return.

6. Talking head videos. Since introverts usually love to read and can read quickly, they feel tortured when a web site conveys crucial information in a video that could have been conveyed in text. They don't hate the video medium in itself, only when it seems to be used out of laziness or self-aggrandizement rather than to show something that couldn't be as easily communicated any other way.

7. Too much personal information. Introverts prefer you to get to the point. Therefore, when you go on and on and on about your spouse, kids, pets, vacation or new yacht they tune out. If you want introverts as clients, beware of revealing facts that may reflect badly on you, even if you believe you've cast them in a positive light.

For example, you may think discussing having gone bankrupt makes your current success more impressive. The introvert may not be able to get past your confessing this failure so blithely, since this is something they'd never abide others knowing about themselves. For introverts, either minimize the personal revelations or segregate them in a section of a newsletter or web site they can skip.

My own clients tend to be about 75 percent introverts, and this probably has to do with how easily introverts can identify that I'm someone like them whose success they can model. Take a look at the personality profile of your own customer base and how you market, and you may well find some eye-opening patterns.

You may certainly decide to continue to turn off introverts, but do make that a conscious choice rather than a side effect of simply following popular marketing tactics.

About the Author:
A bookworm as a child, Marcia Yudkin grew up to become the author of 11 books, including 6 Steps to Free Publicity, now in its third edition. To learn more about the strengths and preferences of introverts, download her FREE Marketing for Introverts manifesto: http://www.yudkin.com/introverts.htm

Keyword tags: marketing,sales,introverts,introverted,selling,market,promotion,tactics,like,dislike