Good morning 🙂

One Tuesday afternoon, we had a visitor to our front door.

It was a salesman for a local pest control company, and he was offering his services.

Now I was upstairs in my home office when the guy rang the doorbell…🛎

But the door was open, so I could hear as my wife started talking to the guy…🗣

And after a few seconds, I went out to the hallway to listen in a bit more carefully…

Because I wanted to make sure everything was on the up-and-up and the dude wasn’t sketchy. 🧐

He wasn’t…

But still, I was pretty surprised when about 10 minutes later, he left our house with my wife’s credit card number and a signed contract. 

My wife doesn’t normally say “yes” to random door-to-door salespeople…

In fact, I can’t think of a single time she’s signed up for a random solicitation in the 8+ years I’ve known her…

So what was it about this door-to-door guy that made her say “Yes” to his services?

Really there were three things.

1. He used a “Killer” Opening…  

My family just moved into our new house in San Diego a few weeks ago, and we’ve been noticing that there are a lot of insects in our landscaping…

Which, on the one hand is cool, because it comes with the territory…

But when the guy started talking to my wife, he didn’t talk about “insects” in general…

He talked about spiders…

And not just any spiders…

Brown Recluses, which are venomous.

See the sales rep started out the conversation by telling my wife how he noticed we had a lot of Brown Recluses on our property….

He even pointed out several to her while they were talking, so she could see with her own eyes.

Then the rep mentioned how it looked like we had a young child…

And how he figured we probably wanted to remove those brown recluses from our yard…

So that there wasn’t a threat to our kid.

Turns out that was the right way to start out a pitch to a loving mother…

Because immediately, my wife’s maternal instincts kicked into high gear…

She imagined our daughter Eden getting bit by a spider…

And thought to herself, “I must make sure that doesn’t happen.”

Honestly, the guy pretty much closed the sale with his opening here…

But there are two more factors that strengthened his sales argument even more.

2. Social Proof

In addition to pointing out the Brown Recluses…

The guy gave my wife a very logical reason for why he was knocking on the door.

He said:

“I’m in the neighborhood because we already do the pest control for a lot of your neighbors, and I see you guys just moved in. Since we’re already in the area a lot anyways, I figured I should see if you want to go ahead and take care of your house too. And I can even give you a special discount since I’m already going to be here – so it’s not any extra travel.”

Well, makes logical sense…

He’s not soliciting, he’s stopping by to offer his service…

But much more importantly…

By talking about how our neighbors already use his services…

He’s increasing his credibility tremendously…

Since, if his services are good enough for our neighbors (who we like and already trust)…

Why wouldn’t they be good enough for us too?

3. Presentation

And this last one might sound small, but I think it played a big role. When I was talking to my wife about how I was surprised she signed up…

She said: “Well, you know, he had on a nice clean uniform and he was holding a tablet, so I figured he was legit.”

I found this kind of funny…

Because presumably a scammer would have the same setup as this guy did…

But regardless, it put my wife at ease…

Especially when combined with points #1 and #2 that I’ve already mentioned.

It's the same thing with your sales pages too, by the way…

If you're using an advertorial…you should make it look like a news article…

If you're doing an eCom page, make your button look like Amazon's…

Conform your sales assets to align with what the market thinks they should look like.

—

So the end result of all this?

The guy left with my wife’s credit card information…

Billed us $69 (after my wife negotiated him down from $89)…

And he got my wife to agree to have them return quarterly for something like $149 per visit.

I’m still kind of in shock that it worked…

Because like I said, my wife is pretty discerning and a tough customer…

But really, it just goes back to the three things I mentioned above…

And how you truly can get conversions no matter what you’re selling…

You just need to craft the right offer for the right person.

 

– SPG

P.S. This post originally came from an email I sent to my private list. If you want to see more stuff like this from me, you can apply to join my list using this link.