EP50: Scarcity, Abundance, and the Biggest Sin in Sales

The pandemic has certainly shown the general public that scarcity or abundance of products can have an effect on people’s emotions. Scarcity increases desire — whether you desperately need the product or not. Abundance decreases desire, because there’s plenty of what you might need in the future. This is true for the sales process too. When you know that you’re going to have another conversation with a prospect, then you can relax during the initial conversation. The tension will disappear from your voice, because you’re not pushing for the sale: you know you have another chance at a future date, and you can relax while you gather information and begin establishing trust with your prospect. There’s no need to hang on and desperately keep the call going; you set up an appointment for the next conversation, and then you end the call. In other words, you “make yourself scarce.” And right there, you’ve introduced the element of scarcity to your prospect’s emotions and, in doing so, increased their desire for more information about what your company offers.

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Join Chris and Susan Finch of Funnel Radio as they explore this yin-yang of scarcity and abundance, and then let you in on the biggest sin in sales. You won’t want to miss this!

 

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The complete transcript of this episode is below:

Susan Finch (00:22):

Hey everybody, you don't usually see me here. I'm Susan Finch. I'm usually the host on a couple of other shows, but I also help produce the Market Dominance Guys. And Chris Beall And I had this wonderful conversation that we did not hit the recording button on, about scarcity and abundance. And he said, "Hey, let's just make this into a podcast." So we're going to get going here. And we're going to be talking about scarcity and abundance and how it affects demand for what we offer in products and services. Now we know that scarcity falls into three distinctive categories, demand-induced, supply-induced, and structural. And demand-induced scarcity happens when the demand of a resource increases and the supply stays the same. And I think it's one of the most common versions of scarcity that we deal with in sales. And, Chris, I ain't even going to even ask you to talk about when it's totally manufactured, wholly unnecessary, because you told me that whiskey story yesterday, and we're going to dive into that. So, Chris Beall, enlightened us. Let's have this conversation.

Chris Beall (01:42):

Well, nothing is more enlightening than talking scarcity and whiskey at the same time. I bet there's a lot of folks who can relate to that at this very minute. And they're probably thinking, "I'm feeling a little scarcity on the whiskey front right now." And that story by the way, it is an example of brilliantly manufactured scarcity. I think everybody in sales, at the margin manufactures a little bit of scarcity, either you're busy and you can't meet with somebody. All the really good sellers are always busy, and they're busy, whether they're busy or not busy, right? Because folks feel better, quite frankly, when they feel like they're getting something that not everybody is getting. And so scarcity is correlated positively with desirability. And at the margin, of course, we all have got to use little clues in the environment to tell us what's desirable.

We may have calculated or thought through our situation. And we said, "Well, we really need a product that does X, Y, and Z. It's got to have this feature and this capabilities, performance characteristics and this cost." But really what we do is we go, "Well, wait a minute. You mean I can't have that one? I want that." I mean, that's actually what we do on the inside. And we do it all the time. We do it all the time in life. By the way, the whiskey story is about the Blanton's and it's for bourbon drinkers, for people who care about this. And what they've done is super smart. So every bottle of the Blanton's... They're these attractively-shaped bulbous bottles, they come in a bag, but it's not like a fru-fru bag, it's just a bag that looks nice.

And the cork is atta