I mean... Who doesn't love a snow day?!

I mean… Who doesn’t love a snow day?!

Today is a snow day and the kids are out of school, so I’m going to keep this issue brief…

In fact, it’s the second snow day in a row.  But yesterday my wife was scheduled to be home with the kids most of the day anyway, so I got a full day of work in.  Today, I got the kids and I’m squeezing this issue in during nap time for my two youngest, while my oldest plays Legos (he just finished reading yet another James Patterson Treasure Hunters book)…

Because it’s a snow day, I got to thinking…

There’s a secret selling psychology hidden in “snow days” — and stimulating it is definitely a shortcut to bigger sales!

I guess there are folks who this won’t apply to — but I think most of us grew up anticipating snow days at school.

That is, a snowstorm or blizzard rolls in, and the school district decides to cancel school.

It’s a sudden and unexpected free day, a sudden liberation from the expected responsibilities of the day.

Don’t have to go to school.  Don’t have to do classwork.  Won’t have homework.  Maybe a test got canceled.

It’s total childhood bliss!

And maybe you throw in a movie or some other diversion for good measure, and now we’re really cooking!

Doesn’t a snow day sound great?!

As adults, we’re far less likely to have snow days.  For example, yesterday it was really snowing all day so even most retail (like the mall) in our city shut down for the day.  But today is a recovery day, with school called off due to slippery streets and tough travel conditions.  And while that’s enough to call off school, for most grown-ups it’s back to work as usual.

Most adults are no different than kids in what gets us excited emotionally.

Sure, we have more complex, more nuanced, and sometimes much more grown-up emotions.  But by and large, all the core drives that really moved us emotionally as children remain with us to this day.

Including…

The desire to be totally liberated from responsibility!

In fact, sometimes this is an even stronger desire as adults.

As kids, we felt like we had a lot of responsibility.  The process of growing up, starting from a very young age, is the process of taking ever-greater responsibility for everything in our lives.  And yet, childhood is full of huge breaks from responsibility.  Your homework is done, and you have hours upon hours left in the day to do mostly what you want.

Grown-ups’ lives, on the other hand — and especially parents, bosses, business owners, and others in positions of regular responsibility over others — are fraught with responsibility.  While we can sometimes carve out an hour here or there to get away and not be responsible for anything but our own entertainment, these times are quite rare for the average adult.

And we crave that time.

We crave that freedom.

It’s the promise of the weekend.  The promise of a vacation getaway.  The promise of retirement.  (All too often, those are promises only partially fulfilled — as we can’t help letting responsibility seep into each.)

And even if you embrace responsibility — which I think is a true virtue of the emotionally and psychologically mature individual — you still often long for release from that responsibility, if even for a moment.

(Is it any wonder that the stereotypical clientele of a sexual Dominatrix is the Type A dominant CEO, who wants just one space in their life to be totally submissive to another strong personality?)

How this applies in selling…

Everyone has something they are currently responsible for, that they would rather not be.

It could be as simple as having to find out an answer to a bunch of questions, or to gather information on a specific topic.  For example, for someone into recording music, they may want to know the 10 most important factors to getting a good recording and mixdown every time.  They could take responsibility for learning that through hundreds of hours of experimentation in the studio, but they’d rather someone else take the responsibility for finding it out and share it — and they’re willing to pay.

On a much deeper level (and probably more relevant to you as my reader), there’s the crafts-person business owner who started their business to do the thing, not to build a business.  The mechanic who started a mechanic business, the physician who opened a private practice, the computer programmer who started a software company.  They are responsible for marketing and lead generation and selling and business development — and may really not want to be.  If your services give them “snow day” liberation from that responsibility, they will likely be willing to pay a high premium.

It doesn’t take much thought to apply this to nearly any selling situation… 

Your prospect has something they want, but don’t necessarily want to take responsibility for building or going out and getting for themselves.

How can you give them a snow day and alleviate them of that responsibility, through responding to your offer?

If you get the pain and the problem right, even a mediocre offer to solve it could move mountains in terms of the response it generates…

Yours for bigger breakthroughs,

Roy Furr