The Sales Hormone: The science of improving customer acquisition, retention, and spend

Think about the last sale your business made, and answer this — why did the customer buy?

There are hundreds of answers you might give, along the lines of:

“Our solution matches their problem perfectly.”

“We have the best track record working with their sector.”

“We’re refreshingly different to most suppliers in our space.”

“They liked that we don’t tie customers to long-term contracts.”

“We have worked with them before and they were happy with the results.”

“They were unhappy with their current supplier and we do things differently.”

All of those answers are factual, but what is more important is the single truth that they all point to — the customer trusted you.Everyone is a buyer at some point, and everybody knows that they would not part with money if they do not trust the business that is asking for it.

While there are no shortcuts or ‘hacks’ to creating trust, there is a reliable approach that is backed by science and data, and that is to stimulate a specific hormone — Oxytocin.

Why more Oxytocin means more sales

Oxytocin is colloquially referred to as the ‘love hormone’ because activities like hugging and breastfeeding stimulate it, but it is a far more versatile hormone and it has more effects than simply reinforcing affection.

On an evolutionary level, Oxytocin plays a role in a diverse range of social patterns and contexts, but the most interesting and useful from a sales and marketing perspective is that it stimulates feelings of trust.

In short, if you can stimulate oxytocin in your audience, you go a long way to creating the conditions in which they will buy.

As an added bonus, the presence of Oxytocin is shown to increase generosity up to 80%, so when it comes to a buying decision, oxytocin could make your prospect less concerned about pricing, or less insistent on a discount.

How to stimulate oxytocin and create trust in your brand

What can a business do to reinforce the feelings of trust that develop as a prospect engages with them?

Use empathy, offer advice, and share their goals

Businesses can fall into the habit of focusing on themselves when they are promoting their offering. The stark truth is that prospects don’t care about other businesses, but they do care about what other businesses can do for them.

By focusing your marketing on your prospect, you can capture their attention with a topic they care a lot about (their own business), while building the trust that will eventually convert them into a customer.

Then, something powerful can happen. As you talk with empathy and expertise about the prospect’s problems and how to solve them, you and they are sharing a goal. Shared goals and ‘shared intentionality talk’ are closely associated with oxytocin production.

The added bonus is that you can appeal to the intellectual side of the sale, as well as the emotional. By speaking with authority and positioning yourself as a trusted advisor, you qualify yourself as a partner for the 88% of B2B buyers who only buy from those experts.

Use stories to grow your brand

Stories are proven to stimulate oxytocin release. Likeoffering advice and expertise, using those stories builds the trust that you need to make a sale.

You can approach that in a very literal narrative of cause and effect, with content like case studies — ‘X company was struggling with Y problem, which we solved with Z solution’ — and you can be more creative, with content that puts the prospect in a central role and describes a journey from the current state they will recognise to a future state they desire.

A good campaign will probably use both (and various approaches between the two) according to the target buyers and their stage in the buying journey.

Oxytocin, creativity, and transforming your pipeline

Building trust is a long-term project made of short-term interactions. It not only requires high-value, high-quality content that meets the needs of buyers all along the path to purchase, it also needs a consistent set of messages across different mediums that join up and complement each other and turn leads into relationships.

That is why we created our streamlined marketing strategy to help ambitious businesses attract attention, build relationships, and turn prospects into long-term customers and advocates.

It is called nx3, and it is a dynamic, data-driven integrated marketed strategy, built from over a decade of transforming businesses’ growth. If you would like to see what nx3 can do for you, find out more and book a no-obligation consultation here.