Get More Customers to Say Yes

Why Understanding Regret Aversion Bias Can Help You Get More Yeses

Rishav Khanal
April 19, 2023

NLCS

Increase your ability to — impact your colleagues and customers — by using communication and psychology frameworks

This Week's Digest At-A-Glance

Read time 3-4 minutes

✏️ Brain Booster: Understanding Regret Aversion Bias

🤓 Post-Sale Breakdown: The Role of Regret Aversion in Decision-Making and Using ChatGPT & Aspirational Social Proof To Get More Yeses

🛠 Tool: MagicSlides App (Enter A Topic On Google Slides and Have AI Generate A Beautiful Deck in Seconds)

💡 What’s New: I spent a lot of time with my designer making changes to the newsletter. What do you think? Some of the old issues were hard on the eyes.

✏️ Brain Booster

Have you ever made a choice and then thought later that it was the wrong one?

If you're like me and think too much, most likely all the time. That is what we call regret. Now, think about this. When you're operating in a post-sale world and interacting with customers all day long, it's essential to recognize the psychological phenomenon of regret aversion.

Let me explain. Let's say you and your friend are on a game show where you each get a piece of paper with numbers on it.

You win a new car if the numbers on your paper match the ones on the screen. You both have the same chance of winning because neither of you knows what's in the paper right now. And to make things even better, the host of the game show says, "If you switch, you'll get free tires."

You say, "Sure, why not?"

Now things are starting to get interesting. Now, let's say the game show host changes things up and gives you a piece of paper with a number on it where you’re able to see the numbers. The host then tells you to switch. "If you switch, you'll know if the other person wins," the host says.

If you're like me, you'd say no because you don't want to be feel the regret later. "It would be terrible to find out that I had the winning ticket all along and gave it to someone else. That would kill me." This is regret aversion.

You decide not to do something in the short term because you might realize in the long term that you were wrong.

But what does mean for you if you’re in a post-sale world? And you deal with customers all day long?

🤓 Post-Sale Breakdown

It's also important to know that some customers may be reluctant to buy more from you or try new goods or services because they don't want to make a choice they'll later regret.

If it goes wrong, they’ll blame you for any mistakes. By knowing about regret aversion, you can help customers have better experiences by anticipating their worries and doubts and solving them. Here are two fast ways to overcome this:

1: Let ChatGPT prepare you for objections.

By inputting negative reviews or objections, ChatGPT can help you anticipate and address customer concerns before they even come up.If you’re in SaaS, you can either go to G2, or input bad reviews; or if you work in a service, you can upload a list of bad reviews or objections your customers might tell you

Use this as a prompt:

The Prompt on ChatGPT:

Hey there, I'm working on pitching a customer for [X Company]. I'm sharing all our negative reviews below. I want you to extract the 5 most common objections and regrets a customer may have with regard to our product. Make sure it's in a bullet point format, in order of relevance, and includes quotes from the reviews that support each point.

Hit enter, and you'll soon see few points pop up. By understanding the reasons behind customer objections, you can be prepared to address their concerns.

2: Use aspirational social proof

If we want to convince people to use our services, and minimize their regret, just listing the companies we've worked with isn't enough. It works better to show how people in similar jobs faced similar problems and chose to do something about them.

"Here are different companies that use us" isn't as effective as saying:

Using aspirational social proof to reduce regret; here’s what you can say instead:

"Here are people with similar titles to you who had the same worries as you. They did it because the cost of not doing it was much higher than the investment they'd have to make. And now great things have come from it. We know it works because of this. You seem to be about a 7 out of 10. So tell me, even with all the facts and what we've talked about, what's missing in your mind that keeps you from feeling 100 percent safe, confident, and excited about this change?"

Notice my use of emotional words to trigger the emotional objections. ”Safe, confident, excited” followed by replacing “decision” with “change”

In a post-sale environment where you deal with clients all day, communicating in a way that proactively overcomes regret aversion bias is critical.

🛠 Tool + Resource

Making decks look nice is annoying. I hate it. I found this awesome tool (MagicSlides) where I input a few things, and it uses AI to make a beautiful presentation. (Not sponsored)

💡 What’s New

That’s it for this week 🙂

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