Selling: geeks vs non-geeks (but mostly geeks).

Written by John Freeman

The extra chapter on selling to geeks gives insightful information on properly advertising your product to people like us. Selling to a geek goes much differently than selling to a usual buyer, here’s a short list of those things.

Sell through reason

most commercials tug on our heart strings to get a buyer. through emotion they try to convince us to buy that product that we know we love.  This is the correct way to go! There are multiple styles of emotions you can implore. You can use Ego and advertise a symbol of power on a shirt, you can use excitement and advertise that fun new toy to a kid, you can use affinity and tell people with a sickness that it is OK for them to seek help using your services. You can use trust and mental comfort as you relax a client. these are all ways I agree you can sell to a client. Different ways exist for a geek I will show next.

How do geeks use emotions differently? Well we don’t value intuition, what moves our emotions is reasoning; It can be cold hard data or just good facts and logical inquiries. For example, my boss at the I.T center buys supplies and necessary electronics for GC workers and faculty. When he is about to place an order, he is calculating. He would decide what tech is best and fits in a good price range and is most convenient but still does its job properly because it is compatible with this other technology. For us, its more about data than intuition.

Here is a more perfect example.

When a Geek is searching for a computer, they are looking for specific things that will help them, they want computer specs, ram, video, graphics, etc. While this video is not exactly and advertisement it probably advertises more to us than a quick mac commercial showing off the looks of a computer. This is because the video gives us data and facts. It helps us reason what would be best for us. This is why we self-build our pc’s as well. each computer part uses more reasoning, as it is just a useful part of a full machine as a whole.

To sell to a geek, you need specific reasoning as to why an item will help them. If you just try to advertise the entire product and it’s looks, we will be less convinced. To sell to us, you have to tell us the “why”.