Copy And

3. Sales Psychology and How To Write Copy That Converts

• Samantha Burmeister

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Sales psychology is about understanding what motivates YOUR audience, reflecting their desires back in their own words, and clearly offering the solution they’re already looking for.

When you sell using positive psychology, you stop sounding “salesy” and start sounding like the trusted guide they’ve been waiting for.

Resources Mentioned

  • See the full episode notes here
  • Copy On Demand → 1:1 support to help you learn how to write high-converting copy in your own voice. (Waitlist open!)
  • Nomad Copy VIP Services → Hire me to write your copy—sales pages, emails, websites, and more.
  • Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs → The psychological model that explains human motivators, from survival to self-actualization.

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To view this episode with subtitles, visit my YouTube channel here



Nomad Copy Agency writes copy that CONVERTS for service-based businesses. To inquire about done-for-you copy, click here.

Hello and welcome back to Copy and the marketing podcast where online service providers like you learn how to write copy that sounds like them, but convert. Better. I'm Sam Burmeister. I'm the founder and lead copywriter at Nomad Copy Agency, and I'm your guide on this little copy adventure. As you know, copy is a central piece of all of your marketing. It's the words that sell, whether it's the words that you're speaking, that you're writing, things that go in places that rarely get seen, like the bottom of your about page can do so much. For your brand. So today we are talking about copy and sales psychology basics. And before you go running the other way or wonder if I'm a psychologist, I'm not a psychologist, this is specifically a conversation for service providers who are writing copy in their own businesses who think to themselves, I can write. How do I write something that sells? How do I make the people who visit my sales pages and opt-in pages and read my emails think, oh my gosh, she knows me so well. I absolutely need this thing that she is buying. That is my goal for you, is to write copy that sounds like you, but converts better. So let's jump in. Today we are talking about sales psychology and why words persuade. We're talking about sales psychology basics, how to persuade people, how to write copy that converts. And in the next few episodes after this, we're gonna talk about how to actually apply the sales psychology that you learned today and put it on your sales pages in a way that makes people say, absolutely, take my money. Sales psychology. Isn't that scary? It's just kind of the official term for knowing why people buy things and when you know what motivates your people to buy, you can use words and phrases that resonate with them and guide them to a solution that works for them. Ultimately, I want you to be thinking about sales as a service. Of course you're selling your services and those services should serve the goals of your people, but selling to them is truly just educating them on how to get the solution that they're so deeply looking for. And again, sales psychology is just the words for knowing why people buy stuff. So in this episode, I will keep it pretty surface level, but I'm gonna dig into sales psychology basic. Some concepts that you can use and a few practical tips for infusing this into your writing so that you can write copy that converts. Then in the next couple of episodes, I'm doing a series, so I really want you to stick around to make sure that you like and subscribe so that you get the updates when these come out. But we're doing a full series on sales pages specifically. We're gonna start with the above the fold. We're gonna talk about calls to action and how to make your page super, super clickable. We're gonna talk about headings and the psychology behind those headings and all of the elements that go into a sales page that make people buy from you. So let's start with the sales psychology basics. You may remember like social studies or AP psych or a class from high school talking about Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And if you're a visual person, you can picture a triangle and it almost looks like the old food pyramid that we had when we were kids. But the bottom of this hierarchy of needs is the basic things you need to survive. That's food, water, shelter. Then when you have those things you can build on your pyramid and you get things like safety. So you're keeping yourself alive and you're keeping yourself safe. Then after that come your social needs, like love and self-esteem. And then finally, the tippy, tippy top of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is self-actualization. And to define that, it's basically How do you feel that you've reached your full potential? And we are not typically selling food, water, and shelter. Those are basic rights for all humans. We're not typically selling safety, but typically in the people that I hang out with and the people that I write for and the businesses who sell things, they're selling basically commodities, whether those are services or products, but those are fulfilling those top parts of the needs, which is their need for love, self-esteem, and self-actualization. What's relevant here is that every decision that buyers make is an emotional decision. Does that mean that you need to drive into people's negative emotions? No. It actually means quite the opposite. When we say that people are emotional buyers, it means that people buy their potential. You very rarely purchase something because you just need it. You purchase something because of what it means to you. So if we think about what we do when we go shopping, we buy something, not because we need a shirt. Typically we have shirts. Even if you say, oh, but I need it for an event. You probably have a shirt. It's just not a shirt that's going to give the message that you want to give at the event that you're going to. So it's still an emotional decision of who do I want to present myself as? So when we think about these emotional decisions, it's what is really motivating people when they're purchasing. And we wanna lean into this positive side because if you are catering to people on what. And selling what doesn't motivate them and what they're moving away from. We think of this, it's called the carrot and the stick. you can picture a bunny rabbit with a leash around its neck, or a color around its neck with a carrot dangling in front of it, and then somebody chasing after it with a stick. That rabbit's gonna stop running when the person stops chasing them. But how are they going to continue to move forward as an act of their own volition is gonna be their chasing the carrot. So when you're selling a service, you want to be selling the carrot. You want to be selling their potential and what's happening in front of them, because just like the rabbit, we are going to make decisions based on who we can become, what we will achieve in the future. And that's where this sense of community and self-actualization and belonging and love and potential live is in the front, not in the back. Not behind us. So, um, specifically in psychology, we're lighting up the parts of the brain, the limbic system that make emotional decisions, and we want those to be positive decisions. Funny enough, the limbic system is also where your fight or flight, what is it, fawn and one other one. Um. Are also living. So we don't want to activate the other parts of the brain that doesn't foster great buyers. So how do we do this? Then in our copy, we wanna play to people's desires in our copy, speaking to their potential and their future. And we also want to speak to their logic because we think we make logical decisions, but we tend to make decisions based on emotion. So we wanna play on both logic and their desires. So in our sales copy, we can leverage both of them by creating positive emotional associations with our services, which is using emotional techniques like storytelling appealing to brand loyalty, or we can trigger the limbic system the more logical side of the brain and make the product more desirable, making it seem like it's something that they do truly need, not something that they want or desire. So that's how the brain plays into things. Prefrontal cortex in the limbic system ultimately saying, but what do you want and what do you need? And how can I help you get there to achieve this self-actualization that you're looking for? So positive psychology is thing one that you need to know about. Sales psychology. There are two other things. The second one is mirroring, and this is something that the CIA uses to get information out of people. It's something that can be used to help people feel like it's in their best interest to work with you. And mirroring is simply playing into our need to feel seen and to feel heard, and it's as easy as repeating back to people what they tell you and how do we do that? I'll get to that in just a second. So, so far we've talked about positive psychology, that's our carrot and the stick. We've talked about mirroring. And the third thing is reciprocity. And this is where people often start to feel salesy. However, it's important to know about it from a sales psychology perspective. Reciprocity is simply When you give someone something, they're expected to give something back. I'll give you a really crappy example when you're on vacation and, um, people come up to you and tie a bracelet on you. this is really common in high tourist destinations. I've seen it everywhere from PISA to Mexico City. they come up and they tie a bracelet on you and they say, oh, I've given you this gift. Like, now will you help my family by giving a donation or like a handout basically, that is reciprocity. It's when people feel that they need to buy something from you. Do I think that this is the best way to go about selling, especially in our online business and services and coaching space? No. However, when we go to Maslow's hierarchy and look at. Reciprocity. What we see is that this is the self-actualization of feeling like you owe someone something. It's the idea of fitting in and being accepted, helping somebody else reach their goals. It is this place that we come to from this place of abundance because we have our other needs met. However, oftentimes in sales. Reciprocity is not the best way to go. So I told you we would come back to some examples of using positive psychology, mirroring and reciprocity. How can you use this? The first way to use this is to understand your ideal audience. And I know everyone always says, ask your audience. However, market research is arguably one of the most important things that you can do, not just of your current audience, but of your future audience. So this might mean asking your current audience questions throughout their customer journey before they work with you, right after they've signed up working with you. Asking them in offboarding what the experience was like of working with you and what they wish they had seen. It means asking questions on your intake forms. It may mean surveying your list at random or at least once a year. My current favorite way to understand my audience's motivations is to ask them right when they join my list. All of my freebies ask not only for first name and email, but they also ask for where they're at in the buyer's journey knowing what motivates your people will help you know what kind of calls to action to use in the future as well. Because let's say that some people are worried about how much time you can save them, and other people are worried about how much money you can save them. If you know that most of your people are worried about how much money they're going to be able to save or earn, then that is the kind of call to action that you can use to motivate the most people in the future. So that's one way that you can use sales psychology in your business like today, is to understand their motivations and then use their motivations to speak to them, which leads us to mirroring is speaking their language back at them. The second thing is to understand how they talk about their desires and their needs. Again, this comes back to our market research, but not just understanding answers to yes, no questions, but this is a really great use case for tat GPT Actually. Ask people open-ended questions, copy and paste the information over to an AI bot and ask it what people's desires are. Ask it to give it to you in their language and to paraphrase things for you, give you top three or top five lists. Ask it to call out words that came up multiple times. Um, this can also come from interviews and you can pull transcripts from interviews, but really what I encourage you to do here is understand how people talk about their desires and the words that they use. Because oftentimes I work with people who are so smart and so brilliant and they're using. Big words or ephemeral words or academic words to describe what they do. For example, two of my clients right now are an accountant and a therapist. And the therapist is talking about things like, uh, a neutral nervous system and stuff, and people are like, I just wanna calm the F down. The same thing as she is, but in totally different words. So in her copy, she needs to say, I have the tools to help you calm the F down, not I have the tools to help you neutralize your nervous system. My accountant, um, is talking all about a p and l and a balance sheet and all of this. And the clients that they're working with are people trying to buy their first homes and they just wanna know the documents that I can hand to my. Mortgage lender to get me qualified for a mortgage as an entrepreneur. Again, they're, they're saying the same things. They're talking about the documents, but in totally different ways. So to recap, we've talked about how you can use this as understanding people's motivations and is specifically how they talk about their desires. Then this one's on you. Third thing is get familiar with asking for the sale. People love clarity. So once you know how people talk about their desires, you need to be able to say that back to them and say, yes, I can help you have the documents ready so that you can qualify for a mortgage. Yes, I can help you calm the F down. Yes, I can do the thing. And then asking for the sale, you need to be clear about it so that your people. Are clear about it because when you are confident, that will exude back to them that not only are you confident in selling, but you are confident in actually delivering your service to your people. So we've talked about a couple of things here. Positive psychology, mirroring, saying things back to people and sales tactics like reciprocity. Now let's give a couple more examples of how you can use these. We'll start with sales psychology. When you understand what your people want, you can speak to it. It's super simple. So instead of asking questions and putting people on the defensive and saying things like, imagine this, or Do you ever wish that blank? You can change to sound more confident and say, you can blank. So let's using a designer for an example. Instead of asking, do you wish you ever had to worry about creating graphics that can go anywhere and how you can create them. Say something more like you can create, consistently create on-brand attention grabbing graphics. We're exuding confidence with this psychology, and we're also speaking to their future. So rather than saying, this is what you've worried about in the past, we're saying this is what you can do in the future, that's positive psychology. That is your carrot. So let's talk about mirroring. You can use exactly what people tell you in your market research and in your surveys to speak to people. For example, I used the therapist that I work with who's talking all about nervous system regulation. If people aren't already in the work of. Therapy and coaching and calming their nervous system, that's not the language that they're going to speak. So instead of saying something like, I'll teach you how to regulate your nervous system. Say, I'll teach you how to calm the F down even when you're in luteal phase, if that's what your people are saying. How to use sales tactics like reciprocity or even scarcity and urgency is to talk about your offer confidently. I'm never going to teach you how to use reciprocity and how to manipulate people. However, when you can be confident that is a sales tactic in and of itself is that you are confident that you can solve their problems. And you are confident in asking them to let you do it. So we're using the words that they describe, the transformation that they want to tell them, yes, I can do that. And then we tell them. Why they should want you to do it and exactly how you're going to do it. And again, this is some in-depth sales page stuff that we're gonna get to in the next couple of episodes. But what I want you to do is to have a clear call to action when you are selling so that you can confidently speak to your people. This has been so, so, so brief. Sales psychology is an entire concentration in graduate programs, and I'm covering it in a few minutes. But the basics of it here are that I want you to sell like a human. I want you to sell like someone who experiences empathy and understands who your people are and where they wanna be. Six months from now. I want you to sell like someone who is so freaking good at what they do, that they can also get really good at telling people that they're good at what they do. Because one thing that all of my clients have in common is that they are so smart and so good at what they do, and oftentimes copy is the one thing standing in their way. So if you need somebody to help you write this copy, I've got two options for you and the links to both are gonna be in the show notes below, but the first one is not currently available. I still want you to go to the link and get on the wait list. That's copy on demand. That's where I work with you one-on-one to help you learn how to write better copy in your business. That's where we look at your copy and we look at yours. It's not hypotheticals, and you over time create better habits so that writing according to sales psychology becomes second nature. Second way is that you hire me to write your copy. I can do this through VIP days or on an hourly basis. It really depends on what's best for you. But basically I take everything that I know about your business because we have a kickoff call and we talk about everything in your business, I then take everything that I know about sales, psychology, and your business, and I help you create sales pages, emails, and websites that sell, because I always, always, always want you to have a copy that sounds like you, but converts better. Tomorrow we're gonna talk about defining that ideal customer so that you know who you should be surveying or not. And it's so much more than age demographics and like naming your ideal client avatar that we so often see in the online space. So be sure to subscribe so that you get notifications when that episode drops next week. So this has been copy and sales psychology. And I'm so glad that you're here. Be sure to like and subscribe below so that you get future notifications, and of course, reach out if you have any questions. You can find me on Instagram at Nomad copy, and on LinkedIn at Samantha Burmeister. As always, links are gonna be in show notes. I will see you soon.