When Challenging Your Customer Backfires: Provocative Approach Proves Biggest Loser in Two Important Customer Conversations

April 25, 2017

Second consecutive experiment proves insights-led messaging alienates existing customers when communicating renewals and price increases

Whether you call it “provoking” or “challenging,” the insights-led sales approach that gained popularity in the Harvard Business Review and several books has become widely adopted in recent years. Surprisingly, disrupting your customer during a renewal or price increase discussion is the wrong approach—one that could drive a good customer to your competition.

Recent academic studies conducted by social psychology professors placed would-be customers into “buying simulations” to measure their reactions. This testing approach differs from the original research supporting “provocative/challenging” methodologies, which were based on observing common behaviors among top-performing salespeople rather than testing the actions of potential decision-makers.

Over the last 18 months, Corporate Visions has contracted three experiments with leading academic researchers to test the impact of challenging or provocation-based messages in three specific selling scenarios:

1. 1.New Sales Opportunities – Winning new business or stealing competitive business.
2. 2.Renewal Sales Opportunities – Ensuring customer loyalty and capturing contract renewals.
3. 3.Price Increase Opportunities – Effectively passing along price increases to expand revenue while minimizing risk.

In the first experiment, provocation-based messages introducing “unconsidered needs” or new insights were most successful in persuading potential customers to choose you over competitors responding only to “known needs.” Challenging your prospect in a “new sales” opportunity provided a 10-plus percent lift in persuasion.

However, in the second and third experiments, which focused on existing customers, this approach was the least effective. When trying to renew a customer or communicate a price increase, introducing a challenging message with “unconsidered needs” puts you at significant risk of losing them.

The most recent experiment, focused on communicating price increases, showed that the provocative approach resulted in the following for the “challenging message”:

• ​18.8% less favorable attitudes
• ​15.5% less likely to renew
• ​16.3% more likely to switch

The winning approach focused on reinforcing your customer’s status quo bias instead of disrupting it.

Professor Nick Lee of Warwick Business School, who conducted the most recent experiment, stated: “If you introduce an unconsidered need, you start making your customer think more carefully about what they want and how to get it. So, they become more likely to consider others. It was amazing to me how the pattern was so clear. It is rare to see such strong and consistent results across so many different groups in this kind of experiment. It’s also quite counter-intuitive these days with all the hype around provocation-based selling, that the ‘unconsidered needs’ approach turns out to be such a poor idea, according to our data.”

Tim Riesterer, chief strategy and research officer for Corporate Visions, added: “It’s clearly not a one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to communicating with customers. Challenging a customer when you are trying to defeat the status quo works. But, challenging a customer when you are trying to keep them and get them to pay more doesn’t.”

Based on the experiments, which also revealed the best approaches for customer messaging success, Corporate Visions has developed situational frameworks for helping companies create and deliver messages for each of the key selling moments:

• ​Why Change? – Telling a story that defeats status quo bias and gets prospects to agree to change
• ​Why You? – Telling a follow-on story that clearly differentiates you from the competing alternatives
• ​Why Stay? – Telling a story that convinces existing customers to renew their relationship with you
• ​Why Pay? – Telling your customers a story that is most likely to generate a positive response to a price increase

More details on the experiments entitled “Why Stay?” and “Why Pay” can be found in the Corporate Visions resource library, where research briefs, infographics, video links, and other content describing the results are available.