Foot in The Door: Getting B2B Prospects to Make a Big Leap By Starting Small

Behavioral research has found that “foot-in-the-door” techniques can prove effective when attempting to motivate your target audience to make a large behavioral change. For example, if you are marketing a B2B product or service that requires your prospects to make a huge change (such as switching from a provider  they’ve used for decades), it may be useful to have them agree to a smaller change first to get your foot in the door.

There are some stipulations regarding foot-in-the-door research, but the main one is to allow some time to pass before you follow up with your second, larger request. You cannot just assume your audience will proactively act on the larger request — you have to make it.  

It may also be useful to get your B2B target audience to comply with other behaviors that are similar in ease to the smaller request. Evidence of suggests spillover is stronger when the requested behaviors are of the same ease. And, as you know, the more business they can do with you, the better chance you will have of them agreeing to the larger change later on.  

So if you have a B2B marketing product or service that requires your target audience to make a large behavioral change, consider using the foot-in-the-door technique. It just may be the key to motivating your target audience to act on what otherwise would be too large of a change for them to consider.

Vann Morris is the Director of Buying Behavior Studies with the Atlanta B2B advertising agency, MLT Creative. She is a Social and Behavioral Scientist who is currently working on her PhD in Communications, and uses her strong theoretical background in order to show how scientific theory should be used to develop strategy and effective B2B marketing campaigns.