I recently read a story about a successful real estate agent who outperforms his colleagues using a key insight into how and why people make buying decisions.

I can’t remember the book in which I read the story, so I’ll tell it loosely as I remember it.

The realtor determined that, for the most part, humans make buying decisions emotionally and then justify the decision with logic afterward.

He further concluded that, when buying a house, people became emotionally hooked on a property because of one key feature in the house. And it was a different feature every time.

Equipped with this insight, he spent his time listening carefully to which feature his clients were most excited about. He paid special attention to their body language when they walked into a certain room. He watched as their eyes lit up over one feature or another.

In one example, a woman fell in love with the closet in the master bedroom of a home she was visiting. Her eyes lit up and she spoke about it incessantly.

He also noticed that the husband deferred to the wife when it came down to the final “yay or nay” decision to buy the home. The realtor could see that the wife was ultimately the final decision maker.

The home, we’ll say, cost a million dollars. So he knew he was now selling not a home, but a “million-dollar closet”. The rest of the home had most of what they needed, so it could be easily justified on the back of the emotional attachment to the closet.

Whether we like it or not, we all follow a similar pattern. For example, when I am choosing a coworking space, I need a quiet place to make unscheduled telephone calls. So, having access to a phone booth/designated area for calls is of paramount importance to me. It’s my Million-Dollar Closet.

I’ll compromise on  a lot of things to get that one key feature. I’ll even travel further from home to a coworking space that offers this feature because telephone calls happen frequently and I need to be respectful of my clients’ need for a quiet and private consulting call. I can’t have people talking in the background during a client strategy meeting.

The Problem with Features

The problem is that the Million-Dollar Closet is different for every person.

There’s no way the realtor could have guessed it would be the closet for that specific client. But in her case, that was the hook needed to make the sale. The home simply needed to be a good enough choice to logically reinforce her emotional hook.

However, unlike the realtor, you can find our what your members value as the Million-Dollar Closet of your workspace by asking and listening when they tell you why they chose your workspace instead of the others.

By understanding which key features are most important to your members, you can highlight those and bring attention to them in your website copy. You can also draw attention to those things through subtle inclusions in your blog content and social media.

What’s your workspace’s Million-Dollar Closet?