Tag Archives: Sales

Interrupting Patterns Can Lead To Expanding Opportunities

I Shot An Elephant In My Pajamas

I used to have this friend that had a particular skill. It wasn’t anything that was going to make him rich, or famous, but it was really fun to watch. The interesting thing was that whenever he tried to purposely do it, like think about it beforehand, it never was quite as amusing.

It even was less funny to watch, and more obviously forced, when there was a group of people, and somebody mentioned this particular skill, and then everybody turned and expected him to turn it on right on the spot. He wasn’t a shy guy, so he never melted under pressure or anything, but it seemed to be much more spontaneous whenever he just launched into this particular behavior without any prompting, and kind of riffed off of himself. Especially when it happened at a party or something when there were plenty of people around, and they were completely taken by surprise.

I was reading this article the other day about something called a pattern interrupt. This is something from NLP that goes way back. What is likely the most taught, or talked about, or referenced example is the handshake interrupt.

Milton Erickson, the famous hypnotherapist invented this, mostly by trial and error. He would walk up to somebody, stick out his hand, and right in the middle of the handshake, he would suddenly shift into hypnotist mode, and pretty soon the person would be standing there staring at his or her hand.

The way it works is like this. The brain is a very lazy organ. Perhaps lazy is the wrong word. The brain is a very efficient organ. It doesn’t want to waste a bunch of energy figuring out the same things over and over. The brain likes to find patterns, so that it doesn’t have to expend a lot of energy. Most people are surprised when they find out that the brain burns over twenty percent of your daily energy. So it makes sense it wants to make things as efficient as possible.

So the way it does this is it looks for patterns whenever possible. Like when you first learned how to open a door, you pretty much knew how to open all doors. And when you first learned the alphabet, you could read any font, regardless of how esoteric or flowery it was.

If your brain had to stop everything, and spend all its energy trying to relearn how to open a door every time, then you wouldn’t get much accomplished.

One of the reasons, according to many evolutionary biologists, for the reason of our powerful brain was because we had to develop all kinds of complex social skills as we evolved on the African plains. So a large part of our brain goes into reading body language, and trying to decide who to trust and who we can take advantage of.

So it makes sense that patterns involving other people are very important to the brain. Once we figure out certain behaviors that we do over and over again, it can potentially save a lot of energy.

Meeting somebody for the first time is one of those patterns. If you can imagine what it would be like if we had to invent ways to get to know somebody every single time we met somebody new, it would be an extraordinary burden on our brain. Meeting somebody for the first time is extremely important, because how accurately we judge them can have a profound effect on our future safety, especially when you consider what it was like back in the caveman days.

If you made the wrong impression about somebody, perhaps thinking if they were harmless when they were really a wolf in sheep’s clothing, it could be devastating later on. So when you meet somebody for the first time, you need as much brainpower as possible to “feel them out,” so to speak. Which makes the handshake interrupt very powerful.

The automatic portion of the handshake, where you respond by sticking out your hand when somebody sticks out there, grab it and pump it a few times, and say the automatic “My names Jack, nice to meet you, nice to meet you too…” is rarely given any conscious thought.

So when Erickson would stop right in the middle of the handshake, people were completely thrown off balance. The mind is do entrenched in the automatic behavior that there is a complete and total shutdown of all thought for a few moments as the “targets” tried to figure out what was going on. And during this brief window, Erickson would see how much he could get away with.

A typical interaction would go like this:

Erickson (sticking his hand out) “Hi!”
Mark (Responding with his hand) “Hi.”
Erickson (freezing the handshake in the middle) “Nice to meet you my name is….”

And then he’d quickly grab the other guys hand with his non shaking hand, gently turn it and lift it so the other guy was staring at his palm. He would do this in less than a second.

“..as you look at your hand you can start to wonder about all those things you’ve forgotten, and you’ll be surprised how easy it is to stand here and think of all those wonderful things…” or something similar, that would take up as much of the guys brain CPU as possible.

Then he would walk away and leave the guy staring at his hand.

I think the reason my friend was so funny when he was so spontaneous, was that everybody was busy caught up in their pre-programmed “behavior” and they would be shaken when he started to act out his bizarre behavior. If you take any popular joke, a key element is something that is completely unexpected, especially if the joke is a play on words or something, and delivers a punch line that completely shakes up the imagine that you were led to automatically think.

The old Groucho Marx joke comes to mind:

“Last night I shop an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know.”

Or the famous linguistic example of ambiguity:

“Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.”

I’m sure you can think of many others.

(Advertisement)

To break any pattern of failure and skyrocket yourself to massive success, click below before it’s they figure out how to stop this:

Success with NLP

Success with NLP

How To Apply The Powerful Integration Of Parts Technique

Union Talks

I was mindlessly reading various articles on the net the other day and came across a description of an NLP procedure I learned a few years ago in a seminar. It is pretty useful procedure, but many people don’t realize in how many different ways it can be applied, and in how many different situations for various results, both for yourself and for others.

The procedure is called “Integration of Parts,” and has been written about in quite a few NLP books. The interesting thing about NLP is people tend to think that it is set of tools that were “invented” and didn’t exist until Bandler and Grinders started their work. The actual truth is that all of NLP existed before, in various forms, they just weren’t called “NLP,” or they weren’t used in the specific way the “NLPers” are taught to use them.

One of the presuppositions of NLP is that the more flexible you are, the better equipped you are to handle different situations. You’d think that being taught this from the get go, NLPers would be able to see how the same procedures have been used for quite a while, some since the beginning of recorded history. In one particular book (I believe it was persuasion by Kevin Hogan, but I may be mistaken) he goes over a passage from the New Testament, where in one of St. Paul’s letters, he is clearly using the sales technique of “pacing and leading.” Only back then he didn’t call it “pacing and leading,” he was likely a natural salesperson.

The thing that many people tend to overlook is that NLP only collects the techniques and strategies that people that are “naturals” are doing anyway. They study excellence, elicit people’s strategies, and then write them down in an easy to follow recipe. Sometimes you’ll hear a particularly gifted and eloquent speaker, and people will whisper and argue whether or not he’s “using” NLP. A better question might be is he a natural, or did he learn those skills, or is it a combination of both?

A lot of people claimed that President Obama was “using” NLP while he was campaigning, but I think he is merely a naturally gifted speaker. If you study the tonality and gestures that he uses when he speaks, they aren’t anywhere near as proficient and congruent as in somebody who has studied embedded commands and anchoring.

But back to the particular procedure. Integration of parts. Lets say part of you wants to pick up the phone to make a cold call, so you can make some money. But another part of you is afraid of getting rejected. It would seem that you have two parts that have two completely different intentions. These warring parts create anxiety, stress, and a high turnover rate in any sales job.

So what do you do?

Integration of parts.

You ask the part that wants to make the call to come out and play. Put that part in your right hand. You then talk to that part, respectfully of course. Parts don’t usually get a lot of focus, and are used to operating in the background, so you need to be gentle. First chat him or her up a bit, and develop some rapport. Describe them as much as you can, in as many sensory modes as possible. Then ask the part what’s important about his top level intention (wanting to pick up the phone to make a call). Then do some basic conversational criteria eliciting skills and find out the intentions under that. You’ll probably need to go three or four deep to get to the big one. For example, he wants to pick up the phone, to make some money, to pay the bills, to not worry, to feel safe. Safety is important. Make sure at every step of the way to validate you part, and make sure they know you respect their intention.

Then you do the same with the other part. Make sure that before you do that, you ask the first part if they’ll sit tight for a bit. They usually will, as it’s nice to sit out side in the open. Once you chat up your other part for a bit, start digging down for their deeper level criteria. It doesn’t take long to get the “Aha!” when you realize that both parts are really after the same thing, only at different levels. The first part took a while to get to wanting “safety,” while the second part might be fighting for that right off the bat.

Once you find that both parts are really after the same thing, ask them if they’d like to join forces, like the superfriends. Most of they time they’ll agree, then slowly bring them together, and give them time to get used to each other. Once you combine your hands, you’ll be holding a new part that has all the strategies and resources of both parts, but not evolved into more powerful more resourceful part. Slowly bring this into your chest, take a couple of breaths, and do whatever hallucination is useful to let this new part sink down into your soul or wherever the parts live inside you. It’s different for most people. I knew this one guy that had all his parts living in an energy ball that floated behind him, and was tethered to the back of his neck. Not really his neck, the tether went right into his spinal column.

(Keep in mind this is only a hallucination, there really are no parts or anything called NLP or any of that other new age nonsense. It’s just pretty useful, that’s all.)

Can you see how this simple communication strategy between two entities with seemingly different intentions can work? You can use this for:

Union Negotiations
Sales Meetings
Asking for A Raise
Nuclear Arms Reduction Talks (if you’re into that sort of thing)
Deciding where to go on a date

And much, much more. You are only limited by your imagination, and you willingness to play with this and see what happens.

If you’re interested in a really cool guided meditation/dual induction CD (about twenty minutes long) that helps you through this process, check out the New Option Generator, from Learning Strategies Corporation.

Have fun.

(Advertisement)

To find out other cool NLP tricks you can use in all areas of your life for massive happiness and success, check out NLP success below for more information:

Success with NLP

Success with NLP

Everything Is Temporary

Endless Horizons

I have a friend that lives in Korea. He’s never been to any other countries, and he told me the country he’d like to visit most is the United States. Not move there to live or anything, just to visit. I asked him why, and he gave me a rather peculiar answer, but it made sense after I thought about it for a while. And after he told me of his answer, I never looked at the world the same.

I remember when I was in third grade, when we first learned about plate tectonics. How all the continents are like giant pieces of an ancient jigsaw puzzle that used to fit together snugly, as one large mass of land. And of course, due to the structure of the Earth, the land can float around, albeit extremely slowly, at least according to human standards.

I remember asking my teacher how that was possible. She said that even though the Earth appeared to be a solid object, we can walk on the surface without falling through, it’s really liquid underneath. Really hot liquid, and the surface is really sort of floating around. She described it as a giant pie that’s cooking in the oven. The top is solid, or becomes solid while it cooks, but the inside is always liquid, especially if it’s an apple pie. And if you look at one of those time elapsed movies of an apple pie cooking, the surface will seem to expand a little bit, and move around.

There are many metaphors that are based on the “solidness” of the earth. Solid as a rock, immovable as a mountain etc. But these metaphors only hold true when compared to the attention span of your average human society, which isn’t nearly as long enough to appreciate the fluidity of a mountain range. The English language has only been around, in various forms, for a few thousand years at most. A mere blink compared to plate tectonics.

I remember once I was taking a sales course in handling objections. We learned many different ways to overcome a client’s reason for not buying our product or service. These are pretty handy techniques, and can be used in a variety of situations. One of the presuppositions of being able to out frame somebody’s objection is nobodies objection is ever set in stone.

They might not be able to buy today; right this second, but they will someday, or at least they think they will someday, otherwise they wouldn’t be talking to you. (Unless you happen to be a really aggressive door-to-door salesperson).

Whenever they give an objection, or a reason, or an excuse or whatever, you just say:

“Yes, but for how long?”

That usually throws them for a loop, and gets them thinking outside of their small “now” frame of not being able to buy. Once they start thinking in terms of some time in the future, when they will be able to buy (and their objection is no longer valid), you simply bring that feeling into the present.

“I can’t afford it.”
“Yes, but for how long?”

“I’m not sure I like the color.”
“Yes, but for how long.”

“I’m just shopping for now, kind of looking around.”
“Yes, but for now long.”

Unless you’ve done something wrong and they’re ready to kill you, they won’t usually answer with “Forever!” before stomping off.

A flip side to this is to say a variation of “No yet?”

“I don’t really like the color.”
“Hmm. Not yet, huh?”

“I’m not sure if I can afford it.”
“Yea, not yet?”
(Note: for you conversational hypnotists, they won’t be sure if the “not yet” applies to them not being sure, or them not having any money)

If you have good rapport with your client/target/mark, these simple questions will get them out of right now, where all their problems are, and get them thinking in the future, when their problems have already been solved. Then they can take that feeling of already having solved their problems back to now, and the current situation will look a lot more doable.

Obviously, you can use this in any kind of conversation, for any kind of intention, so long as you have a win/win outcome in mind. Sales, therapy, seduction, getting your kids to clean their rooms, whatever.

So when I asked my friend why wanted to visit the states, it was for the simple reason to be able to look out toward the horizon, and see nothing but flat earth. Korea, being a pretty cramped peninsula, has many mountains, and no matter were you are in Korea, no matter which direction you look, (unless you are looking out over the sea) you don’t have to look for to see mountains.

But in the United States, there are plenty of areas with nothing but flat ground, and open sky. He wanted to be able to look out his window, or whatever, and see nothing but uninhibited views of the ground stretching flat seemingly forever until finally meeting up with the sky. And look to the right, and to the left, and see a perfectly flat horizon, endlessly expanding in both directions.

(Advertisement)

To gaze out into your future without seeing any obstructions, take a look what’s on the other side of the link below:

Success with NLP

Success with NLP

How To Unleash Your Powerful Potential

Why You Should Study NLP

Have you ever been window-shopping, and maybe decided to venture into a store to get a better look, and one thing led to another and you ended up buying something that you hadn’t set out to buy that day? Or maybe you were kind of in the market for something, like maybe a TV or something, and weren’t quite ready to make a purchase, but you came across a salesperson that somehow seemed to make buying a TV that day the most obvious choice in the world?

We’ve all had the experience of being hounded by a salesperson that just wouldn’t take no for an answer, and know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of hard sell after hard sell. You know a salesperson is desperate for a sale when they relentlessly follow you around despite your clear indications for them to take a hike.

So what’s the difference? Why does on salesperson seem to be helpful, and when you do make the decision to buy something, you feel grateful and want to tell your friends about him or her, while other sales people, they just emit an aura of desperation that triggers every single one of your warning signals?

Or more importantly, if you are trying to persuade somebody, whether it is in direct sales, marketing, or other form of persuasion, how do you be the first salesperson and not the second one?

Most people will tell you that being able to sell things is a natural gift that you either have it, or you don’t. Like a guy being a “natural” with women, wherever he goes, women follow. And no matter how hard you try to emulate him, you just can’t figure it out.

Part of the problem with so-called “naturals” is that they themselves have no idea how they do what they do. Unless they’ve gained their skills through long concentrated practice, they likely have no clue what makes them such a persuasive and charismatic salesperson. And unfortunately, many books on sales are written by these “naturals” and aren’t all that helpful, as they don’t really know how to describe what they are doing in a way that makes it easily repeatable by others.

They may say things like “respect the client,” “develop rapport,” “be sincere,” but these are particularly vague. How exactly do you “respect the client?” What is the best way to “develop rapport?” if you ask ten different successful salespeople these questions, you’ll likely get ten very different answers, which will likely be just as vague and unhelpful.

Enter NLP.

NLP, or neurolinguistic programming was developed as a powerful modeling tool to figure out exactly what these “naturals” were doing that made them “naturals.” It all started with therapists. Most people, when they think of therapy, they imagine going to a shrink every week for many years, and talking endlessly about childhood problems and parental issues (like Tony Soprano). But when NLP was first developed, they studied a few therapists that could “fix” people in just a few sessions.

Somebody would have this deep emotional problem, they’d go see one of these “naturals” and in a couple of weeks, through three or four sessions, their problem would be completely obliterated. And these weren’t your basic problems like not being able to smile at a pretty girl, or ask your boss for a raise. These were deep emotional problems that had to do with sexual abuse, alcoholism, and other serious relationship issues.

So how did they do it? The interesting thing is when one of the co-founders of NLP, Richard Bandler, showed one of these therapists her specific language patterns, she was surprised. She herself didn’t even know that was how she was doing it. Bandler basically showed her that she was using the same language structure over and over again with her clients, and it was creating magical results. Much better than that stereotypical image of a useless psychiatrist who just sits there and says, “how do you feel about that? What do you think that means?” over and over again.

Through the creation of NLP, people were suddenly able to model excellence in human behavior and human communication. By asking the right questions, and paying attention to the specifics of the communication structure, they were able to figure out exactly how those “naturals” were doing what they were doing.

And a major part of their “natural” abilities was a strong belief about their capabilities. This went far beyond affirmations in the mirror every morning. This was a deep, powerful subconscious belief that they totally capable of doing what they were setting out to do, whether it be curing a child of his bedwetting, or selling a fifty thousand dollar car to somebody who was merely “looking around.”

There were subsequently several method and procedures developed in NLP to install these beliefs in people, or for people to install them in themselves. It became possible to become a natural without experiencing the random childhood that produced a natural salesperson or therapist. As Richard Bandler put it, with NLP, it’s never too late to have a happy childhood.

There is a huge amount of free NLP information available on the web, and there are several great sources of self study NLP courses, as well as NLP based self development products. With NLP, there really isn’t any reason why you can’t be a natural in your chosen field.

One powerful program that many people have been having massive results with is success with NLP. If you check out this website, you’ll find that this is just one of the many programs that uses NLP to help you become successful in any field you choose.

Success with NLP

Success with NLP

One thing about studying NLP is that it is by no means a “quick fix.” Many of our beliefs that we’ve been carrying around for a while can take some effort to re engineer, but once you do, you’ll be amazed at how much you can accomplish in life. Take a look at success with NLP and see for yourself.

Many people discover that once they start down the path of self-development with NLP, they realize that the sky really is the limit, and studying and mastering NLP becomes an obviously essential skill of life.

Social Manipulation Or Shrewd Marketing?

Beware The Door Buster

I was waiting in line down at this new electronics shop last weekend. They had this massive grand opening, and they were going to give away this really cool flat screen TV along with a home theater system. They said they’d give out free raffle tickets to the first five hundred people that showed up, and then they’d draw later on in the afternoon to see who won. The catch, of course, was you had to be there to claim your prize. And since they gave out the free raffle tickets at eight o clock in the morning, they were assured that five hundred people would not only likely buy something that morning, but make plans to come back later. Marketing plans like this are fairly obvious. Give somebody a gimmick to get them in the door, and then do your best to up sell them while they are there.

Car dealerships are notorious for doing this. They’ll run an add in the paper for a certain make and model for a ridiculously low price. Of course they’ll say in the small print that there is only one particular car at that price, you can tell as they list the VIN, or Vehicle Identification Number of the car in question. Sometimes they’ll have three or four at that price. People see the ad, and mistakenly believe (to the hopes of the dealer) that all of the cars are at that price.
Then when they show up, they’re told they all sold out. When that happens, the dealership has two powerful tools of influence naturally working in their favor.

The first is something called “Commitment and Consistency,” as pointed out in the often referenced “Influence, Science and Practice,” by Robert Cialdini. When people make a public commitment, they are much easier to be persuaded to do something that is along the lines of that commitment. Political campaigners know this. When they phone people the week before an election and ask them if they are going go out and vote, most people naturally say yes. Since they’ve made a public commitment, even to a complete stranger over the phone, they are much more likely to vote than the average citizen who hasn’t made such a commitment.

By going to the car dealership in search of a good deal on a car, you make a certain commitment. It’s not like the car salesman pulled you in cold off the street.

Another powerful factor they have working for them in this case is social proof. As much as we’d like to think otherwise, we humans are pack animals and are extremely susceptible to crowd behavior. We love to follow fashions, stick to the status quo (unless you are a singing basketball player), and follow the crowd. So when you show up, and the car you wanted is “all sold out (all one of them),” it gives the impression that many people are after the same car, which makes it more desirable.

So by putting those cheesy ads in the paper, and getting you to make a trip to the dealership, just by showing up you have two powerful forces of social influence guiding you to buy a new car.

It’s no wonder that stores use the same tactics. They work, and they work beautifully. Stores use them so much because they work so well. All those incredibly insane “door busters” that you see the day after Thanksgiving, or black Friday, are carefully designed instruments of social manipulation. In case you are unaware, the reason it’s called “Black Friday” is in reference to the black ink bookkeepers use when they are making a profit. In this case black is very good.

To make matters worse, sometime they’ll have free giveaways, but the “winner” is actually a ringer. A plant that works for the store. Even though this is clearly immoral and unethical, it’s pretty hard to uncover and prosecute. The only danger lies in a store being found out, and it’s business getting a bad reputation. Even when people have a suspicion that the winner may indeed be a “ringer,” they still line up, “just in case.” We humans can be terribly easy to manipulate sometimes.

If you can figure out a way to get the free stuff, without giving in to the temptation to buy whatever they convincing you to buy through their masterful social engineering, so much the better.

One thing I usually do in a case like the free TV giveaway is only take five dollars with me, and leave all my credit cards at home. That way even I’m persuaded by the slickest of salesman, I won’t be able to buy anything. Hopefully by the time I race home to get my credit card, I’ll stop and wonder if I really do need that beef jerky machine. It’s not like I eat beef jerky every day, or even once a week. Why in the world do I need to cook the stuff?

So as I was standing there in line, looking at all the awesome electronic gadgets that I would surely buy if I were rich enough, I started talking to the guy behind me. He was involved in several MLMs and told me places like this were a great opportunity spread his business. People were surrounded by all this stuff that they wished they had enough money to buy, so naturally they would be open to opportunities to make more money, at least in principle. This guy said that he had great success recruiting people for his “downline,” at these “free” offerings. He scans the paper every week, and goes to as many as these as possible. He said the best time is right before the actual drawing, when people’s interests are the highest.

He said he was kind of “piggybacking” on the social manipulation of the business. He would show up in the morning, talk to a few people in line, and not mention anything about his business. Then he would come back that afternoon, strike up a conversation again with the people he already met, like he was an old friend. Then while the excitement and expectation was high, he would slowly ease the conversation into his well-crafted sales pitch.

He said that if he only gets one person per “giveaway,” then it is well worth his while, because in the long run, each person that joins his “downline” is worth potentially thousands of dollars, if not more.

And, of course, I didn’t win the TV, and I bought this cool little vacuum cleaner for my keyboard, that plugs into my USB port. And a new computer mouse, because my old one, was, kind of, you know, needed replacing. Or something.

Beware Of Covert Persuasion

Three Types Of Sales

If you’ve ever bought a car, then you are familiar with something called “sales resistance.” As soon as the salesman or saleswoman came walking up to you, your defenses automatically went up. Another name for this is “conscious resistance.” It is widely believed that one of the functions of the conscious mind is to prevent extraneous and harmful ideas from invading our brains. To protect us from getting duped.

There is lot of information regarding the so-called “conscious” and “unconscious” mind. Sometimes the second is referred to as the “subconscious” or the “non conscious” or even the “other than conscious.” Talk about these things can tend to get fairly esoteric and metaphysical in a hurry, which can be less than helpful if you are looking for a specific solution to something. Think of your conscious mind as things that your brain has decided that you “need to think about” and the unconscious (or whatever else you want to call it) everything else. These things you’ve either done them enough times, or God or Mother Nature has decided through evolution that we needn’t worry about these things.

Your heartbeat, your breathing (most of the time), driving to work, scratching your nose, that memory of that time back in third grade when that girl did that thing that you thought meant one thing, but really meant something else. All of these are considered “automatic” and no needing conscious thought, until something specifically calls them to mind.

There’s nothing mystical or metaphysical about it, it is just a conservation of brain bandwidth. If you had to think about all those things, all the time, you’d go nuts, and end up in the corner babbling to yourself. Maybe there were some people who walked around holding all those thoughts in their minds all the time, but they likely were to busy thinking about all those things to reproduce, so there genes didn’t get passed down.

The commonly accepted belief is that we can pretty much hold between 5 to 9 things in our conscious thought at any given time. Once something new comes in, the oldest one drops off into unconsciousness. It’s still there in our brains; it’s just that we don’t access it because our brains have decided it’s not important enough to keep in our memory.

There are plenty of cases where witnesses to crimes supposedly couldn’t recall certain events, but under hypnosis they were able to come up with enough information to help get a conviction.

Back to the approaching car salesman. As soon as you see him coming up, your brain goes into defensive mode. He represents a threat, because his overt intention is to get you to give him a bunch of money. His job is to convince you to believe him enough so you’ll hand over a stack of cash (or sign a lengthy finance contract) based solely on his description of this item for sale. Since this represents quite a large amount of money, or resources, you are on high alert, as there is a potential for serious damage.

Those 5 to 9 things that you can hold in your brain suddenly are cleared and room is made to scrutinize his offer with as much brain bandwidth as possible. You suddenly forget what you want to eat for dinner, that report that you were worried about that you forgot to write before you left for work on Friday, and which of your kids’ friends house he wants to sleep over at tonight.

If you’ve ever sold anything, and felt that huge anxiety that comes with trying to persuade customers, this is why. They are looking at you with much more scrutiny that most people face. Even public speaking, while terrifying for many, doesn’t involve as much scrutiny as trying to sell somebody something. Especially a big ticket item like a car. Unless you are selling from the podium, there’s a good chance that while most of your audience is sitting there politely listening to your speech, they are also planning their shopping list, wondering what to buy their boyfriend or girlfriend for their next birthday, and so on.

The whole of sales strategies is designed and developed to overcome this “sales resistance” and convince the customer that they would be better of giving you their money in exchange for something than they would be to keep their money and get nothing. This can be incredibly difficult, but if can also be incredibly lucrative if you can figure out a way to do it consistent. There are three basic strategies that sales people use.

The Hard Sell

This is the most belligerent of the three. The salesperson hammers away at the prospect, and through brute force of willpower, overcomes the potential buyers resistance. This is the most confrontational, the most anxiety producing, and requires the most amount of mental energy. This is why most normal people loathe going to a car dealership. They fear, many times rightly so, that they will be hammered until their resistance is futile, and the best choice is to accept the salespersons offer, and then slink home, convincing themselves they made a good deal.

The benefits of this, from a sales perspective, is that most people really don’t have that strong of a resistance. After only twenty minutes or so, most people start to show signs of starting to cave.

The drawbacks are obviously a huge amount of stress and pressure, which can lead to health problems such as high blood pressure, not to mention to coping strategies salespeople are commonly known to adopt to deal with this stress, like smoking or drinking.

The Logical Sell

This is just laying out the features and benefits of your product, and hoping the customer decides to buy your product. Many times people that use this strategy are referred to as “order takers” because there’s not a lot of persuasion going on. Most retail outlets rely on this method. Give the customer as much information as he can handle, and hope he buys your product.

The main benefit of this is this is not confrontational in the least. Even if the customer decides not to buy your product, he will likely remember you as a helpful and friendly salesperson.

The main drawback is you likely won’t make a great deal of money using this strategy. You may very well eke out a living, but in most cases the pay is not that spectacular. Jobs that are highly paid that use this method are hard to come by, and usually involve working for a company whose reputation is doing a lot of the convincing for you. In order to make money this way, you need to get yourself in front of a lot of prospects, which can produce stress and anxiety almost as much as in the hard sell scenario described above

The Covert Persuasion Method

This is by far the most lucrative, and causes the least amount of stress and anxiety. This is based on the idea that all decisions are made on an emotional level, rather than a logical level. And by structuring your communication to elicit the proper buying emotions, the sale is easy. Probably the most surprising thing to most people is that you don’t really need to talk about the product at all to elicit the customer’s buying emotions. This is why it is referred to as covert persuasion.

The main drawback is that this takes quite a lot of face to face practice, and requires a lot well developed skills, like reading body language, facial expressions, using specific language patterns and using your mannerisms and gestures in specific ways.

There are a few people that are really good at this, and they make tons of money, and work a lot less often, and lot less hard than most people. If you’ve ever wandered into a store, not really sure if you wanted to buy something, and just from asking a few questions, and getting a few answers, you felt really compelled to buy something, you’ve likely experienced at least one aspect of covert sales.

Any method that is designed to move your emotional mind, rather than your logical mind, is using these methods.

These are much easier to do in a TV commercial, or a well-crafted newspaper or magazine add than they are face to face. The difference is that ads you see on TV are designed to hit the emotional hot buttons that we all have, like sex, safety, belonging to a group, etc.

To use these face to face, you need to elicit the individual hot buttons of the person you are speaking with, and then covertly fire them off while talking about your product, and then covertly connecting those emotional hot buttons to your product or service.

If you want to have some fun, next time you see a particularly persuasive ad on TV, try and figure out what emotional hot buttons the writers were trying to hit, and how they did them. Be careful, because many times their intention is only that you remember their product name, so next time you are in that market for that particular product, theirs will be the first one you think of. If that happens, they’ve successfully snuck their products name past your conscious resistance.

Be careful. It can be disheartening to discover that a many of your decisions and desires were covertly put there by skilled advertisers.

The best defense, of course, is a good offense. Before you buy something, make sure you have a clear, logical reason, and that it satisfies your criteria that you decided on before going to the shop or the dealership or website.

The Power Of Influence – Tool Or Weapon?

Do You Know When Your Strings Are Being Pulled?

There are two laws of influence that can be used in a particularly powerful combination. These two laws have been identified by Robert Cialdini in his bestselling book, “Influence, Science And Practice.” If you are interested in influence at all, and would like to either become better at it, or just to understand how pretty much everybody around you is using these techniques, you should read this book.

There is a vague belief that persuasion is kind of an “art,” and that people that are good at it are like musicians or painters who are born with some natural talent. But Dr. Cialdini has shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that persuasion is indeed a science, rather than an art. A science that can be learned and applied either to benefit an individual, a company, or the leader of a nation.

There are several examples of how these principles of influence have been used without much concern for ethical considerations, but they still work nevertheless.

There is one fantastic example that comes to mind, which I’d like to share with you today. This was illustrated in “Influence.”

The first principle this involves is one of “commitment and consistency.” This is the idea that people are much more willing to do something if they have already publicly stated they will something, or have done something before that is similar.

A great Internet example is “click through.” If you visit a website of somebody trying to sell you something, you’ll likely have to click through several different pages to actually get to the point where you type in your credit card number. The reasoning behind this is people are much more likely to take the next step if they’ve already taken several previous steps.

If you land on some web page, and read some advertising text, and there is a button at the bottom that says “Buy Now!” The percentage of people that click on it is fairly low. But instead, if you shorten your sales page, and on the bottom is a button that says, “Click to Read More!” You’ll get much more people clicking through. Once you get visitors to click through three or four pages, they’ll be much more likely to click on a “Buy Now” button.

Another example is in jury trials. When they finish a trial, and the jury convenes they will often conduct a “straw vote” meaning that just give their first impression, guilty or not guilty, before the jury starts to discuss the case. Here’s the interesting part.

In jury deliberations where each juror publicly states, out loud, whether they feel the defendant is guilty or not guilty, the deliberations last more than twice as long as those where they jurors submit their initial guilty or innocent vote via anonymous slips of paper.

When people state their opinions out loud, they are much less likely to later change them. But when they submit their opinions in private, on an anonymous slip of paper, they later change their minds rather easily.

Another principle is one called scarcity. I’m sure you are well aware of this. Limited supply. Sale only lasts for two days. Only the first one hundred customers.

Study after study shows that people will give something a much higher value when they think it is scarce. A group of researchers did an experiment where they had people sample a cookie. In one case, they convinced the samplers that there were plenty of cookies, and the test would be going for quite a while, etc etc.

Then they told a different group of testers that the cookies were a limited batch, and it was a recipe that was only being tried out for a short period of time, and the testers were lucky to be in on the experiment. Keep in mind the testers or samplers were never sold anything, so there was no buying pressure.

The results? The samplers who were told there were many more cookies of the same kind gave it an average rating. The testers who were told that it was a small group of cookies, and they were a select group of testers gave it an excellent rating.

But they were the same exact cookie. Simply by telling people it was scarce, it made the cookie taste better.

Now for the powerful, Christmas time combination. I have no idea if this still happens today, but this story was illustrated in “Influence,” the book I mentioned previous.

There was a toy manufacturer. They made a toy, and put all kinds of TV commercials on, directed at little kids. They used all kinds of marketing tricks, mainly scarcity. Only a limited number of dolls made. Get yours today. Everybody wants this doll for Christmas.

Only when the parents went to the store to get the doll, they were all sold out. So they had to get a substitute gift for their kid. Then, a couple months after Christmas, they somehow found a hidden warehouse filled with these dolls. Of course, the kids saw this, told their parents, and their parents were pretty much obligated to buy the toy, as they had promised to buy it at Christmas but couldn’t find it.

Here’s how it works. Kid sees toy, bugs parent. Parents promises kid to buy them that particular toy. When buying time comes, toy isn’t available. Parent buys replacement gift. Two months later, toy reappears. Kid says, “But Daddy, you promised!” Daddy now has to go and buy gift.

Simply by manipulating the supply of the toys (scarcity) to increase demand, and depending on commitment and consistency (Daddy, you promised!) the toy company was able to double it’s Christmas sales. They sold a slew of replacement gifts (jacked up in price because of daddy’s guilt for not finding the promised toy) and then again a couple months later, when the original gift magically appeared, they had an increase in sales when all their competitor were suffering from a post Christmas slump

The beauty (or evilness, depending on how you look at it) of a plan like this is that this is almost impossible to defend against. What parent is going to tell their child they can’t have what the TV has said every other kid is getting? What parent is going to break a promise to their kid?

Everywhere you look, there are advertisements developed by companies who know and apply these principles on a daily basis. It helps to understand these principles so that you can use them yourself (in an ethical, win win scenario, of course) and to defend against them when they are used against you.

The Paradox Of Choice

Which Do You Choose?

Which would you rather have, a big juicy hamburger, or a cracker with some peanut butter slapped on top? How about a nice two-week relaxing vacation on the beaches of Hawaii versus a free coupon worth on rental from your local video store? Or how about a date with Megan Fox compared to that homeless woman you saw the other day?

These may seem like obviously easy choices. But what about these:

You are standing next to the train tracks. There is a split right where you are standing. There is a train coming. As it stands, the strain is going to veer left. You have access to a switch that can make the train veer right if you flip the switch.
You notice there is a stranded bus filled with school kids on the tracks to the left. If the train continues on its course, it will hit the bus and kill the kids. But to the right, there is one fat guy working on the tracks. If you throw the switch to change tracks, the train will avoid the kids, but it will kill he fat guy.

What do you do?

If you do nothing, a busload of kids will die. If you throw the switch, you will save the kids, but you will be directly responsible for killing some fat guy.

Or how about this:

There is a boatload of kids drifting down a river, about to plunge off a waterfall. You are standing on a bridge. There is the same fat guy walking across the bridge. If you run up and push the fat guy off the bridge, he will hit the boat and diverge it from the waterfall, and save the kids.

What do you do?

Many people polled in various studies would pull the switch in the first scenario, as they see it as an act of saving the kids. But few people would actually run up and push the fat guy off the bridge.

Why?

They (those they people again) did a study where they took some students and had them stick their hands in a bucket of water, and then guess the temperature. Then they had the same students stick their same hands in the same water, but at the same time, they had them stick their other hands in another bucket of water, that was either really hot or really cold. When the other bucket was really hot, they underestimated the temperature of the test bucket. When the water was really cold, they overestimated the temperature of the test bucket.

Or how about this. It is not uncommon for real estate agents to show a potential client a really crappy house in a really crappy neighborhood that is within their stated price range. Then they show them another much better house, in a much better neighborhood that is priced slightly higher than their stated price range.

They’ve found that this works really well to convince them to increase their price limits. By showing them the first house (which is owned and maintained by the real estate company) they effectively make the second house look like a bargain.

Restaurants have also found this trick works really well when selling wine. If they have a bottle (or several bottles) they are trying to unload at, say, fifty dollars a bottle, the wine won’t sell very well if it is the most expensive bottle they have. But they’ve found by adding another bottle, priced at seventy five to a hundred dollars, they increase sales of the fifty dollar bottle significantly. It looks better in comparison.

Our brains don’t’ like to choose in a vacuum. We need to have something to compare our choices to. If the choice is only to buy a bottle of wine or not, we usually will choose not. But if it’s an expensive bottle or a cheaper bottle, we’ll choose the cheaper bottle.

This is a known psychological trick that has been used in sales for many years. We like to feel like we have a choice, like we are smart enough to evaluate those choices and make the best decision that we can. But our short hand thinking process can easily be hijacked by marketers who want to sell us something that we really don’t need.

There is one simple rule to avoid being duped. Simply know going in, before being presented with choices, what is important to you, what price you are willing to spend, and what options you want. And compare everything you see only to your list of options and your acceptable price.

Of course, if you are a marketer, and you are trying to sell something, say online, it would help dramatically to include something similar that is priced significantly higher. That way people will think the real item you have for sale is a bargain and they will be much more likely to buy it.

For example, if you run a product review page, and you are selling item “X” for fifty bucks, try and find a similar item, with only slightly better features, for two hundred bucks. Item “X” will seem like steal in comparison.

Another trick that has been proven very useful in this regard is to include only a little bit of information about the first, more expensive item, and then very detailed information about item “X.” That way, item “X” will not only seem cheaper by comparison, but your potential buyers will feel much more informed, and feel they are making a wise buying decision.

Happy marketing, and don’t push any fat guys off any bridges.

Rapport Building Secrets That Will Skyrocket Your Persuasion And Seduction Skills

How To Master Body Language To Maximize Your Covert Persuasion With Seemingly Psychic Abilities

Several people have emailed me asking to write more about creating rapport. So today I’ll delve a little bit deeper into exactly how to create rapport, and exactly what to do with it. Many people have a misconception about rapport. The word seems to be thrown around in certain circles, mostly sales and seduction.

You can usually tell by the way it’s being used that most people aren’t really sure exactly what it is, how to get it, and how to test to make sure you have it. Another cool thing, (at least for guys) is that once you learn how to see it in other people, you can pretty much read a room fairly quickly, just by scanning everybody’s body language. You can tell who is into whom, who is fighting, who is wishing whom would leave them alone, etc. Most women, of course, are naturals at this. With practice, men can get just as good.

Let’s first talk about what rapport is. Rapport is a deep, usually unconscious feeling that you feel connected to somebody. You feel safe and comfortable. You don’t have your defenses up. For example, if you went to a Mets game, and you were the only one in the stands with a Yankees jacket on. You would likely feel very left out. But if while waiting in the hot dog line, you saw another person wearing a Yankee’s jacket, you would suddenly feel connected to them. You share something with them that you don’t share with all the other people around. And this would be regardless if they were a different gender, age bracket or ethnicity.

Another example. Lets say you are on a flight from Chicago to Nigeria. And you are sitting on a plane full of Nigerians. You start talking to the person next to you, and after a few minutes of conversation you realize that not only does she collect stamps, but also she collects stamps that were produced by previous Soviet Bloc countries (if they indeed exist.) You both know all the ins and outs of that particular niche hobby, and you have a long and wonderful conversation regarding methods and your respective collections, etc.

Both of the examples above are deep and powerful rapport. If either of people asked to borrow five dollars to buy a drink, you’d be much more willing if they were a total stranger you only exchanged a couple words with. There is one problem with both of the above. One, it was completely random, and happened by chance. Two, it is purely contextual. Meaning that so long as you are talking about stamps, or the Yankees, you’re allright. As soon as you deviate from those two topics, you’ll likely lose rapport rather quickly.

That is how most sales people, and most people trying to create “rapport” with would be boyfriends/girfriends go about doing it. They start a conversation, and hope to find similar interests, backgrounds, hobbies, etc. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. This is what people usually mean when they say they are “trying to build rapport.” They are talking to the person and hopefully creating that feeling of trust and connection.

But there is a much more easier way. A much more powerful way, that cuts through any surface small talk filled conversation you might be having. And because it is not dependent on the conversation, you can still create strong rapport even if you are talking about something you both vehemently disagree on.

How do you do this? You simply match everything you can about the other person. No, I don’t mean go out and buy an outfit just like theirs. That would take too long, and they might suspect you are up to something.

You match their body language, and other non-verbal behavior, and everything you can about their speech. If they speak slowly, you speak slowly. If they smile when they speak, you smile when you speak. If they cross their legs, you cross your legs.

Many people are afraid they are going to get caught doing this. But this hardly ever happens. If they scratch their nose, and you stare at their nose intently, and then stare at your hand, and then bring it slowly to your nose, they’ll know something is up. Usually, however, they will have no idea. They’ll only know that they feel a strange connection to you.

Try this with a friend. Sit facing each other. Try to be as open as possible (e.g. no crossed legs or arms). And match each other’s body language as much as possible. Then talk about something you disagree on. Focus on keeping the match between your body language.

Then switch. Mismatch body language as much as possible. Then talk about something you both agree on.

What you’ll discover is that when talking about something you disagree on, your matching language has more of an effect than the subject you’re talking about. And likewise when you are purposely mismatching. Even though you are talking about something you both like or agree with, you’ll have this funny feeling that something is amiss.

So how do you test to make sure you really have strong rapport? Simple. After you’ve spent five or ten minutes on normal, everyday conversation, and you’ve slowly matched their body language, start to lead a little bit. This means that you move first, and see if they follow. Like lean back in your chair, or cross and uncross your legs, any small movement. Most often they will follow, without even knowing.

Once you get to this stage, you can use a number of any other persuasive techniques to get their agreement. If you are talking to a girl in a bar, you can ask for her phone number. If you were a salesperson with a client, now would be a good time to suggest moving to the next stage in the sales process.

Knowing this gives you great insight whenever you see a room full of people. Next time you are at Starbucks or a similar public place where people are sitting around in groups, take a look around. Who is in rapport with whom? Who is out of rapport with whom?

If you want to use this to help meet somebody, here’s a neat trick. Get close to them, wherever you are. Party, bar, friends house, Starbucks, wherever. And just get into rapport with them before you go and introduce yourself.

People have much more powerful peripheral vision and brain computational capacity than most of us realize. At all times, people are scanning the area around us and checking every single person to determine if they are friend or foe. We may be advanced, but we still carry baggage from our evolutionary days.

If you are nervous, and scared, and you go and approach somebody, they will know it before you even open your mouth. However, if you take the time to develop rapport with them before you talk to them, they will feel this as well. Their guard will be down, and they’ll be more likely to engage in friendly conversation without getting nervous or anxious about being approached by a complete stranger.

Despite how powerful the above methods are, this is just scratching the surface o how to develop powerful, unconscious rapport with people. Try these, and see how they work out. Have fun.

Covert Hypnosis And Persuasion

Can you really use it to quickly and easily get what you want?

There has been a lot of interest in recent years about something called “covert hypnosis.” It sounds like something very sinister and perhaps evil. If you’ve ever seen some of those videos on youtube, or have ever had the pleasure of watching a good stage hypnotist, you know what I’m talking about.

There are a few videos where some powerful hypnotist will talk up to somebody, say some strange words to them, and then leave them standing there with their hands up in the air for a few minutes before they realize what’s going on.

Then there’s that one where the guy walks up to strangers on the street and gets them to give him their jewelry, watch and wallet without even knowing about it.

And some stage hypnotists are really skilled at getting people to forget their names, forget letters of the alphabet or even numbers. I saw one particularly entertaining show where one volunteer thought he heard a voice coming from his watch every time he heard his name.

The guys who do this on stage have an advantage. They are doing something that is called direct, or authoritative hypnosis. The person knows they are being hypnotized. And what makes it actually pretty easy for the stage hypnotist is that he or she asks a room full of hundreds of people who wants to come up and be hypnotized. So whoever volunteers, you can be sure that they:

  • Have no problem acting like a fool in front of complete strangers
  • Are open to the idea of being hypnotized
  • Are at the very least aware of hypnosis, and have an interest in it

So in reality, hypnotizing somebody on stage is likely the easiest way you’ll ever hypnotize somebody. Even if you completely suck as a hypnotist, the people that volunteer will often times pretend they are hypnotized, even if they don’t feel anything. There are a lot of other factors involved in this. Volunteering to be hypnotized, going up on stage, and then admitting that you can’t be hypnotized can be embarrassing. So many people play along, just for fun.

The guys on the street are practicing a powerful form of covert hypnosis. That is they are hypnotizing the people without their direct knowledge. You’d think that the person would think something was up when they saw the camera, but in many cases, the camera is hidden. So they are doing it completely through conversation and massive skill.

However, it is not as powerful as you think. The actual interaction that you are watching is real, on the street hypnosis. The thing they don’t tell you is that in order to get that one fantastic interaction, the hypnotist likely had to approach, start a conversation, and try their “trick” on perhaps a hundred people until they found somebody that worked. And they only show you the good ones, and not the people that looked at him like he was nuts.

So what does that mean? That all these shows are fake? No. What it does mean is that only a small percentage of the population can be hypnotized quickly and deeply like those people on the street. And only a small handful of people would ever volunteer to go up on stage and be hypnotized.

So where does that lead the rest of us, who want to hypnotize each and every client to buy our products, or go on dates with us, or vote for us? We need to use a much more subtler form of covert hypnosis. One that gradually sneaks in through the person’s conscious awareness, and carefully suggests a course of action over time.

Stage hypnotists and street hypnotists are in it for entertainment. They need a quick reaction to sustain the audience’s interest. Otherwise they will flop.

But in real life, covert hypnosis can be just as powerful, but you need to go a bit slower. You still need to develop a relationship with somebody, but with covert hypnosis, you can develop that relationship through a few minutes rather than a few days.

Once this relationship is established, you can slowly elicit their criteria in a conversational way. Once you have their criteria, you can carefully attach your outcome to their getting their needs met by their criteria.

It may not be as quick as pretending to steal some guy’s watch on the street, or convincing some guy he’s a chicken, but it can be just as powerful. Over the course of an hour, it is completely possible, (and rather easy) to establish a deep rapport with someone, get their most important desires and needs, and then creatively attach your outcome to their getting their needs met. They will leave happy, you will leave happy, and nobody will be clucking like a chicken or forgetting the number four.