Secrets of Hypnotic Influence and Persuasion Virtual Classroom Series

The Critical Mind

Because there is another time our critical mind can come into play, and that is after the sale! I don’t know if you have ever sold someone to somebody who then went home and had a conversation with somebody, or read something in the newspaper or talked to a friend or relative or saw something on TV, or maybe they just had a bad dream and the next day they woke up with a little buyers remorse. If you have ever experienced that, you have experienced the critical mind at work! It is its job to be the mental skeptic, to be that mental attorney and makes sure that it’s thinking about every possible contingency and everything that could go wrong. So its important to us as persuasionists to make sure that we are dealing with the critical mind.

And in previous virtual classrooms we have talked about getting the emotions more involved in the purchasing process. We are going to be diving into that some more in future classrooms, and as we do that it is even more important that we are able to satisfy the critical mind and literally help it rationalize the emotions decisions that we have helped our prospects reach. The better that we get at tapping into our clients compelling emotional outcomes, the things they really care about. The more important it’s going to be that we become good at helping them rationalize the decisions that we have helped them arrive at.

The Good News

Now the good news is, if you felt a little guilty when I was talking about some of those logic based tools that a lot of us use to attempt to prove to clients that doing business with us is the right thing to do. Those are excellent tools for this particular purpose! So for example, if you have got really powerful third party endorsements or if you have got some industry watchdog group that has given you the 5 star ranking, or the gold star best in class service, or if you have got hypothetical illustrations that show how much people are going to be able to save over the long haul because they are now happily involved in your offering. These are great things to use at the end of the sale to help a client logically rationalize the emotional decision they arrived at earlier.

And if there is a point in the future where often times buyer’s remorse tends to rear its ugly head, this is a good opportunity for you to future pace that experience with the client and let them know exactly what is going to happen. So future pace, lets talk a little bit about what that means. Pacing simply means to get in sync with whatever their ongoing reality is or has been or in the case of future pacing, will be. So for example when the product gets delivered and its delivered in an overwhelmingly complex number of boxes, or if the installation sometimes has a little bit of challenges that go along with it. You want to use that particular experience. In the case of investments, when I was a financial advisor one of the times that people used to get a little nervous and get buyers remorse was when their statement came, values would have fluctuated, they are not used to looking at our particular statement so nothing is in the space where they think that it should be and it just seems to add an enormous amount of complexity and hence uncertainty in their whole overall experience.

Future Pacing

So that was a good opportunity to future pace the experience of them getting their statement, and I would start off by saying, “you are going to absolutely love our statements but I do want to manage your expectations that they do have an enormous amount of information on there. In fact I had a client who was a pilot who told me going to your statements is like going from the dashboard of a car to the cockpit of a 747. You have got every bit of information you could ever want on there but you need to know where to look to be able to find it. So on the day that your statement arrives I am going to have my assistant give you a call and she is an expert at helping you understand that statement and where everything is. And once you understand the logic of the way that it is laid out and how you go about finding everything you are going to think this is one of the easiest and more investor friendly statements you have ever seen. But the key is getting it right the first time, so Sharon will give you a call and she will help walk you through the statement and if you need me to I am more than happy to set up a time and we can get together again and I am willing to go back through that with you personally.”

So this ends up serving to do a couple of different things:

1. Take a point where there could be a little bit of buyers remorse and manage those expectations before it comes
2. Use this as an opportunity to separate myself from the crowd and all of the other noise that is out there
3. Use these logical tools that we have been using at the wrong part of our sales process to help rationalize justify the emotional processes that our superior sales skills are now having our clients arrive at.

So your homework here is to see, are there places in your process where your new clients critical mind is being lit up like a Christmas tree? And if that is the case, what are some ways you can pre-manage, future pace and use some of your logical sales skills to help calm them down and create a more pleasant client experience?