The secret of effective sales lies, like so much else, in your unconscious mind.  We have a deeply engrained response to selling and salesmen that we take along with us whenever we go out to sell to others.  If you haven’t won the battle in your mind, then you’ll have serious difficulty actually making a ‘confident close’ no matter how much your product or service is going to help another person.

Your unconscious mind is always judging your thoughts, words, and actions.  So as long as it is telling you that selling is bad, you’ll communicate that to the people you talk to.  What this means, is that you need to retrain your unconscious mind at a very deep level, and the best way to do this is to ensure that what you are selling is really going to help your prospect.

One of the things that I learned from Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) is that you don’t really win unless everyone who is involved wins.  Shortly after I completed my training I was hired to lead a corporate sales team and in the first 6 months our business grew by 400%.  Apart from me there were no changes in the team, but because the team’s focus shifted from simply selling our product, to discovering if it was the best solution for our prospects we had enormous success.

Don’t Try To Cheat Your Unconscious Mind!

You see, you can’t cheat your unconscious mind.  No matter how deeply buried your reservations are about the product or service you are selling your unconscious mind knows about them.  If you want to be successful in your selling, then you need to teach you unconscious mind about the value of the thing you sell.

Try this exercise to help you clarify things:

  1. List all the reasons why someone would find your product/service valuable – make it as comprehensive and detailed as possible.
  2. List all the reasons why someone would be better choosing a different option -make this list as comprehensive and detailed as possible too.

Think of 2 or 3 questions you can ask a prospect to find our whether they fall into Category 1 or Category 2.

Now you have some clear guidelines to help you discover whether you are talking to someone who will benefit from your product or service or not.  If they are in Category 1 you know that it’s in their best interests to buy your product and you have the freedom to sell as persuasively as possible.  If they’re in Category 2, then you can thank them for their time, and move on – or you can suggest where they might find a more suitable solution for their needs.  Either way, you’ve got your unconscious mind working for you, and you’ve found a win-win solution.

Why Do We Really Hate Sales People?

The real reason we hate sales people is that they always seem to be trying to sell us things we neither need nor want.  That’s why walking into an Apple Store is so refreshing.  Their sales people always have plenty of time to help you and give you the advice you need, and they’re just as likely to tell you that you don’t need something as they are to upsell you.  That builds trust, and it means that when they do suggest that I need an expensive add-on I’ll usually listen to them – and in any case, they don’t just say, “Oh, you’ll also want X.  Here it is.”  They say, “You’ll probably want X because …” and give me the reasons why I should buy it.

This is the secret of power-selling – you’re not just trying to make a sale, you’re trying to solve your prospect’s problems – and your unconscious mind knows that so every part of your physiognomy, not just your words, move them towards the sale.

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By popular demand we have turned many of our multi-day workshops into multi-week online courses with a live day to kick them off. Learn more at https://businessgrowth.mykajabi.com/masteryoursales

I talk to a lot people who have been setting goals for years, and who think it’s a nice exercise, but not really important.  That’s because their goals never really affect their lives.  They’re either so mundane that it doesn’t take any effort to reach them, so abstract that you’d never know whether you had reached them or not, or so impossible that you can’t possibly reach them anyway.

You can read about the techniques of S.M.A.R.T. Goal-setting here, but this post is about using your unconscious mind to keep you on track.

One of the things that often stops people from reaching their goals is the amount of deliberate effort it takes to stay focused.  If you harness your unconscious mind and give it clear instructions about what you are trying to achieve then you relieve your conscious mind of that task.  This gives you more energy to apply to actually working towards the goal, so it’s a really powerful tool.

I’m really passionate about the power of goal-setting, but I think it comes with a caution.  If you really can’t visualise your goal, you probably should ask some questions about whether you can get yourself there.  On the other hand, once you have a clear picture of your goal, you can give your unconscious mind all the help it needs to carry you forward until you achieve them.

What Kind of Goals Do You Have?

People are different.  They are genuinely motivated by different things.  For some people it’s the car they drive, or the house they live in, or the clothes/jewellery they wear.  For others it’s about charitable causes or relationships.  

I don’t know what you really want, but if you can figure that out and write down your goals to incorporate sensory information – visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, olfactory, gustatory and emotional information they will intensify your image of the goal, and send a clear picture to your unconscious mind.  

So, now you’ve given your unconscious mind a vivid picture of where you want to be, you work through the milestones you need to achieve them and send that to your unconscious mind as well.

Say you’re publishing a book (something I’ve recently been working on).  My final goal, was to hold that book in my hand and be able to say, “I’ve done it!”  Early in the process I created a mock-up of the cover so that I could focus my unconscious mind on what the finished product would look like (in the end I even changed the title and cover, but all the way through I had a picture in my mind of me holding the book).

Along the way there were many things I had to do:- writing the book, getting it edited, working with my graphic designer and printer etc.  At every stage, I had a clear picture in my mind, and I could feed that to my unconscious mind so that I stayed focused and kept moving forward.  I still had to make decisions, and put in the effort, but my unconscious mind kept prodding me into action.

Using Physical Prompts to Help Out

Your unconscious mind is very busy moving you forward, whether you’re aware of it or not.  How much more effective it is to use your unconscious mind to take you where you want to go, rather than simply letting it keep you up at night – but you need to give it some help.

This is where physical prompts like lists, posters and white boards come in.  My computer desktop usually contains visual prompts to keep my primary goals top of mind.  That way, every time I open my computer I am reminding myself both consciously and unconsciously about the goals I’m working towards.

I also have a vision board on my bedroom wall just to keep me focused.  Many days I don’t consciously notice it, but it’s always there as an unconscious prompt.

Try it for yourself – you’ll be surprised how far it takes you.

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By popular demand we have turned many of our multi-day workshops into multi-week online courses with a live day to kick them off. Learn more at https://businessgrowth.mykajabi.com/masteryoursales

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