Do you want to persuade with more power and effectiveness? Start speaking in a way that draws pictures in your prospects’ minds. Most salespeople are so boring in their sentence construction that it’s like watching a movie on a blurry dark screen.
How long would you sit in a movie theater if the images on the screen were blurry, dark, and washed out instead of crisp, clear, and colorful? How intellectually and emotionally moved by the writer’s and director’s work would you be? How long before you threw your bucket of buttered popcorn at the screen and stormed out, possibly asking for a refund?
This hellish theater experience is equivalent to most salespeople’s scripts: dull, boring, lifeless, and completely unpersuasive. It’s not that they are not capable of doing better; it’s just that few ever learned what actually takes place inside the human brain when it’s communicated to.
During my seminars, I demonstrate to my participants the power of word choice. I say, “Right now, while I’m speaking to you, a lot more is going on inside your heads than you simply hearing my words. Because your brain is also enriching my words—completely automatically, without your permission, with mentally created pictures, sounds, feelings, smells, and tastes that aren’t really there! Like a Hollywood director, I’m installing these things inside your head by the words I choose. The funny thing is, I’m fully aware that I’m doing this and you are not. This means I can actually force you to demonstrate the positive and successful purchase and use of my product inside your heads before you buy it!
“For example, if I say ‘purple kangaroo,’ can you imagine what this creature looks like? If I say ‘two sunny-side-up eggs on a shiny, black triangular-shaped plate,’ do you picture this in your head? If I held that plate above my head, can you imagine the sound it would make if I dropped it, letting it smash on the floor?
“Now imagine a big juicy lemon. Feel it in your hands, bring it to your nose, and breathe in deeply. Now imagine grabbing a big sharp knife, cutting the lemon into four equal wedges, picking up two wedges, opening your mouth, and squeezing both pieces, with the sour juice squirting onto your lips, flowing over your tongue, and running down the back of your throat. How many of you can imagine—right now—what that lemon tastes like?”
Invariably, at this point in the script, I hear moans, groans, and laughs because people are actually experiencing the things I’m talking about even though none of those things actually exist anywhere in the room. There is no freaky kangaroo, no egg, no triangular black plate, no lemon, yet they see, hear, feel, and taste 100 percent automatically. The key point here is that as long as they have heard my words, they can’t stop their brains from delivering the experiences even if they want to.
Do you see the power you have? Every time you speak, you’re like a Hollywood movie director, directing, sequencing, and controlling the internal representations in other people’s brains. A skilled persuader crafts words that install experiences that have never been realized in reality.
There are five different elements that make up our experience, represented by the acronym VAKOG: V = visual, what we see; A = auditory, what we hear; K = kinesthetic, what we feel; O = olfactory; what we smell, and G = gustatory, what we taste. Every experience you have is a combination of these five elements. If you recall something you did 5, 10, or 20 years ago—say, a ride on a roller coaster—the reason you’re able to reexperience the event through memory is that your brain runs a pattern of code that’s made up of a specifically encoded mix of these elements, which we call internal representations; this is the way our brains represent experience. VAKOG is the recipe for all human experience. Most important, the effectiveness of your presentations is directly related to the effectiveness of the internal representations you install in your prospects’ brains.
Let’s get practical. Let’s say I own a pizzeria and you see the ad for my Corporate-Party Pizza Pack. Since your boss loves pizza, you decide to throw her a surprise lunch at work, and so you grab the phone and call for more information.
As an especially perspicacious pizza parlor proprietor, I treat my leads like gold. I have only one chance—while you’re still on the phone—to sell you on choosing my pizza over all my competitors’, and parties mean selling a mountain of pies, not just one. If I get your business, dozens of your coworkers may fall in love with my pizza, and that means lots of potential future business. (That’s why my business name and logo are plastered across my boxes in marinara-red ink, visible even to the legally blind.)
The bottom line is that I better sell you. If I use dull, colorless, fuzzy, and lifeless word pictures such as “Yeah, plain pies are 12 bucks each, two for 22,” you probably won’t give me a penny of your business unless you’re already familiar with my pizza. (For this example, we’re assuming you’re not.) You might think I’m a bit weird or cold and impersonal, even a bit snippy.
How about if I ramp it up and say, “Great! I sell cheese and pepperoni pizzas for $12 each, two for $22. My pizzas are the best.” It’s a bit better, but not much. At least I don’t sound as suicidal. You might even be more inclined to ask questions. But notice that I’m not actually selling you. I’m only telling you. Telling is not selling. (Re-read the last four words.) No matter how well you tell it, it’s still not selling. Telling is merely talking, saying stuff that moves nobody to do a thing. Selling is talking that persuades people to take action and—for our purposes—give us their money. Most salespeople (and most advertisements, for that matter) tell; they don’t sell.
So what should I, the pizza pie guy, do? I need to bring in specifics: carefully chosen words that create VAKOG internal representations that cause you to clearly picture what I’m saying. I need to get aggressive and really sell by saying exactly why my pizza is superior. Here’s an example.
“First, thanks for calling me. Let me tell you, this is award-winning pizza, the best in the entire county. We won the Best Pizza of Ocean County five years in a row. Read our reviews on Yelp; we have a higher average review than any other pizzeria within 35 miles. That’s because instead of using ordinary cheap cow-milk mozzarella, I use incredibly flavorful, creamy buffalo-milk mozzarella that I hand make myself every morning. Our mozzarella is fresh—never aged—so you get to enjoy it within just hours of making it. Did you ever have fresh, homemade buffalo-milk mozzarella? Most pizza shops don’t use it because buffalo milk is three times more expensive than cow’s milk. I don’t care. I use only the best of everything.
“My flour? I use only hard northern spring wheat, because it gives a much crisper exterior and an amazingly fresh breadlike interior crust. The crunch can be heard across the room. Do you like a thick or a thin crust? Because I do both. My sauce? It’s never canned—no, no, no! That’s an insult. Instead, I hand crush genuine San Marzano tomatoes from Italy—the best. My olive oil? I use only Colletta Olivieri Extra Virgin Olive Oil, produced by the Colletta Olivieri family in the Puglia region of southern Italy. Their olive trees are literally hundreds of years old. This oil has a rich, fruity aroma with a slight hint of vanilla. My beautiful dough is hand stretched, never machine rolled. And I bake my pies in a blazing-hot 800-degree coal-burning oven that I imported from Italy. It gives my pizzas an incredible, slightly smoky flavor that my customers say is absolutely addictive. There’s no comparison to the gas and electric ovens ordinary pizza shops use. They don’t care; those ovens are easier and faster, but the difference in flavor is light-years apart. And the crispness is unreal.
“Anyway, now you know why we won the best of Ocean County five years running and our Yelp reviews blow other shops away. How many people do you expect for your party? Forty-five? Okay, I suggest 12 large pizzas for 45 average eaters. My large cheese pizzas are just $12 each. And right now we’re running a special until the end of the month: two for just $20.”
Do you see the difference? Do you see that I’m really selling now? Not only am I aggressively honking my horn, I’m simultaneously blasting my competition; this is a double-barreled approach that lifts me up and squashes my competitors. With every advantage that I teach you about my product, I teach you the corresponding disadvantage of theirs. The length of your script, of course, is determined by the rapport you’ve developed with your prospect and the continuous feedback you’re getting all along the way. Boom, boom … boom, boom … back and forth … the advantage of mine … the disadvantage of theirs … a reason for buying mine … a reason for avoiding theirs.
It’s like a consumer advocate seesaw that crushes whatever competitor gets in the way, all the while wearing the nice clothing of a Ralph Nader type who wants to help the consumer make the right decision and ultimately slides in the coup de grâce question: “I wonder why the other guys didn’t/don’t tell you that_______ [they use frozen dough/use inferior recycled parts/don’t make their own desserts/do animal experimentation/have friends who work for Yelp/don’t clean their equipment every day/serve kids frozen, processed, microwaved food for lunch/don’t sanitize their rooms with germ-killing ultraviolet light after every guest like we do].”
This is a fiercely effective way to make your points via implication. Not only are you implying that your competition’s offerings are inferior to yours, you’re supplying an array of things to be dissatisfied about. What’s more, you’re covertly implying that your competitors are somehow being dishonest by not being fully transparent and revealing these terribly negative things “which the consumer has the right to know about before spending his or her hard-earned money.”
Brutally effective. Almost unfair. My recommendation? Start using it today.