On the day your mother delivered you, your human brain was biologically programmed with eight preinstalled desires that you will strive tirelessly to satisfy. No matter who you are, where you come from, where you live, or what your socioeconomic background is, you (and your prospects and customers) are being controlled by these eight powerful desires—the LifeForce-8—at this very moment.
You were born with these eight primary desires:
1. Survival, enjoyment of life, life extension
2. Enjoyment of food and beverages
3. Freedom from fear, pain, and danger
4. Sexual companionship
5. Comfortable living conditions
6. To be superior, to win, to keep up with the Joneses
7. Care and protection of loved ones
8. Social approval
Can you honestly say that you’re not currently striving for most, if not all, of these things? Few people can answer no because these are not learned wants. They haven’t been reserved for a select few. Your parents didn’t install these ideas in your head when you were young. You didn’t copy them from your friends as a result of peer pressure. These eight desires are hardwired into your brain by Mother Nature herself. They control nearly every choice and action. They’re with you from the time you slap off the morning alarm clock to when your sleep-heavy head crashes into your pillow. They’re insidious in their persistence. They operate 24/7/365. They don’t care whether you like them, and no matter how hard you try, they’ll stick with you like a razor-toothed lamprey eel until a now-nameless doctor writes the time of your death on a clipboard somewhere.
Everyone believes very easily whatever they fear or desire.
Jean de La Fontaine
Surely you use one or more of these powerful appeals in your sales presentations, right?
Probably not. Chances are, you’re using few of them, if any. Like most other salespeople, you’re probably spending most of your time talking about plastic, paper, metal, cement, rubber, or chemicals. You’re focusing more on the thing rather than the desire that’s driving the want for the thing. But that’s not your fault. It’s unlikely that anyone ever taught you this stuff.
When your sales presentation is based on one or more of the LF8 desires, you’re tapping into the power of Mother Nature herself. You’re speaking to the essence of what makes your prospects tick. Rather than trying to change the train’s direction (trying to get prospects to think differently), you’ll be jumping aboard the train and using its already- established momentum (the prospect’s LifeForce-8 desires) to sell your product for you.
Try as you may, you can’t escape your desire for the LF8. For example, starting tomorrow morning, I challenge you to do the following:
Stop wanting to eat (LF8, number 2)
Stop wanting to live a long healthy life (LF8, number 1)
Stop wanting to be physically comfortable (LF8, number 5)
Stop holding your child’s hand when you cross the street (LF8, number 7)
Easy, right? No way. You just can’t do it.
How about if I paid you $50,000 to stop doing each of these things? How about a cool million? Ten million? Surely you could do it then, right? No way. Nothing short of drugs, a coma, or an “ice-pick” lobotomy can reduce your innate desire for food, life, comfort, and the protection of your loved ones or stop your continual craving for the four other biologically programmed desires.
Life would be boring if all you wanted were those eight things, right? You want more. You also want to be physically attractive. You want to be educated and good at what you do. These are called secondary, or learned, wants, and nine have been identified:
1. The desire to be informed
2. Curiosity
3. Cleanliness of body and surroundings
4. Efficiency
5. Convenience
7. Expression of beauty and style
8. Economy/profit
9. Bargains
These nine secondary wants are powerful and exert an incredible degree of control over your daily thoughts and decisions. However, compared with the LifeForce-8, these wants are quite weak. Since they’re learned desires, they’re not built into our brains the way the LF8 are. They weren’t installed at the cellular level. They’re like software that we—if we tried hard enough—could learn to unlearn, whereas the LifeForce-8 are permanently etched into every fiber of our being.
In fact, some of us have never learned to desire all these learned secondary wants. For example, some people could care less about being informed. They wander through life with terribly limited information about the world around them. Others couldn’t be called clean by even the most liberal standards. However, for most people, these wants exert an influence that manifests itself though the products and services they buy. When used as tools of influence, however, they’re not quite as bankable as the LF8 because we’re not biologically compelled to satisfy them. Desire is pure biology. When you can tap into it with your sales presentation, it’s like having Mother Nature on your side, helping you ink the deal.
Take this simple quiz. Which desire would you be motivated to satisfy first?
While strolling through the mall, would you be more compelled to buy a more stylish dress shirt (because the one you’re currently wearing doesn’t reflect contemporary fashion trends) or would you first drop down to the floor because a crazed lunatic in the mall was blasting a machine gun at you?
Would you be more likely to buy a new $500 wristwatch that’s guaranteed to work flawlessly or your money would be cheerfully returned or to buy the really cool $500 high-tech watch (parts made in North Korea and assembled in South Korea) that 94 percent of online reviewers say typically breaks within the first 60 days?
Would you be more driven to yank the rusty nail out of your shoe that’s making the bottom of your foot look like a package of chopped steak—OR—would you prefer to take a leisurely stroll down to your mailbox (with the nail still grinding away into your flesh) to see if your electric bill arrived in a timely manner?
Would you push your child out of the way of a speeding bullet train or decide not to be bothered and instead enjoy a nice fresh summer salad?
Ridiculous, right? Of course. But what would you say about someone who’d be stumped by these choices? Your words wouldn’t be very complimentary, would they? Why not? Because making the second choice in each of these situations is more than simply stupid. It literally goes against our innate biological instincts—our Life-Force-8 desires—and, in the case of the crappy watch, our learned secondary wants of dependability and quality.
The LF8 are so ingrained in people that making a choice other than one that supports these desires simply makes no sense. It boggles the mind. In fact, while you were reading those examples, you probably thought those choices were absurd, ridiculous, silly, insane.
That’s a perfect example of how deeply affected you are of their power and control over your life. You didn’t think those examples were just silly; you thought they were nuts! Choosing the wrong option in those situations seems like the action of a person gone mad.
We’ve just discussed two categories of human desire: biological and learned. But just knowing what people want without knowing the very simple mechanics of desire is not enough. When you know the three-step flow path from stimulus to satisfaction, you’ll realize how it can be turned into a formula that you can use to sell anything at all, from aardvarks to zwieback cookies.
Simply put, desire is tension unrelieved, a need or want not yet met. If you’re hungry, for example, low blood sugar and hormone levels cause your hypothalamus to send messages through your spinal cord, causing your stomach to growl and hunger pangs to crescendo.
The result? The desire for food (LF8, number 2) kicks in, starting off like a gentle tap on your shoulder. Ignore it long enough and it eventually turns into the equivalent of a sledgehammer in the gut that you can’t ignore.
Suppose you learn from another parent that corporal punishment is secretly taking place at the daycare center where you take your three-year old son; the urge to protect your child arises, and your desire to pull your child from the soon-to-be-sued facility—or at least start investigating the reports (LF8, number 7)—kicks in.
If a steel spring pops up in the middle of your mattress and mercilessly corkscrews into your spine every time you lie down, the need to be comfortable arises, and the desire to buy a new bed (LF8, number 5) kicks in.
Here’s the simple three-step desire flow path that happens inside your brain, including the result it sets in motion. It always works in exactly this fashion:
(1) Tension arises → (2) desire builds → (3) action is taken to satisfy the desire
Any time you appeal to a consumer’s LF8 desires, you’re hitching a ride on a psychological train that’s speeding in the direction of an action that will fulfill that desire as soon as possible.
Tension can be created by using aggressively specific words. For example, do you like chocolate? How about freshly baked brownies? Did you ever take homemade chocolate-fudge brownies hot from the oven, cut a few thick chunks while they were still steaming, drop them in the bottom of a deep glass bowl, and top them with big scoops of freshly made vanilla bean ice cream? There’s plenty of extradark hot fudge, so ladle it on thickly. Now spoon a nice fluffy pillow of freshly made whipped cream right on top. Go on … live a little! How about sprinkling some crunchy, freshly roasted peanuts or walnuts on top and two sweet red maraschino cherries? Now you’re talking! Grab a spoon and cut deeply into the bowl through the cold ice cream, hot fudge, and warm brownies. Feel the spoon slowly push though each rich, delicious layer.
If you’re like me, chances are that you’re more moved by that description than you would have been if I had simply said, “Put ice cream, hot fudge, and whipped cream on brownies.”
The point here is that your choice of words alone can create varying degrees of desire. We’ll talk more about how to maximize the effectiveness of your speaking next, when we discuss Principle 2: The Psychology of Sensory-Specific Language.
In fact, we’ll look at 21 different principles of consumer psychology that can be used to influence almost every human mind. Most important, I’ll teach you how to use these principles to persuade people to give you money in exchange for your quality products and services. Grab a pen and paper. Take lots of notes. Even better, highlight these pages as you read them. The highlighting will create a personal version of this book that will get more valuable with every page you read.
Ready? Let’s roll.