Overcome Buyer Resistance

PART One

To state the obvious:

Selling your services or products is a challenge.

Selling is a tough profession.

Sales people are aware that selling is harder than it used to be, primarily because buyers are more sophisticated today and far better educated.

So, what can you do?

Given the competition is intense and there is often a resistance to traditional closing techniques, it makes sense to get rid of any shotgun approach and discover a more refined and winning way.

One of the problems is that buyers are more aware when they are being sold to.

Old tricks and manipulation fail miserably. And, to make matters worse, people have a built-in neediness detector.

We just know that the more someone wants or needs us to do something that they are focused almost exclusively on their own best interests.

What do people need to take action?

They need to “care”.

The “facts” around a product or service is just not enough even if people believe what you are presenting.

For example, just about everybody believes eating fatty food can lead to health problems.

The facts are clear, yet this knowledge and the belief generally fail to make a person care enough to act.

The biscuit tin wins yet again.

If you really want to be able to influence people elegantly and particularly if you want to sell successfully you need to be able to understand the “buy buttons” in a person’s brain.

This requires a basic understanding of how the brain operates.

In spite of the enlarged neo-cortex – the new brain – that has evolved and wraps around the brain, it is the “old brain” that makes key decisions.

So, what is the old brain and how do you access it to persuade other people to make a decision to deal with and buy from you?

The goal is two-fold: Make your messages intuitively “emotional” to the old brain so you can convince a person to “care”, and also to transform their beliefs into action.

This is done through properly understanding the decision-making mechanism of the brain, in particular how the “old-brain” works.

You need the thinking, feeling and deciding mechanism of the brain to work in your favour.

Continue to learn more about this topic by reading below.

Remember you have many faces, many skills, many talents and a number of wonderful attributes.

And you also have choice.

Why not choose to make a crucial difference to the way you communicate by selling using the old-brain?

PART Two

So we know a buyer needs to “care” about what it is you are selling.

This means they must engage emotionally no matter what it is you’re selling.

The facts about your offer make minor difference.

So, what does matter?

In fact, how do you get a person to decide in your favour?

Well, the brain loves novelty, and new thinking.

Do this and you can expand your reach and engage with more people.

You can transform your “face” to the world, and create the future you want.

To achieve brilliant results something has to happen inside a buyer’s brain.

So, let’s look at the decision-making mechanism of the brain.

Let’s start with the distinction between the left and right brain hemispheres.

The left brain processes linearly, prefers logic and mathematics while the right brain thinks conceptually, enjoys art, music, creativity and inspiration.

Rather a clever lot, aren’t we!

In fact, through evolution, the brain can be divided into 3 parts:

The new brain thinks – it processes rational data.

The middle brain feels – it processes emotions and relies on gut feel.

The old brain decides – it uses information from the other two brains and, importantly, contains the trigger for making decisions.

The old brain determines what sensory information is passed to the new brain.

When attempting to influence people you must satisfy the old brain.

Your whole marketing and sales strategy should be based on satisfying the old brain.

By the way, words have been around about 40,000 years.

Written words have been around about 10,000 years.

This means the old brain has been around about 45,000 times longer than the written word!

So, in evolutionary terms words alone do not significantly influence the old brain.

So much for selling through facts and features!

Now I’m not sure if it is particularly comforting to know that the decision whether to use you or not, will be made by the old brain, a brain that doesn’t understand words, but there it is!

This suggests a method to access the old brain of a buyer to improve your ability to sell yourself, market your goods, and communicate more effectively is needed.

Your mission is to get people to care.

In the next part I’ll provide some useful tips about how to engage the old brain successfully.

Specifically, how to get the old brain to experience a positive emotional response to your message.

So, continue to learn more about this topic by reading the final part.

Remember you have many faces, many skills, many talents and a number of wonderful attributes. 

And you also have choice.

Why not choose to make a crucial difference to the way you communicate by marketing and selling based on the old-brain?

PART Three

We accept a buyer needs to actually CARE about what it is you are selling.

Facts and figures make little difference.

They must engage with you emotionally.

So, how can we do this quickly and easily?

We want to know how do you get a person to decide in your favour.

Now we know the old brain plays a significant role in making key decisions.

And we know the old brain is a primitive organ.

It is the seat of the “flight or fight” response and can be described as the reptilian brain.

It has been around well before the development of the middle and new brains.

When attempting to influence people you must satisfy the old brain.

As said, your whole marketing and sales strategy should be based this way.

Here’s a couple of useful tips:

First, the old brain loves contrast.

If you provide a simple to process contrast mechanism the old brain can make a decision quickly in your favour.

By contrast I mean: “Before and After” type contrastive information, such as Fat/Thin, Risky/Safe, Profit/Loss, Rich/Poor, Opportunity/Threat.

You need to create contrast in your communication to get the attention of the old brain.

Dickens said this perfectly in A Tale of Two Cities when he wrote:

“It was the Best of Times. It was the Worst of Times.”

And what a brain he had!

The most important variable is emotion, getting a person to care.

The old brain is triggered ONLY by emotion.

Emotions create electro-chemical responses in the brain.

Emotions flood the body and brain with specific chemicals.

Every enjoyable memory has a strong emotional attachment.

This is one of the reasons why negative emotions affect a person’s well-being.

Your customer must experience a positive emotional response to your message.

Remember, data and logic, facts and features, do not achieve this.

Your words do not achieve this.

You must engage emotionally.

People buy on emotion and justify through logic.

And it needs to be done through your customer’s values – what’s important to them.

If a buyer does not easily remember your message they will not choose you.

If you do not switch on the “buy buttons” in a person’s brain a buyer will not choose you.

The goal of making your messages more emotional is to get a prospective buyer to CARE.

You need to form an association between something a buyer may not really care about YET to something they do care about – their VALUES.

That’s it.

Remember you have many faces, many skills, many talents and a number of wonderful attributes. And you also have choice.

Go ahead and choose to make the “power of association” an important part of your sales technique.