Try to visualize your customer.
He’s standing before you.
He’s not frowning; nor is he smiling. He is perfectly neutral. Yet, there’s something strange about him.
Coming out of his forehead, reaching up toward the ceiling, is an antenna! And at the end of the antenna is a sensor, beeping away like crazy.
And the sensor is taking in all of the sensory data around it—the colors, shapes, sounds, and smells of your store, or your office, or the restaurant where you’re meeting for lunch.
The sensor is also taking in sensory data from you: how you are standing or sitting, the color of your hair, how your hair is combed, the expression on your face— Is it tense? Are you looking directly at him or off to the side?—the crease in your slacks, the color of your shoes—Are they shined? Are they worn? Are the laces tied?
Nothing escapes the sensor as it absorbs the stimuli from the environment.
Nothing escapes your customer as he absorbs the information he uses to make his decision to buy or not to buy.
But this step in the buying process is only the first. It’s what the sensor does with the information that’s of interest here.
Because it’s how the sensor processes the information that will determine the decision your customer is about to make.
Think of the sensor as your customer’s Conscious Mind.
Its job is to gather the information needed for a decision
Most of what it does, however, is unconscious; that is, automatic, habitual.
So even though your customer’s Conscious Mind is actively absorbing all manner and forms of impressions, it is totally unaware of most of them.
It can do it—literally—in its sleep.
In fact, it can’t stop doing it!
Fortunately, the Conscious Mind doesn’t need to be aware.
For it’s not your customer’s Conscious Mind that has to make the decisions.
It’s your customer’s Unconscious Mind.
It’s in your customer’s Unconscious Mind where all the action is.
It’s in your customer’s Unconscious Mind where the second step of the buying process takes place.
What is your customer’s Unconscious Mind?
It’s like a vast, dark, underground sea in which a multitude of exotic creatures swim about, single and in schools, ’silently seeking out food, each with entirely different needs and tastes.
Those creatures are your customer’s expectations. And the sea in which they swim is a truly foreign place to your customer.
He has no idea what’s swimming around down there. What’s lurking behind some subterranean rock. What’s lying still and quiet as a stone on the bottom, waiting patiently and deliberately for some sweet morsel to wander by.
But you can rest assured that every creature in that sea—every one of those expectations—is a product of your customer’s life!
Of his reactions, perceptions, attitudes, associations, beliefs, opinions, inferences, conclusions. An accumulation of all his experiences since the instant of his birth (and for all we know, before its to this very moment when he stands before you.
And all his expectations are nothing more or less than the means through which the sum of them all— your customer’s personality—gets fed what it needs.
The food it needs comes in the form of sensory input from the Conscious Mind (the “surface”).
And if the food is compatible with its expectations, the Unconscious Mind says, “Yes.”
And if the food is incompatible with its expectations, the Unconscious Mind says, “No.”
And that decision, yes or no, is made at the instant it gets a taste!
In a television commercial, we’re told, the sale is made or lost in the first three or four seconds.
In a print ad, tests have shown, 75 percent of the buying decisions are made at the headline alone.
In a sales presentation, data have shown us, the sale is made or lost in the first three minutes.
And all that happens after that psychographic moment of truth, after the buying decision is made, is that the Unconscious Mind sends its answer up to the Conscious Mind, which then goes back out into the world to assemble the rational armament it needs to support its already determined emotional commitment.
And that’s how buying decisions are made.
Irrationally!
If anyone cared to do it, it could probably be proved that no one yet has ever made a rational decision to buy anything!
So when your customer says, “I want to think about it,” don’t you believe him.
He’s not going to think about it.
He doesn’t know how.
He’s already done all the “thinking” he’s going to do—he either wants it or not.
What your customer is really saying is one of two things: he is either emotionally incapable of saying no for fear of how you might react if he told you the truth, or you haven’t provided him with the “food” his Unconscious Mind craves.
Either way, little or no thought enters into the trans- Action.
Despite what we would like to believe, the decision was made unconsciously and instantaneously.
In fact, it was made long before you ever met. But your customer didn’t know it.
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