The purpose of loops is to create a small vacuum in the mind of the listener.



To understand open loops, or the temporal loop pattern, there are three important things you need to understand: 1) People, by nature, need closure.

Sales professionals experience open loops often when potential customers say those dreaded words, 'I'm going to have to think it over.' Either yes or no, don't tell me you have to think about it.

Number two, when they don't get closure, your prospect's response potential is increased.

And, with that, you have all the information you need about open loops.

Hey, didn't I say that there were three things you needed to know about open loops? Yup. And, yet, I only gave you two things. How did that feel? Frustrating?

Simply put: People need closure and if they don't get it, it increases their response potential.

Are you still wondering what the third thing is? How much do you want to know?

Sorry. There is no number three. There are only two things you need to know about loops.

Why would I do that? Because by leaving a loop open, by purposefully leaving the third blank, I increased your response potential and piqued your interest.

If you consider a topic that you are really well versed in. . .say it's the Civil War and there isn't anything you don't know about the Civil War, you've learned all there is to know.

Now say that someone was giving a lecture or teaching a class on the Civil War and claimed to have new information. But that's not possible, you think to yourself. You already know EVERYTHING there is to know. . . Well, sadly all of your loops regarding this particular subject are closed.

You can use loops when you want to increase response potential because if you leave a loop open, it makes people want to sit forward and try to figure out what it was that you didn't tell them. In other words, they're missing something. Like when I wrote, "There are three powerful things you need to know to do these loop patterns" and I told you two of the three. For many of you, you just had to know, "Well, what's the third one?"

If you were just skimming this article and not paying too much attention, your conscious mind may not have picked up on the open loop. No matter, you other-than-conscious is always at work and you may have been left with a little nagging feeling of incompleteness.

With open loops, people begin to believe they don't know as much as they thought they knew about a subject. This works to your advantage. When people 'know everything' they tend to go away and not come back. Why stick around if they've gotten everything out of the interaction?