When it comes to persuading the affluent, or anyone for that matter, we've got to dig deeper... into uncharted waters... where most business people are afraid to go. We've got to appeal to the unconscious mind, using emotions in our selling.
Researchers have determined that our conscious minds can only hold an average of seven bits of information at a time. Considering how many things we could be thinking about, that's quite an insignificant number.
There are so many things to think about. . .what we see, what we hear, what we feel, what we need to remember, what we are trying to forget. . . All of these things take up space somewhere. . . but we're only able to consciously think about seven of them at a time.
Our conscious mind couldn't possibly absorb and process everything that's going on around us which is why our unconscious has such a huge job.
What happens to the information we're unable to contain in our conscious minds? It gets absorbed in our other-than-conscious.
A visual representation of the would have the conscious mind as a tiny crumb with the unconscious mind being the entire rest of the pie.
How do we take the conscious mind of another individual, the tip of their iceberg, and set it aside so it doesn't object to us as we go directly and access the real boss, the unconscious mind?
Most people are persuaded based on emotions, feelings that are going on inside of them, not with rational, logical things that are going on inside them. People make their decisions emotionally and then back up these decisions with logic.
Our job as persuaders is to give them a little logic at the end so that our prospects feel good about the decision they've made emotionally. This is easy if we appeal directly to their unconscious.
Side stepping logical thought and eliciting the criteria of our prospects and clients gets to the emotional core of what is important to them.
For example, let's say their top value is 'Freedom'. When we trigger their need for freedom we're stirring up a whole cauldron of emotions.
In reacting to the emotional trigger of freedom, this can manifest as rage or frustration in a person with an 'away from' orientation and as a feeling of dominion over all things in a person with a 'towards' orientation. If you are successful in maneuvering your product or service as the cure for the away person or access to more for the towards person, you will have navigated the emotional landscape where business and industry has been afraid to go.
