Worry

When your prospect is worried or preoccupied with something occurring now or could happen in the future. The wrong type of worry can hinder persuasion. Worry is feeling anxious, uneasy, or concerned about something that may happen, or has already happened. Worry creates anxiety which creates tension—a fear that occupies our thoughts, which if encouraged will grow and continue to dominate our thoughts. I have heard worry referred to as "negative goal setting."

You can combat worry in your prospects by modifying their anxiety. Bring them back to reality by having them realize we can't change many things in the past or forecast the future. Stress that most of the things we worry about are those very things we can't change or control and which won't likely ever happen in the first place. Help your prospects replace their negative mental images with positive ones.  Worry can also be caused by indecision.  Get them to make a series of minor decisions and their worry will decrease.

Anger

Anger is a secondary emotion. A prospect's anger is usually an indicator that something else is askew and that he needs or wants attention.  When we are angry – we want attention or action now. You can assist in diminishing his anger by determining the key issue he is upset about. It is also often effective to ask for his help, opinions, or advice. This will usually diffuse his anger or even change his attitude and demeanor completely. In some circumstances, you may want to use anger to make a certain point or to evoke a certain reaction. However when someone is angry they are more likely to blame someone else. In their mind it is not their fault. When they are sad they will usually blame the situation.

When people become angry they tend to rely on intuition or an educated guess.  Anger triggers non analytical information processing.   Anger causes us to use mental shortcuts to decide if the argument is right.  An experiment was done that induced anger. The participants that were angry tended to discriminate between weak and strong persuasive arguments more than those in a neutral mood.  In other words, those that were angry tended to be more influenced by heuristic cues (intuition) than those in a sad or neutral mood.

Did you know that money can buy happiness? A recent study published in “Psychology Today” shows just that. Kurt and Steve discuss the ins and outs of this study and how money certainly can buy happiness…up to a point.

Continuing off of recent episodes, Kurt and Steve cover how we can overcome objections before they ever occur in the first place. This concept is called “inoculation.” The term comes from the medical field, where patients are given a weak form of a virus so that their body can develop an immunity to it. This same concept happens on the psychological level. If we can introduce a weak form of the objection to our prospects, they will be better prepared for when the real one comes along at a later date.

For example, do most of your prospects end up looking for more bids from competitors? Or do they end up getting serious resistance from friends and family? Letting them know very subtly that this will happen beforehand helps them avoid the shock and disappointment that will later surface. They’ll think “hey, you know what? He told me that the competitors would say this, or that my family would think that.”

This even applies when raising children. Unfortunately we know that at some point kids will be exposed to and given the opportunity to take drugs. Pretending this won’t happen just increases the chances that they will be influenced by a drug dealer and not by you as a parent. Letting them know in advance “hey Jr, at some point somebody is going to offer you drugs. If you say know they’ll call you chicken, they’ll make fun of you, etc. But just say no no matter what and come talk to me about it. It’s okay.”

You can’t, nor should you, inoculate against everything. Just pick the two or three most common objections your prospects have and pre solve them with stories, examples, statistics, and testimonials!