Hypnotic Selling
Hypnotic Selling: Fact or Fiction?
Sales veterans, and the best of them in particular, will admit that they learn something new every day. Selling really is an endless profession with no boundaries. Every time you think you've reached a high level of understanding and skill, a new angle or variation shows up and takes you up another notch. Of course, we're not talking about conceptual shifts, or about the well-known ground rules of the interaction, but about seemingly minor details. Those are precisely what separate a good salesperson from an excellent one.
The principles of hypnotic, or suggestive, selling fall into the category of support tools: they dramatically boost the effectiveness of a sale, but they don't change the rules of classic selling. So someone who lacks experience and hasn't mastered the fundamentals of selling won't get anything out of studying hypnotic selling. It's a complex and extremely powerful chapter, meant strictly for professionals.
The first practical elements from the teachings of Dr. Erickson (the father of hypnosis theory) made their way into sales in the early 1980s. Only then did people realize that the ability to manipulate human consciousness, which, as we know, has unique traits and plenty of limitations, could be harnessed for selling. The first empirical experiments found that skilled, professional use of suggestive techniques produces results far stronger and more effective than selling in the classic sense.
Most laypeople picture hypnosis as a state in which the patient lies in a trance on the therapist's couch, obeying his commands.
The truth is that most hypnotic influence actually happens while the person is wide awake, in the middle of a conversation, as the hypnotist makes sharp use of words, syllables, sentences, body language and special intonation as a means of influence that is extremely hard to resist. Putting someone into a hypnotic state doesn't require him to be irrational, weak-willed or anything of the sort. Hypnotic influence works the same way on most of the normal population. But hypnotic ability has its limits too.
You won't manage (and you'd better not even try) to use hypnosis to sell someone a product he doesn't need or doesn't want. On the other hand, if there's a need and an option to buy, suggestive tools will let you dramatically increase the chances that the purchase will happen, quickly, and... with you.
Hypnotic messages essentially bypass the listener's cognitive defenses and act directly on his subconscious. The upshot is that the customer is convinced the buying decision was entirely his own and that nobody influenced him. Under these conditions, the chance that he'll have second thoughts is also very slim. It's no accident that hypnotic selling relies heavily on sophisticated questions instead of direct messages, recommendations or instructions. While instructions and recommendations from the seller get filtered out automatically by the customer's defense mechanisms (as an attempt to change him), questions are designed to stir up feelings of excitement, enthusiasm, strong desire and the like in his mind, without it being perceived as outside influence.
Sales experts have known for more than 20 years that earning the customer's trust is a condition for success. Here, hypnotic selling carries enormous weight. Each of us has met someone at some point whom we instantly liked and trusted, without any logical reason or explanation. A deep sense of trust also reduces objections and opens the door to cooperation and strong influence. In most cases that feeling develops between people who are alike in many ways. Hypnotic selling makes it possible to create that feeling through means the listener isn't aware of.
Quite often the seller is dealing with a customer who has already been exposed to an alternative product or solution but still hasn't made a buying decision. In cases like this, assuming we're talking about an ordinary person who isn't an expert on the subject at hand, you can create hypnotic amnesia by deliberately and repeatedly using words like "hard to remember," "forget," "impossible to remember" and so on.
To make this more effective, it's common to add intonation that stresses these words and draws them out at length, until the customer can no longer remember what he was told before...
In the same way, you can create hypnotic hypermnesia (a strong heightening of memory and of the ability to recall earlier information and events).
Experts in hypnotic selling know how to use guided questions to lead the customer to powerful primal experiences and link them in his mind to the product or service being sold. This way the customer can be made to feel, right then and there, any mood, emotion or state that serves the seller's goals. Knowing that in many cases buying is driven precisely by the wish to avoid something negative, the seller can bring up relevant points in that area, motivating the customer to take action to avoid the discomfort.
Many salespeople know how hard it is to sell amid noise, outside distractions or interference from third parties ("advisors"). In situations like these, the seller's goal is to draw the buyer's attention to himself and shield the buyer's mind from any outside distraction. The hypnotic solution here is to build trust by acknowledging that the distraction exists, and then assuring the customer that, as time goes on, it won't affect him and he'll tune it out completely. Some talented salespeople use sentences like this without knowing their hypnotic meaning. More than half of the more sophisticated objection-handling techniques (rephrase and respond, the three-dimensional technique, planting doubt, and so on) also make clever use of suggestive elements, both in their content and in the intonation and body language that go with them.
You can also capture the customer's attention by controlling his sense of time. Many of us like to say at the start of the process: "You're going to find this so fascinating and absorbing that you won't even notice the time going by"... After a statement like that, the customer is likely to focus on the sales process and ignore how long it takes. When the effect wears off, there's nothing stopping you from repeating it in different variations.
A very powerful tool, used in sales and just as much in training, is setting up post-hypnotic responses. This is done by linking the desired topics, perceptions or moves to fitting images. The connection created between the image or story (the use of illustrations) and the thing you want to promote stays in the listeners' minds long after they were exposed to the image, and it gets reinforced every time they come across the object or image that was used.
These examples of practical hypnotic tools are just the tip of the iceberg. The theory of hypnotic selling is broad, deep and highly varied. It calls for a trainer with the right education, many years of experience, complete command of the material, great skill and the right teaching methods. As for the learners, hypnotic selling is meant only for those who already have a solid grasp of classic selling, and it demands long study and intensive practice. But its effectiveness more than justifies the effort.