Opening the Mind of a Potential Client

Show Notes

When we are forced to evaluate a question and possible answers, we internalize the message.
If you evaluate a question and discover the answer for yourself, you will internalize the answer much more than if someone else tells you the answer.
People will be moved to take action if they figure out the reason why they should do so on their own.
Ryan held a workshop in which the attendees were challenged to prioritize a list of media outlets according to which would make the workshop attendees become experts in their field. Attendees were required to evaluate and justify their decisions against other entrepreneurs. Rather than Ryan telling them his company could ghostwrite a book for them, they discovered on their own that publishing a book would be the most beneficial way for them to become positioned as experts.
Surveys and questionnaires can be powerful tools to direct thought.
For example, which of the following communication methods gets your attention more quickly?

Email
Text message
Phone call
Facebook message

Surveys before education can open the mind by opening the reticular activator. The reticular activator is activated by gathering information before the education so you will make quicker decisions in the future once something has been introduced to you.
Using surveys should be easy and should be mobile-accessible.
Fix Your Funnel has mobile surveys that allow you to:

Learn information about your potential customer
Activate certain concepts or thoughts that will help a potential customer to make a decision about your business in the future.

Transcription of Episode

[00:00:00] I have to make a confession. I really wouldn't consider myself to be a super great marketer or sales person or anything like that, simply because I feel like sometimes I'm so slow on the pickup. In fact, after hosting over 440 live trainings for our training company that I've talked about a few times we had before the software company, I finally learned a very powerful lesson. I think it kind of pains me that took 440 live trainings for me to learn this lesson because it was such a powerful lesson. And the lesson is this, if you have something to write down with, this would be a good thing to take note on: when we're forced to evaluate a question and possible answers, we internalize the message like no other situation.

In fact, just recently there was a guy who had gone to school to be an educational psychologist and he pointed out something called the [00:01:00] triangle of learning. And the triangle learning, I know there's articles online that say it may or may not be accurate, but towards the bottom was actually when you try and teach something or you have to process it. That's when you learn the best.

I obviously didn't go to school for psychology, so I wasn't aware of this and so I had to learn that the hard way through the School of Hard Knocks. But what I learned is that, I can tell you an answer, but if you evaluate a question and decide what the answer is for yourself, then the level of internalization is way deeper.

We had an experience, and this is after doing 440 live trainings, where we did a workshop. In this workshop, we had little cut outs. We had everybody sitting at tables. There were like eight people at each table and there were about 60 people in this room. It was relatively small workshop. I had an objective at this workshop, which was to allow people to have us ghost write a book for them to position them as an authority. [00:02:00]

I could have very well come out and said, hey, the most powerful way to position you a an authority is to become an author. But me telling somebody versus somebody figuring out that on their own is totally different terms of being able to move people to take action. And really, as marketers and as sales people, that's our job, is to move people to take action and hopefully, we're principled enough that we're helping them take something that's in their best interest. In this case, it was.

What we had discovered for these particular customers was that one of their biggest challenges was not being taken as an expert or an authority, and as a result people would not listen to their advice. When those people didn't listen to their advice, the outcome was they lost big financially. It was a huge loss to them, which could also result in emotional trauma, which could destroy family relationships and so on. You see kind of the domino [00:03:00] effect of them not being an expert.

It was very important for them to be perceived and positioned as an expert. That was my job, to make sure that as many people as possible I could help take that step. And for those that would let us help them with that, it was going to be good for us financially as well and a huge value for them. They couldn't have done what we were asking them to do for a better price. We really were giving them a great value.

So I asked them to organize from most authority giving to least authority giving the following medias, so, which one would position them best as an expert? Heres 7 of the 10 that I gave them. I don't want to give you too many because it's audio here, but, writing a newspaper article, writing a magazine article, being a guest on a radio show, being a published author of a book, writing a blog post, writing a Facebook post, tweeting.

If I gave you those seven options, and I asked you to sort them in order [00:04:00] from most powerful to position you as an expert to least powerful to position you as an expert, what would you say? I give them slips of paper and I said, arrange the slips of paper from most powerful to least powerful. As I asked them to do that, they had heated debates.

Now, this intensifies the ability for somebody to evaluate something, when they have to justify it to somebody else. If you look up the learning pyramid, you'll see at the bottom is teaching somebody else. Having to justify your decision for organizing these medias or these things in most powerful to least powerful for positioning you as an expert requires debate and challenge. You have to really think and you have to then get really tough about what it is that you're saying, especially if you have a bunch of hard-headed entrepreneurs in the same room going through the same exercise. If you don't agree, you're going to be fighting over what that was.

In fact, we had one table of women who are very powerful women and it [00:05:00] almost went to fisticuffs because they're so adamant. In fact, at the last minute, they were switching things because they were so angry about some of the order that had been selected. Through this process, they solidified in their mind that the number one, and we went around to each table and asked them their top three, because we weren't going to get all 10, as we did the top three, one item came at the top of each of their lists and that was being a published author of a book.

I obviously could have told them that and told them that with great passion, and maybe even authority, but that wouldn't have been nearly as powerful as them determining for themselves which they thought was the most powerful. If they had not come up with author of a book, then maybe the whole call the action to be able to let us write books for them would have fallen flat, but that was a risk that I needed to take because I understood that that was most likely what they were going to [00:06:00] decide.

That's what had actually tailored our decision to offer it in the first place. We knew it was the most effective, and so we needed them to come to the same conclusion so that they could get behind the effort that would be required either in terms of investment or actually action if they're going to do it themselves to get that done.

Surveys or questionnaires can really be a powerful tool to direct thought.

I want to ask you a question. I'd like you to think about it. Obviously, you know what the exercise is because we just went through it in detail. But which of the following methods of receiving information gets your attention the quickest: email, text message, phone call, or Facebook message?

Again, which of the following ways to receive information gets your attention the quickest. Email, text message, phone call, or Facebook message?

Now, whatever answer you decide, you had to go through an evaluation process and you were looking [00:07:00] backwards into your own life experience. You may have looked into the experience of friends and comments that they had made. And you did this very rapidly, but in the process you solidify a fact or a belief about how the world is. My question was tailored to get you to do that in a way that would be effective for you to then make better decisions in the future.

Surveys before education can open the mind by activating the reticular activator. If you're not familiar with what the reticular activator is, the reticular activator is a portion of your mental psyche that, when it is called on to something, it keeps an eye out for it. So who knows where this originally came from or why we have it, but the fact that matter is, is if you're thinking about buying a car and you decide that you want this particular car, chances are you're going to start seeing that car everywhere once you make that decision.

In the same way, when I call your attention to the fact that not all [00:08:00] information being sent to people receives attention the quickest, that there are some that receive it more quickly, and then I ask you to evaluate which of these do you feel is going to be the quickest at getting your attention, you're going to come to some conclusions. If I thought about my question and what information you have, what possible answers you can come up with, I can tailor my answers to activate your reticular activator so in the future when I teach you, I'll be able to use the fact that your reticular activator has been activated to help you to be able to gather information before the education that will allow you to solidify beliefs about what I'm going to teach you that may help you to make quicker decisions in the future.

I know I went a little bit high in terms of the level of what I'm talking about, but hopefully that makes total sense to you.

Surveys after education can help in internalizing a message that you presented in order to simplify the decision-making as well. [00:09:00] If I have taught you in the past that text messaging is a very powerful way for a business to be able to communicate with customers because it's personal, because it gets attention, because it's always with the person, and it's not clouded up by tons of other email messages or things like that, then when I ask you this question, which method of receiving information gets your attention the quickest, it's going to help you solidify the message that I already gave to you.

Oh, wow a text message actually does get my attention the quickest. Maybe if you use Facebook Messenger, it's Facebook message. And a phone call, you may or may not respond to depending on what's going on because it requires you to actually pick up and talk, and then email is probably last.

So through the process of that question, I was actually able to shape a little bit of your thinking to help you make better or simpler decisions in the future. It won't be as complicated because you've taken into consideration some important facts that you may not have considered in the past.

[00:10:00] Using surveys should be easy and they should be mobile-friendly because as we know most content is being consumed now on mobile phones. That's kind of why we created and released the mobile surveys for our text messaging customers. The principal reason that we did this is because I needed it for an application process for our Claim Your Life Back event. If you've already applied for a Claim Your Life Back event, then you've gone through our mobile surveys. We actually invented that like a month before we released it as part of Fix Your Funnel.

The reason we did that is because that's how we create all of our products. We look for an actual business usage and then we test things out. If it works to actually move the needles, so to speak, on the business, then it's something that's worthy of consideration to become a product that we can offer to other people. If it doesn't, then it gets scrapped and it goes to the rock pile.

That's how we decide what we add to Fix Your Funnel, is what things work to move the needle for our business and businesses that are not our software business, but other businesses that we have an interest [00:11:00] in. And if something moves the needle and it has a good solid marketing concept to it, then it becomes part of our products set. That's how we introduced mobile surveys.

We started using mobile surveys to have people go through an application process that did a couple things. One, it told us information about the preferences and the situation of the person coming through.

And two, it allowed us to activate certain concepts or thoughts that may not be at the top of the mind that will help them to make a better decision when we present them an opportunity to make a decision later on in the the sales process.

If you haven't already tried that out, and I don't necessarily want you to apply for applying sake just to try it out, there's other ways that you can try out the surveys, but if you're interested in our Claim Your Life Back event, then go ahead and text CLAIM to 7606218199. When you do, you'll get a link that tells you more about the Claim Your Life Back event and also a link to our survey or [00:12:00] application which will show you how we utilize it to use this concept of surveys to direct thought to help people make better decisions when it's time for them to decide if they want to work with us or not.

And I hope that you'll use the same concept in your business because it can be a very powerful effect for helping people to be clear and make simple decisions when presented the opportunity to do so. This is Ryan Chapman with Fix Your Funnel. Hope this helps you today.