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Psychological Triggers
- Two Free Chapters
Introduction
Ch1
- The Ice Cream Ordering Sequence
Ch2 - When Your Neighbor Kicks the Bucket
Ch3 - Love and the Campus
Hooker
Ch4 - Raising Dirty
Laundry Up a Flag Pole
Ch5 - Turning Money
Poop Into Shinola
Ch6 - The TV Salesman's
Secret
Ch7 - Your Money or
Your Life
Ch8 - Talkin' Story
in Hawaii
Ch9 - Instilling Authority
in the Men's Bathroom
Ch10 - Our President
Drives a Rabbit
Ch11 - Gorilla Survival
Tactics for Marital Bliss
Ch12 - The Devil Is
In the Logic
Ch13 - The Last Temptation
of the Well Heeled
Ch14 - Brain Surgery
for Dummies
Ch15 - The Art of Extreme
Passion
Ch16 - Mass Delusion
and Other Good Marketing Ideas
Ch17 - The National
Hermits Convention
Ch18 - Airplane Tail
Collecting Made Easy
Section Two: The Pain
Continues
Ch19 - Help, It's a
Fire
Ch20 - The Snowmobile
That Bit Me
Ch21 - KIS&S: Keep
It Stupid and Simple
Ch22 - Winning Through
Legal Bribery
Ch23 - Anal Retention
Really Helps
Ch24 - The Military
Bubble Gum Conspiracy
Ch25 - Making Love With
Your Prospect
Ch26 - Winning the Jackpot
Ch27 - Blatant Seduction
of the Third Kind
Ch28 - Splish Splash,
I Was Takin' a Bath
Ch29 - How to Manufacture
a Hormone
Ch30 - The Most Powerful
Force in Selling
Epilogue
Appendix A - Recommended
Reading
Appendix B - The Third
Kind Continued
Appendix C - The Psychological
Triggers Worksheets
Bonus: Advertising
Secrets of the Written Word
Ch1 - The Ice Cream
Ordering Sequence
People are funny. And the way they respond
sometimes makes for some very valuable insights. That’s the basis of this
true but crazy story of how I ordered ice cream and discovered a very
valuable psychological trigger, even though I didn’t realize what I was
learning at the time.
In the late 1950s I was working in New York selling printing equipment.
One day after dinner, I decided to stop by a small ice cream parlor to
have a dish of ice cream. I sat down at the counter and the waitress asked
me for my order.
I requested my favorite dessert, “I’ll have a dish of chocolate ice cream
with whipped cream.”
The waitress looked at me with a puzzled expression, “You mean a chocolate
sundae?”
“No, I want a dish of chocolate ice cream with whipped cream,” was my
response.
“Well, that’s a chocolate sundae without the syrup,” replied the waitress.
“Isn’t it just chocolate ice cream with whipped cream? What’s the difference?”
I inquired.
“Well, a sundae is 35 cents and plain ice cream is 25 cents. What you
want is a sundae without the syrup,” replied the waitress, with a rather
smug expression on her face.
“OK, I want chocolate ice cream with whipped cream, so if you have to
charge me 10 cents more, go ahead,” was my reply. (This took place in
the ’50s when a dollar was worth a lot more than it is today.)
The ice cream arrived and I ate it. It was
delicious. Chocolate ice cream was my favorite dessert in college, where
I had just completed two years before taking off a year to work in New
York.
I had always heard that New Yorkers had a different way of expressing
themselves, so I guess I wasn’t surprised at my first experience.
A few days later I went out to dinner at a small diner on the lower
West Side. When the waitress asked me if I wanted dessert, I responded,
“I’ll have a dish of chocolate ice cream with whipped cream.”
The waitress looked at me and put her hands on her hips, “You mean a
sundae?”
Here I go again, I thought. “No, not a sundae but a dish of chocolate
ice cream with whipped cream.”
The waitress responded, “Well, that’s a sundae without the chocolate
syrup.”
After a few exchanges back and forth, I finally agreed to get the chocolate
ice cream with whipped cream and pay an extra 10 cents, just like I
had had to at the ice cream parlor.
And for the next few weeks, each time I ordered my favorite dessert,
regardless of the restaurant, I’d still go through the same hassle.
One evening, after having worked really hard during the day, I was finishing
my meal in a restaurant in mid-town Manhattan when the waitress looked
at me and asked, “Would you like dessert?”
I really wanted my favorite, but I just didn’t feel like going through
the entire verbal routine that I had been experiencing for the last
few weeks. “I’ll have a dish of chocolate ice cream,” was my response.
I didn’t ask for the whipped cream. This was a simple request—one I
didn’t expect a hassle over.
As the waitress was walking away, I thought to myself, in what must
have been a fraction of a second, how much I really wanted chocolate
ice cream with whipped cream and that I should not let myself be intimidated
by a waitress. “Hey, miss,” I called, as the waitress was still walking
away, “could you put whipped cream on that ice cream?”
“Sure,” was her response. “No problem.”
When the check came, I noticed that I had been
charged just 25 cents for the ice cream and whipped cream—something
that I had been charged 35 cents before. I also remembered that the
whipped cream had been an afterthought—something I ordered as the waitress
was walking away. Would this work again? Was this the way I would have
to order in the future?
The next time I ordered ice cream was the following day. But this time
I went to one of the restaurants where I had ordered ice cream and where
the waitress had given me a hard time.
I had a nice meal and then when I ordered dessert, I simply said to
the waitress, “Chocolate ice cream.” She wrote it down on her check
pad and as she walked away, I injected, “Would you also add some whipped
cream?”
With a slight glance back to me, she nodded her head and walked away.
A dish of chocolate ice cream brimming with whipped cream was brought
to my table. I asked for the check. Sure enough, the amount on the check
was only 25 cents. The ordering technique worked again.
I tried it again and again, purposely going to restaurants where I had
previously been charged 35 cents—only to be charged 25 cents simply
because of the way I was ordering. I even reverted to my old way of
ordering—as a kind of reality check—and sure enough, I got trapped in
my old pattern of having to explain that I didn’t want a sundae and
ended up paying 10 cents extra anyway. But the ultimate test was yet
to come.
While I was having lunch with a friend one day, I told him of the new
way I had been ordering ice cream and how the way that I ordered it
determined the price of the dish I got. He found it hard to believe
and then said, “Why don’t we do a test? I’ll order chocolate ice cream
with whipped cream and after I go through the sundae routine, you order
just chocolate ice cream. As the waitress is walking away, you call
out to her and have her add some whipped cream to your ice cream. And
then we’ll see what we both get and how much she charges each of us.”
And that is what we did. Sure enough, the waitress gave my friend the
same argument I had been getting. And my friend finally agreed to accept
the sundae without the chocolate syrup. I ordered just the ice cream,
but as the waitress was walking away, I shouted, “Would you put a little
whipped cream on my ice cream as well?” The waitress nodded and continued
walking away.
When the ice cream arrived, both dishes looked
identical. But not the check. Sure enough, my friend was charged 35
cents for a sundae and I was charged 25 cents for a dish of ice cream,
even though both desserts looked identical.
What in human nature would allow the same product ordered in a different
way determine the price? The answer is the first psychological trigger
called consistency.
The waitress committed to accept my original order of just the ice cream
but allowed the addition of the whipped cream because she had already
accepted and committed to my initial request. How can this be viewed
and made useful in the selling process?
As a direct marketer, I have determined that the most important thing
you can do to turn a prospect into a customer is to make it incredibly
easy for that prospect to commit to a purchase, regardless of how small
that purchase may be. It is therefore imperative that the commitment
be simple, small, and in line with the prospect’s needs.
Once the commitment is made and the prospect becomes a customer, the
playing field suddenly changes. There now exists a level of commitment
and consistency, directed in your favor, to encourage future purchases.
A good example of this can be seen at car dealerships. The salesperson
tallies your entire order, gets approval from the general manager, and
then has you sign the purchase contract. As she is walking away to get
the car prepped and ready for you to drive it away, she turns to you
and says, “And you do want that undercoating, don’t you?” You instinctively
nod your head. The charge is added to your invoice. “And you’ll also
want our floor mats to keep your car clean as well, won’t you?”
Once a commitment is made, the tendency is to act consistently with
that commitment. The customer nods his head.
A good example of this phenomenon was told to me by Jon Spoelstra, the
former general manager of the Portland Trailblazers basketball team
and president of the New Jersey Nets. “I would personally visit a prospect,
sell him a simple yet basic ticket package, start to leave and then
turn around, just as I was about to walk out the door, and offer something
else. Very often my customer would simply nod his head and say under
his breath, ‘Yeah, sure, add that to it too.’”
One of the important points to remember is to always make that first
sale simple. Once the prospect makes the commitment to purchase from
you, you can then easily offer more to increase your sales. This is
very true for products sold from a mail order ad or from a TV infomercial.
I have learned to keep the initial offer extremely simple. Then, once
the prospect calls and orders the product I am offering, and while the
prospect is on the phone, I offer other items and end up with a larger
total sale. An additional sale occurs over 50% of the time, depending
on my added offer.
Once you’ve committed to the original purchase, you are committed to
a course of action consistent with what you have already undertaken.
In the case of buying, you are now primed to buy more by virtue of the
original commitment to buy. In the case of ordering ice cream in New
York, you can even save a few bucks.
- Trigger 1: Consistency
Ch2 - When Your Neighbor
Kicks the Bucket
This is one of the really important keys
in determining how to sell a product: First, you have to realize that
every product has its own unique personality, its own unique nature.
Then it’s up to you to figure it out.
How do you present the drama of that product? Every product has one
very powerful way of being presented—a way that will express the true
advantages and emotion that the product has to offer and motivate the
largest number of people to buy it.
Let me cite a good example. Back when I first started JS&A (the
name of my mail order company) in the basement of my home, I met Howard
Franklin. Howard was an insurance salesman from Chicago who bought his
first calculator from me, responding to an ad I ran in The Wall Street
Journal. He loved his calculator and stopped by one day to buy a few
more of them. Later, Howard would stop by every once in a while and
buy more calculators as gifts for his better clients.
One day when Howard stopped by, he pointed out that because JS&A
was a growing concern, I should buy insurance. “You want to protect
your family because if anything ever happened to you, there may be quite
an estate and lots of taxes to pay before your family would realize
anything.”
“Thank you, Howard. I appreciate the offer, but I don’t really believe
in insurance,” was my standard reply.
But Howard was a good salesman. Every now and then Howard would clip
out an article on calculators from a local paper, or an article on some
new gadget from some magazine, and send it to me with his card. And
every once in a while, Howard stopped by and picked up a calculator
and again dropped the comment, “Joe, you should really have insurance.”
“Thanks, Howard. I appreciate the advice,” was my typical comment.
Then one day I heard a siren in front of
my next-door neighbor’s house. I looked out the window and within a
few minutes saw my neighbor being carried out of his home on a stretcher
with a white sheet over him. He had died that morning from a massive
heart attack. He was only in his 40s. I was 36 at the time.
The next day I called Howard on the phone. “Howard, remember our many
discussions on insurance and protecting your family and stuff? Well,
I think we should sit down and work out some sort of program for an
insurance plan for my family and me.”
I had finally made the plunge. Was it Howard’s salesmanship? Was it
his persistence? Maybe. But I realized from that experience a really
effective way to sell a whole series of products. Howard succeeded because
he had planted enough seeds in my mind for me to realize what insurance
was for, who should sell it to me, and who was a good friend and customer.
When it came time to buy, only I, Joseph Sugarman, would know. And only
when there was an immediate experience that hit close to home would
I see the value of insurance. I went through the experience and I responded.
Every product has a nature to it that you must understand to be successful
in selling that product. For example, from the insurance experience,
I soon realized how to sell burglar alarms. I had one of the largest
burglar alarm sales companies in the country, at one point protecting
more homes than any other company.
The alarm was called the Midex and my thoughts went back to Howard as
I created the ad for it. I knew that trying to scare people into buying
a burglar alarm was like Howard coming into my basement and saying,
“Joe, when you die, are you going to leave your wife and kids in financial
disaster?” That would never sell me insurance. Nor would a similar technique
of quoting crime statistics work to sell burglar alarms.
I realized that for me to buy a burglar alarm, I would first have to
recognize a need for one. Perhaps a neighbor was robbed, or crime in
my community was on the rise, or I had recently purchased something
expensive.
Once I knew I needed a burglar alarm, I
would look for one that really made sense for my situation. The first
thing I would insist on is that it work. After all, the first time I
really needed my alarm to work might be the only time it would be called
on to work, and I would want to make sure that it would work flawlessly.
The second thing that would be important to me is ease of installation.
It would have to be so easy to install that it wouldn’t require any
outside person stringing wires all over my house. So when I wrote the
ad on the Midex burglar alarm, I made sure that I spent several paragraphs
on the reliability of the product and the testing each unit went through
before it was shipped. And I used astronaut Wally Schirra as my spokesperson
for the alarm. He was quoted in my ad as simply saying, “I’m very pleased
with my unit.”
Never did I try to scare the prospective customer with crime statistics.
It would look as ridiculous as Howard screaming or warning me in my
basement to get insurance because I may die. All I did was realize the
nature of the product I was selling, bring out the points about the
product that were important to the consumer, and then wait until the
consumer saw the ad enough times or was threatened close enough to home
to make him or her buy.
We received many orders from people who had cut out the ad and put it
in a file. When indeed they were threatened, they then called and placed
their orders. Fortunately, thanks to our timing, there were enough people
who wanted a unit when they saw the ad to earn us a nice profit, but
we also received orders months after we stopped running our ads. Despite
the fact that many of the electronic products of the time were obsolete
just a few months after they were introduced, we managed to run our
ad for over three years before sales slowed down.
I use the security system as an example of how products have their own
unique personality based on our emotional reaction to them. And because
of my experience with Howard and my next-door neighbor’s untimely death,
I had a special insight into the nature of this dissimilar but related
product.
But what about other products? How do you
determine or learn about their nature? There are two ways. The first
is to become an expert on the product you are selling. Learn everything
you can about it: how it’s made, how it’s used, and some of the unusual
applications it may have. Learn about the emotional appeal of the product
or service to a prospect. Study the prospect. Talk to as many potential
buyers as you can and get their insights. Ask a lot of questions. The
more of an expert you become, the closer you will get to really discovering
the true nature of the product you are selling.
The second thing you can do is tap into your own broad knowledge. Throughout
your life you have had numerous experiences that could shed light on
your understanding of the product you are selling. Had I not had my
experience with Howard and my neighbor’s untimely death, I might not
have had the insights to sell the burglar alarm. But since your broad
knowledge comes from your complete body of experience, it is not something
you can focus on to obtain more information. You already have the information;
you only need to “mine” the answers from your vast personal experiences.
Think about other product examples. What is the nature of a toy? Just
from your own personal experience, you know it’s designed for fun. So
you bring out the fun aspects of the product. Maybe when you study it,
you’ll find something else that might appeal to your prospect. What
is the nature of a blood pressure unit? It’s a serious medical device
that you use to check your blood pressure. Note the word “serious.”
What is the nature of a burglar alarm? It’s a serious product that should
be easy to install, that works when it is supposed to, and that provides
protection to concerned homeowners. Very often, common sense combined
with a little bit of work is all you need to understand and appreciate
the nature of a product.
If you don’t understand the nature of the product you are selling, you
won’t effectively sell it. Every product has a unique nature to it—a
unique way of relating itself to the consumer. If you understand this
nature and find the way to best relate the product to your prospect,
you’ll hold the key . . .
. . . end of free sample chapters
STOP!
Now that you realize that applying powerful
psychological triggers today will turbo-charge your business to incalculable
heights, you’ll be surprised to learn that you can have Triggers
for a very small investment of $47. Immediately after ordering,
you will receive download and unlock information that will allow you
to read Joe Sugarman’s Triggers online. You can apply one
or more of the psychological triggers to your sales and marketing activities
today, and literally generate sales before the day is over. Click
here
now.
And remember when
you order, you will also receive the RealPlayer version of Joe Sugarman’s
outstanding Advertising Secrets of the Written Word tapeset.
This is the audio version of Joe’s phenomenal book with the same title,
which has been drawing absolute raves from countless marketing,
sales and advertising professionals all over the world. It is the ultimate
resource on how to write powerful copy – from one of America’s top copywriters
and mail order entrepreneurs. This tapeset is sold separately
for $50.00, but it’s yours free with your purchase of Triggers.
Try it now,
risk-free. If you are not satisfied, just let me know within
30 days and I will issue a no-hassle refund. Although it is highly unlikely
that you would be anything less than thrilled with Triggers
should you decide to request a refund, the free bonus, Advertising
Secrets of the Written Word is yours to keep and enjoy as my gift
just for taking me up on this offer.
Best
Regards,
Kevin
Wilke and Matt Gill
Co-Founders, NitroMarketing.com
P.S. Frankly, I know nothing that could truly
make a significant difference in your net worth like the infusion
of Joe Sugarman’s Triggers into your current marketing and sales
activities. Oh, and did I tell you that the ebook is remarkably
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salesman," has this to say:
“There’s one thing that captured me from the beginning of this ebook
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his incredible skill in writing. He’s a master of the written
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