What People Want vs. What They Say (#1 sales lesson)

You say you want to be a millionaire.

I say you’re lying.

You say you want to lose 40lbs.

I say you like being fat.

You say you want to wake up early and have your daily routine dialed in.

I call BS.

What most people say they want is not what they actually want.

In fact, most of the time what people say they want is not at all what they actually want.

You might think I’m crazy for suggesting this.

How could someone who is overweight not actually want to lose weight or improve their health, especially, if it’s causing them emotional pain?

Or, how could someone making minimum wage not actually want to increase their income, especially, if they’ve been showing all the signs that they’re trying to become wealthy (buying courses, reading books, attending live seminars)?

I know, it sounds cruel.

But this is hands down the most important sales lesson you’ll learn all week:

What people actually want is to know that they can have what they say they want.

That’s it.

People don’t buy a workout program or wealth-building e-book because they want to get fit or become rich. They buy these things because if the day ever comes that they decide they want to get fit or be rich, they know they have the tools to accomplish these things.

I learned this from Frank Kern.

Frank calls this Positive Expectancy — the number one “buying” emotion.

If you’re thinking what I was thinking when I first heard this, if all people really want is to know that they can do something when the time comes, then why would they buy at all? Couldn’t they just wait to buy the thing they need when the time comes?

The answer is a bit more detailed than this essay but it boils down to two things: pain and urgency.

If positive expectancy is the number one buying emotion, then pain is second, and urgency, a close third.

Have you ever watched a video of someone teaching a skill or set of skills and thought to yourself, I can do that!

Maybe it’s how to build an online business that will give you the freedom to work from home.

The video might outline all the steps you’ll need to take, the tools you’ll need, the software, how to get traffic to your website, how to make your first sale, etc.

The first time — and many times after — you watch a video like this, there’s a light that flicks on in your brain saying, I can do that!

That’s positive expectancy.

And to move you from, I can do that! to here’s my credit card, show me how I do it! the salesman needs to create enough pain and urgency to make you feel like this is a no-brainer purchase that has to happen, now!

How does he/she do that?

Enter, emotional case studies, buy-now buttons and deadline clocks, before-and-after pictures, the list goes on.

The sale will never be made until you get your prospect believing they can achieve what your product claims it can do for them.

Once the belief (positive expectancy) is set, everything else is just fanciful sales tactics at work. And some salesmen are better or more tactful than others at this stuff.

Don’t believe me?

How many products, books, programs, gadgets have you bought expecting to change your life and then they don’t? Not because the products don’t work, but because they sit there, in a corner, or on your hard drive, unused.

After your I-can-do-that feeling gets fed, the pain and urgency to actually do the thing you originally set out to do subsides. Until one day, when the pain slowly starts to build up again and the urgency to buy the next how-to program launches.

Then the cycle begins again…

But Nick, wait! What about all the people who bought products and got results? Who actually followed through? How did they stay motivated? What’s their secret?

That’s our next article… stay tuned.

Nick Papple
Managing Editor
Success Formula Daily

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