A person’s past is a clue to their future. Whenever humans do something, we always reference our past. Since we don’t like venturing into the unknown unless we have to, and we generally like to stick to the familiar, you can easily leverage this tool for massive persuasive success.
Most people stick with the same brands, eat the same things in the same restaurant, go to the same places during their free time, doing the same thing.
How do you use this?
Say, for the sake of argument, you’re selling somebody a car.
They’ve always driven a family sedan, and they’re looking at an SUV.
Of course, they’ll have extra objections, since they’re doing something unfamiliar, and spending a lot of cash in the process.
All you’ve got to do is get them thinking in their past history to when they’ve successfully done something similar.
The idea is to covertly shift their thinking from “buying an SUV is unfamiliar,” to “buying an SUV is familiar.”
You can do this by asking some targeted, vague, open ended questions.
Well Mr. Customer, I know this is a big decision, and you’ve said that you’ve never considered buying an SUV before. So clearly you are in uncharted territory. To help you decide whether or not this really is a good choice, what kinds of other decisions have you made like this in the past that turned out to be great decisions?
Lot of stuff in that paragraph.
For one, you can use an embedded command with the, “…this really is a good choice…”
Two, you are presupposing they’ve made good decisions in the past.
Three, some of those decisions were “like this,” meaning they were similar to buying an SUV (how are they like this? Who knows, that’s for the customer to decide!)
Four, those decisions turned out good.
Now, when they come up with some examples, which they almost certainly will (any customer who openly admits that they’ve NEVER made any good decisions probably has a poor credit score anyhow), they will have tacitly agreed with pretty much everything you just presupposed.
Making them much more likely to buy.