How To Control The Minds Of Your Customers – Part 1
November 7th, 2019 // 1:06 pm @ Scott Manning
After having some fun over the past couple weeks with Halloween, I teased you that this week I would cover 3 important aspects of how to control your customers’ minds. Sort of a scary thing when you think about it – all by itself – however this type of approach is all around us right now.
You walk by something in a store and all the sudden you get ads on your social media about it. You visit a website and then they follow you everywhere you go. You search for a produce and suddenly get their catalog in the mail. It’s certainly a crazy situation but I’m not here to share my thoughts on privacy.
You can just play around on Amazon and get one big giant lesson in advanced customer development and marketing.
Here’s the thing… “Mind Control” is real in the sense that you can get people to focus on whatever you want them to and you can influence their feelings about certain things. You see this everyday on TV and in other marketing media.
By comparison, the opposite of controlling your prospects’, customers’, patients’, clients’ minds is doing nothing to help them get to a yes or value the benefits you can provide.
Sitting idle and doing nothing is obviously not an option. And, by default, if you are not methodically and deliberately working to influence your customers for the positive – you are in fact doing things to influence them in the negative.
For example, without proactive positioning of value and intentional focus on outcomes instead of price, every customer is going to default to a money decision and therefore commoditize you completely.
Here is an example… you go to the drugstore to find a remedy for your cold. If you only looked at the price, would you be making the best decision for your health? As confusing and distracting as it might be, I want them to jam every bit of information on the packaging so I can make an informed decision. If an extra $20 kicks my cold a day earlier, I’m all in.
Bottom line: If all things are equal – which they NEVER are – then price wins. If you are doing nothing to make it about something else, you are making it about that.
This can be differences between you and an alternative business or differences between various options or possibilities of purchase within your business.
Controlling how customers see, feel, think, value, and decide about your business is YOUR responsibility, not theirs. Never forget that.
Before I even go into the 3 Principles of Customer Mind Control, I want to challenge you to take a very strong assessment over what you are doing to…
A – Build value from the first point of contact in your customers’ mind
B – Shape the view and perception of your customer to what will serve yours and their best interest in terms of creating a positive outcome
C – Educate and elevate a customer’s desire for an interest in whatever would make them the best and most valuable customer for you and give them the best and most valuable benefit for them
All of this is done strategically, not randomly; on purpose, not on accident.
When you do this you achieve a state of what I call “building better customers” because your process and experience is such that improves the quality of the original prospect.
There are really three major productive activities here if you so choose to execute on them.
1st – List everything that your best customers think and believe, then determine what ways you can influence of all customers with these thoughts, ideas, opinions, etc.
2nd – Define all the things your worst prospects think and the negative ways that they get in their own heads to talk themselves out of ever becoming a customer and what you can do to offset, counteract, mitigate, minimize, eliminate these mindsets.
3rd – Finally, now look at your experience from website all the way through buying and even into long term retention, then assess what you are doing and how you can take what you have identified in #1 and #2 to enhance your mind control power.
I will tell you that most businesses only get the low hanging fruit, which are the easy customers already convinced to buy. Also, many businesses actually sabotage themselves by focusing more on #2 than on building something for #1.
If you dig deep and take this seriously it is the difference maker of cultivating big profits, better customers, and liberating yourself from being at the mercy of “whatever happens.”
Next week, Part 2 of Customer Mind Control… get ready!
Category : Blog