Paul's Blog

Dear reader,

In my previous blog, I described the Third Mind -phenomenon, and promised to devote this blog about how you as an entrepreneur can achieve maybe five times higher sales and still offering the same product in the same market with the same prices! It will be bit longer edition this time, but I promise you the reading will be worth it!

---------

Can you guess the most effective way of keeping a company healthy?
A large part is credited to calculated words meant to persuade you. Not only for the sake of acquiring potential clients, but also for keeping employees satisfied. Let me give you an example. Once a manager in New York City discovered the importance of the right points of reference, when he faced employees who were discontent with the raise of their salaries with a mere five percent, while the net profit of the company had risen with an effective twenty percent.

Thanks to a little research, the manager learned that his greatest competitor offered only a three percent raise; this was joined with rumours of dismissals. The manager brought this to the attention of his employees and wisely combined his news with a lifelong guarantee of employment by the company. Protests of his employees were thus quelled. How come? Words are namely not only a collection of characters and sounds: they are points of references. It determines how people are looking towards a subject.

You can sell the exact same product or service on the same market as other people, and be ten times more successful. Or ten times less successful of course. How is this possible? The other person is usually in command of better words to define his propositions. He might use more powerful words. Words with a bigger impact, emotion, and motivation. Most sales millionaires know that the right words might make you rich. Of course with that we are not talking about grammar or punctuation. The most important difference is that these people can access a superior collection of well sought words, mostly in the form of metaphors and stories instead of the cliches people have heard a hundred times before.

Direct Response Copywriting
In the past years I had the opportunity to read a lot about the personal experiences of 'direct response' copywriting experts, who frequently get hired to write texts for advertisements and sales letters. When a marketing manager tells me that a mailing with a response rate of two percent is the average , it tells me that this person has never thought of what the aforementioned men are doing to achieve a response rate of over 30 (!) percent. How much time do you spend on making your sentences better?

In my opinion it is a fact that most consultants and trainers and a large group of salespeople do not deal with their words in a professional way. However this shouldn t stop you from improving yours. Don t accept the status quo . And I don t just mean the words you use in business, but also the ones you use in your everyday life.

A comparison
As stated before, most sales champions use unique metaphors and stories in their speeches. In contrast, most average copywriter or marketeers has grown accustomed to way too many cliches. With that I mean, cliche sentences, cliche words, cliche metaphors. Having doubts about this? Have a look on the internet. Browse for 10 websites of companies that are offering the same type of services or products and see whether you see any relevant differences between their texts.

The problem here is that our brains having an important task, recognizing patterns and making contexts. When commercial people use the same sentences over and over again when talking to prospective clients, the subconscious part of our brains recognizes a pattern, which leads to a rise of walls around them, and will try to end the conversation as quick as possible.

People are usually not consciously thinking of this, just like we don t consciously think of using our brakes when a child crosses the street! It s something you automatically do. About the same automatic system in our minds raises our own commercial barriers. This is the result of making poor choices about our use of words. I have been frequently asked to take a look at sales letters and websites to renew the used words.

My advice therefore is, never underestimate the might of words!

-----

Thank you for reading again, I can imagine that you have additional questions or want to read more about this subject, so feel free to contact me about this! In the next edition we will go back in time and I will tell you a bit about the most important meeting in the history of modern commercial communication, and why most of the regular advertising agencies or sales consultancies are guilty of commercial malpractice !

With kind regards,

Paul Vessies, M.Sc.
paul.vessies@capture-qc.com