Reverse Thinking

In a typical sales process, we often use what I call Forward Thinking.

This is where we think about things that lead to other things. We start with something (which we'll label "X") and we think about how it leads to something else (which we'll label "Y").

BENEFITS are a good example of this. If you have a great product to sell, you naturally want to tell people about its benefits.

This is forward thinking, because the product (X) leads to the benefits (Y).

There's nothing wrong with this way of thinking. After all, if you have a great product, why wouldn't you want to tell people about the benefits? (Actually, there's one very good reason why not, which I'll get into shortly).

It's also a very natural way to think. We have thoughts that lead to other thoughts, right?

However, for the purpose of preselling - that is, leading potential customers gradually to the point where they're ready to buy from you - there is an even more useful way of thinking.

I call it Reverse Thinking.

This is where we start with what we might normally think of as an outcome (i.e. Y), and think backwards about an earlier something ("W") that could lead to X or Y.

Sound confusing?

I understand. This is a less natural and intuitive way of thinking, but it's incredibly powerful once you can train yourself to do it.

An example or two would help here, right?

Example #1 - Reasons Why

Let's say you sell a 30-day course on Zero Pitch Selling, which shows people how to make sales without selling.

As an example of reverse thinking, a question we could ask here is:

- What would be the reasons why people would want to make sales without selling?

I can think of several:

• Potential customers are wary and skeptical of sales pitches.
• They tend to be more guarded when they know they being pitched.
• Selling can be hard.
• Sellers might not like selling, or be good at it.

You could weave these ideas into your Presell Content. In particular, you could write a Key Article on, say, "The Problem Of Selling." One of your goals for the article would be to have readers think, "yes, you're right. Selling is a problem. I just wish there was a way I could sell without selling!"

See how that works?

By reading the article, they'd be one step closer to buying what you have to offer. This is a very simple example of preselling.

This is also the reason why you don't always want people to know about the benefits of a product - in preselling, potential customers don't necessarily know you have a product yet. Your aim is to "sell the benefits"... without selling the product!

You can do much more powerful things with the preselling toolkit I'll give you, but since this article is about "reverse thinking," let's look at another way we could use this skill.

Example #2 - Ideas That Lead To Acceptance

Let's say you wrote a book about buying real estate at auctions. You cover the technical aspects of buying, but this part of the book is fairly generic. In other words, competing books contain roughly the same information as yours.

However, your book also contains dozens of tips from real estate experts who managed to grab some amazing bargains over the years by being innovative. The book shows what they did and how they did it.

This is a feature of your book that can make it stand out from the crowd, so you'd want to PRESELL this feature in a big way.

A reverse thinking question you could ask yourself is:

- What idea, when bought into by prospects, would lead them to accept the feature as a clear and obvious benefit to them?

I think the key idea here is innovation... or more specifically, the idea that to find a truly amazing real estate bargain, you have to be innovative.

You could create a presell report or video, and whole articles and emails that revolve around this one idea.

If people "buy into" the idea, they are much closer to buying your book (although you'd need to do other things as well, if you want them to actually buy).

"Reverse thinking" is arguably one of the most important skills I teach in the Presell System, because it can be applied in many different ways, to figure out how to move potential customers to the point where they're ready to buy from you.