Bob Etherington

Customers are not stupid but their brains are generally lazy.
I

The point is you never persuade other people to do anything ... people persuade themselves.

The elevator to success is out of order. You’ll have to use the stairs, one step at a time.

A.I.D.A. principle (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action)

The sales person always needs to request some next action—agree the date for an appointment or even ask for the order. It is surprising how few do it.

Master, when will you tell me all I need to know?” Socrates took him down to the river and placed the student’s head under the water. He kept him there until the student was fighting for breath. Even then he kept him down until he was desperate to get to the surface and just short of becoming unconscious. Only then did Socrates allow him to breathe. “You will know when you are ready for all the knowledge you need, when your desire for the knowledge is as great as the need you had for breath just now. Until then I will keep you hungry for air.” The well-trained sales person keeps the prospect as hungry for air as he or she can, by not giving away the solution until the customer is very aware of the problem they have and which the sales person’s product can solve.

I.K.E.A. which stands for: Intelligence, Knock-on effect, Expansion, and Appropriate. Having the same initial letters as the well-known furniture store makes the I.K.E.A. approach easy to remember but why is it so effective? It is because it uses a very common sense approach to opening the sales process. This is based on the following three facts:
1. Most products and services are actually there to provide solutions to problems.
2. None of us is really a prospective customer for any product or service unless we have, first, admitted to ourselves that we have a problem that needs fixing.
3. As prospective customers, self-admission of a problem-in-need-of-a-fix depends largely on where we are on our own buying ladder.
The I.K.E.A. approach is based on first analyzing the potential problem-solving value of the product or service we wish to sell. Only when this is done can we begin to apply the I.K.E.A. model. So what does each word in the I.K.E.A. model stand for?

you want other people to like you don’t tell them about “you.” Ask them about themselves.

(read: total life sustaining imperative

Quite simply this: Write your daily ‘to-do list’ prioritizing your top six tasks but always do it the night before.