The subtitle of this book is “30 Sales Tools You Can Use to Control the Mind of You Prospect to Motivate, Influence and Persuade”. I’ll give you one of those sales tools for free later in this article. All you have to do is keep reading.
But first some caveats, “Triggers” is not a book on how to write better proposals. But it will help write better proposals. “Triggers” is not a book on closing, but it will help you close.
“Triggers” is a sales book and as proposal writers we are all salespeople – after all, what all of us do in any kind of business development is to try and persuade a prospect to buy from us whether that’s on the phone, face to face or on paper.
What Sugarman does, in a very accessible and pleasantly narrative way is to list 30 psychological triggers that make someone commit to a sale. It may be going a bit far to say that you can control someone’s mind in the hypnotic sense, but it’s not going too far to suggest that using some of these techniques can help you lead your prospect in the direction that you want them to go.
What is interesting to the proposal writer is that Joe Sugarman, apart from being an exceptional salesperson, came from a direct marketing background, using written words to create advertising copy that would dramatically improve the results for the products and services he was asked to advertise. It wasn’t the power of his personality – it was the power of his words.
Each of the 30 triggers are presented in just a few pages,making each technique easy to digest and apply before you come back and try another. Or it makes it easy to quickly find a new technique that you aren’t using yet. Sugarman explains the trigger with a sometimes folksy narrative that importantly ensures that you understand how to apply it.
At the end of the book there are worksheets that give you a summary of each trigger and space to do some of your own preparation on how you can use it – a very useful feature that many other improvement books could take on board.
So what are some of these magic triggers? What about the example that I said I would give you for free earlier on. Well that was it. Let me explain this way - you kept reading this article didn’t you? And some of you carried on reading because you were promised something that you thought would help you for free.
Sugarman describes this trigger as “curiosity”. Here is the summary:
“This very powerful tool can be used in the beginning of a sales presentation to kepp the reader or viewer glued to the advertising message. Use this trigger to keep the prospect interested and involved until the very end of your presentation.ACTION STEP: Early in your sales presentation, use seeds of curiosity and promise payoff that will cause a prospect to keep reading and pay attention.”
There’s plenty of other good things here, all within an easy to read book. I’d add it to your reading list right away.
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