I’m a little worried about how you are going to take to these automatic behavior articles. That’s because of a major automatic behavior generators that affects humans. It makes us feel like everything we do is a conscious choice. It can make us “

automatically reject information about automatic behavior. It can even happen when we do automatic behavior and someone points it out. People tend to deny the evidence. A friend of mine asked another one of my friends to prove that he knew hypnosis. He hypnotized her and then, afterwards, told her all the ways she could tell that she was still in light trance. She insisted that she was not hypnotized.

Maybe this is an evolutionary survival mechanism. But this is a powerful sales tool, so you should not be in denial about automatic behavior. But please don’t abuse your customers’ denial.

The most automatic but complicated behaviors in animals, as you know, are called instincts. Even though we know that animals aren’t as aware or thoughtful as we are, it’s hard to believe just how true this is. For example, when ants die, they emit a chemical. This triggers the other ants to put them on the dead ant pile. But if a mischievous scientist comes along and puts a little of that chemical on a live ant, the ant’s friends will pick the ant up and carry him over to the dead ant pile. His struggles to get loose are not enough to tell his friends that he is alive. Red breasted male robins will fight for territory with other red breasted robins. They will even attack a clump of red feathers. But if you color a male red breasted robin’s breast a different color, the other robin will not fight him. In both these examples, there is no thinking, otherwise the behavior would be quite different.

Imagine what it would be like if you could sprinkle some kind of color or magic onto your product and get everyone to buy it automatically! Wait! That’s going too far! It might go to your head, causing you to enslave the entire human race and establish a galactic empire… Or not. But I can tell you that there are many ways to use automatic triggers to help the sales process along, to improve your rate of success, and to give you more options for designing your sales processes. That’s what this section is about.