Many a salesperson has improved sales by capitalizing on prospects’ automatic behaviors. I don’t mean to say that we’re all robots. We certainly aren’t as automatic as most animals, but sometimes we all act automatically. This definitely plays a role in many of our buying decisions. It is essential that you use these automatic behaviors in your sales techniques, because they are nearly universal, and they are quite powerful. You may be missing out on many opportunities for sales because of untapped automatic behaviors, because many of these opportunities are hidden.

The articles about automatic behaviors will enlighten you about all the key aspects, so that you can apply this to all aspects of sales. This will also help you better grasp many of the techniques and perspectives that we share, making them easier to learn and apply in an intuitive, holistic way.

There are also two levels of sophistication to automatic behaviors: simple and complex. You’ll see that I’ll be pushing the envelope a little to call the complex ones automatic, because actually the complex automatic behaviors are kind of in between automatic and conscious. But you’ll love the idea, because it adds a powerful tool called behavior priming to your toolbox.

We have three ways into these automatic behaviors, constituting three opportunities. We will start with very direct automatic behavior triggers, then we’ll get into a broader idea of automatic behavior generators, and then we’ll get into automatic behavior pressure. Each level requires more orchestration and planning than the previous. But the simplest level, that of triggers, is the one that you can most directly treat as a scientific experiment. You provide it, see how a number of customers respond, and you’ll know pretty quickly if you have a good trigger.

Your job is to take all this in and think about ways that this factor can be a resource in your sales process. This requires a bit of an open mind, because these opportunities are not always very obvious. In fact, they can be surprisingly counter-intuitive, as we shall see.