“How Your Head Works”
BY Sean De Souza

Do yow really know how your head works? Why does some communication work much better than others?

First thing they say, it’s not technology.  It’s about psychology, which hasn’t changed in thousands of years, Psychology that unlocks the working of your customer’s brain.

Okay. I will show you how to look into a customer’s brain and see what they’re thinking.

Seriously, I used to be a hypnotherapist.

My view is that, if you can really tap into the number one thing on your prospect’s mind - find out exactly what they’re thinking and how they’re thinking, you just have to give them back what they want to eat.  Feed them the food they want, okay?

Andrew - an Aussie, wrote to me and said, “I got this invoice from my ISP,” and he said, “it was six times the price that they normally bill me for.  So I called up the ISP.”

So Andrew says to the ISP, “Hey, you guys have got it wrong. You’ve over-billed me.”

They said to him, “Andrew, we haven’t over-billed you.  Have you looked at the stats on your website?”

And he said, “What stats?”  They said, “You have had 250,000 visitors in less than 30 days!”

And Andrew went, “Huh?!” You know why he went, “Huh?”  Because he hadn’t sold one product and he wasn’t signed up for any service or anything.  So 250,000 people came to his website and guess what?  Nothing.  Absolutely nothing.

So you’ve learnt about Google Ad Words, how to get people to the website and how to get them to your sales pages.

And guess what?  You’ll be like Andrew.  Nothing.  Because nothing happens until a sale is done. When a sale is done, that’s when everything happens.

You want to learn the tricks of the trade.  I’m not going to teach you the tricks of the trade.  I’m going to teach you the trade!

I’ll give you a little background on psycho-tactics. Psycho-tactics is simply psychological tactics.

Is it going inside your customer’s brain and living inside?

No, it’s not.  It’s a language. If I were to say something to you in German right now, I could be saying exactly what I’m saying right now and half or more of you wouldn’t understand. Because I’m speaking in English, you understand exactly what I’m saying.  And that’s exactly what you need to do.  You need to get straight into the brains of customers, speaking in their own language.  And once you do that, it’s just magic.

So I’m going to introduce you to the Brain audit today.  You can start to look inside a customer’s brain and start to audit your communications.  You can look at a communication and go, “Bing, bing, bing,” like an accountant, and go, “Wow!  I really can do this!”

You’ll find out that you can.

I’m going to cover three main concepts.

The first thing is “What is the Brain audit?”

The second thing is “How do you activate triggers?”

And the third thing is “Immense applications”.

** WHAT IS THE BRAIN AUDIT? **

At Auckland International Airport, I got seven red bags onto the flight.. Then, I got off at Sydney International and there I was, waiting at the conveyor belt, like everybody else, for the bags to come on.

So my first red bag comes off. Then the second red bag and the third.

Then a beige bag, a blue bag, then a green bag, my fourth red bag, then the fifth red bag and then the sixth red bag.

When do I leave the airport?  Only when I get the seventh red bag off.  That’s what everyone says.

That’s exactly what goes on in the customer’s brain.

If you don’t take all the red bags off their brain, they don’t buy.  So if you don’t take even one red bag, even if it’s the littlest bag, they don’t buy.

I’ll show you three of those main “red bags” that you need to cover.

The three main red bags are the problem, the solution, and the target audience.  These are the three main ones that you need to attract the customer in the first place.

Let me explain a little bit about the problem.

Have youe noticed how people walk? I stand around and watch how people walk.

They’re walking about. They go:

“I wonder if my partner is going to find out about my affair?”

”I wonder if my kids have ___ in school?”

“I wonder if I’ve got lunch in my box?”

“I wonder if I’ve got any money in my bank.”

“Oh, please, please, please, let that ___ go through.”

And they are consumed, the whole time, with their problems. Notice how people are - they have problems.

You are consumed with your problems.  Your brain is focused absolutely on problems.

This doctor, Katchiopo, in the United States, had a little test; he had three objects flash in front of an audience. He had them all hooked up to these little wires and stuff like that.

He flashed the first image in front of them; a plate.  The heart monitor kind of thing went beep, beep, beep, beep, beep

Then they flashed up a red Ferrari - a sexy, red Ferrari. The “heart monitor” went zoom, up like that.

Then they flashed up a dead cat and it went higher than the red Ferrari.

The brain is a very, very dangerous thing.

Look at you.  You’re driving down the highway and doing 120 - way over the speed limit. You’re a little concerned, but you’re not that concerned.

When was the last time you got caught, right?  Never!

And then suddenly, your heart starts beating really quickly and you press on the brake.  Guess what’s right ahead of you?  The radar.  The red and blue flashing lights.

So what is your brain doing?  It’s focusing straight onto the problem.  It forgets all of those blondes driving fast and all of those hunky guys driving fast and it focuses on the cops.

The problem.

I want to give you one more example, before I go on.

Many of you read the newspapers, watch the news, read Time magazine. I know you are literate. If you look at the last 5 or 10 issues of the Time magazine cover, what’s on it?

Problems.  What’s on the 6:00 news? What’s the first thing on the news tonight? Disaster.  What’s the second thing?  What’s the third thing?

When do you get the puppy dog stories?  Right at the end.

These guys have to communicate with millions of people day after day. They know exactly what attracts you day after day - problems.

Why does the brain act like that, like a radar?

It’s very simple.

Remember when you were a child and you walked down the street with mom and dad, and you were going, “La, la, la, la, la,”?

“Splotch! You went into dog pooh.  And then you go, “Ew!  Yuk!”  And then scrape, scrape, scrape, scrape, scrape, scrape. 

Your brain remembers it. So the next time it sees that, it ignores the sidewalk, it ignores the trees, it ignores the pretty birds in the trees and it goes, “La, de, da, da, da,” because it’s focusing on the problems.

Yet, what do we do day after day? How do we communicate?

With solutions. Look at what you’re doing everyday. You’re communicating with solutions.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  Solutions have their place.  What does a problem do?  A problem gets your brain locked in, like a radar.

And the solution?  It brings down the heart rate.  The problem picks it up, the solution brings it down.  Up, down, up, down.

That is the place of a solution, right after the problem.

And the third part is the target audience.

If you don’t have a very specific target audience, you’re going to struggle in all sorts of communication, not just the Internet and not just in your business, but in any sort of communication.

For instance, women over 40 want to look like 20.

I’ve got the secret.  Still not around.  You can probably go to the Internet site.

Do you understand what I’m saying?  Instead of targeting ALL the women, you just go women over 40. Because once you have a very specific target audience, you know that they will lock into your problem.  The problems that women over 40 have, the same problems the women after 20 don’t tell.

So what I’ve done so far is identify the main three facets of the brain audit; the problem, the solution, and the target audience.

But you’ve got a better understanding of the problem. 

** “The TRIGGERS” **

Now I’m going to do “brain alchemy”. I’ll take the problem, the solution and the target audience, then mix them together and see what we get.

We get what’s called “the triggers”.

What is a trigger and why do you need triggers?

It’s very simple.

You open your in-box every day, get thousands of e-mails or 50 e-mails or whatever. You look at the newspaper, there’s too much.  You sit in some Internet conferences and you’re getting way too much information.

What happens to you when you get blown apart with information?

When the brain is faced with too much information, it shuts off!

You are now living in a world where you’ve got no options; you’ve got to go ahead and get someone’s brain moving.

You’ve got to get them to say four or five words such as, “How do you do that?” or “What do you mean by that?”

That is a trigger, a measurable trigger.

If you don’t get them to say, “How do you do that?” or “What do you mean by that?” you’re struggling.

The first thing, when they get to a website, right at the top, what people need to see is something that makes them ask, “How do you do that?” or “What do you mean by that?”

If you don’t have a problem, solution and target audience where people say, “How do you do that?” or “What do you mean by that?”, then you’re losing out.

Let’s take a little look at some examples.

This lawnmower guy came up to me and said, “Can you get me a statement that says, “How do you do that?” or “What do you mean by that?”

I said, “What do you do?”  And he said, “I mow lawns.”  And then I said, “What problem do you solve?”  You know what he said?  “I mow lawns.”  “What problem do you solve?”  “I mow lawns.”

He’s so focused on the solution, that he can’t think.

So I asked, “Tell me, when you go in, how does the lawn look like?”

He says, “It’s a mess. I go in and I give it a facelift.”  Cool.  So we’ve got a problem, we’ve got a solution.

Then I asked him, “Who do you do this for?”  And he said, “I do it for everyone,” because that’s what we all say.  “Who’s this for?”  “Everyone.”

I asked him, “Do you do this lawn mowing for schools?”  He says, “No.”  “Do you do it for hospitals?”  “No.”  “Then who do you do it for?”  “Homes.”

So I said, “Do you do it for the large houses on the hill?”  And he goes, “No, they don’t pay on time or they have dogs.”

So we identified who his real target audience was; really small homes.  And from that, we got; “Wrinkle-free home gardens”.

He puts it on his website and says to people that ask, “What do you do?” - he says, “I do wrinkle-free home gardens.”

What are you going to say?  What is your brain going to say at this point in time?

“What do you mean by that?”

The brain is very, very specific.  If you throw a trigger at it and it’s random, it’s like where do you go for dinner and it’s anywhere but, if you say very specifically, you throw a specific trigger at it, then what comes back is a specific response.

If you’re not getting a response like, “How do you do that?” and “What do you mean by that?”, then you’re not attracting your target audience.

This is measurable.  This is what you can guess without any money.

Same thing with a computer repair guy.  Problem, solution, target audience.

I said, “What do you do?”  He said, “This is what I do, I fix computers.”

We went into the whole discussion, until we got to where he said, “I take the fat out of computers.”

“What do you mean by that?”

He says, “When you get a computer, it’s going at a million miles an hour.  And then it goes chug, chug, chug. We put that computer on a treadmill and we get it moving really quick.”

Now, that’s an explanation that you can live with.

I’m going to give you some examples of how do you do that.

“Small business pain relief” - that was for an office doctor kind of thing.

“Corporate Surgeons”, not doctors - This was for a PR company.

This is for an accountant - “Legitimately ripping off the tax department.”

The bed guys - “Taking the middle man out of your bed.”

This is for a headhunter - “Elusive employee search engine.”

“Reactivating dormant business clients.”

Here, I want to put a little clause.  This is the sub-clause, which is “Recession-proof business principles.”  Both of them were done for the same business.

But one worked 10 times better than the other one.  The reactivating dormant business clients would always get people to say, “How do you do that?”

The recession-proof business principles would get people saying, “That’s nice.” You don’t want “that’s nice,” you want “how do you do that.”

You want to measure it time after time after time.  You want a response every single time.  You want a trigger to work.

A trigger is a specific response that goes bang, between the eyes, just to the brain.  And it gets, “How do you do that?  What do you mean by that?”

**”The APPLICATION” **

I’ll move on to the applications now, to give you some real-life examples.

Here’s a headline, “Delicious recipes with Teagles range of frozen boneless chicken.”  That’s an e-mail that you get.  It’s all solution.

Another one, “Having trouble deciding what to cook tonight?”  If you were to get an e-mail at 5:00 saying you were getting recipes, versus “What am I going to cook tonight,” which one would you choose?”

The problem.

“Double-helix communication delivers high-profile customers to consulting firms.”

“Is your business drying up?”  It’s not specific, but at least it’s there.  It’s not very, very specific, but it’s there.

“The marketing mastery workshop for professional service businesses.”  It’s a solution.

“As a subscriber, are you still missing some pieces of the puzzle?  We’ll put all the puzzle together in two days.”

These are just very simple headline changes.  I’ll show you more, though.

There is an advertising campaign from Apple.  “My PC wasn’t plug-and-play, it was plug-and-get-mad.”  They had whole TV commercials on this, where Janie says, “My father got a computer for Christmas and he was going to spend Christmas Day downloading drivers.  And I saved Christmas.  I got on my Mac and we were going.”

So that’s a problem and that’s a solution.

I’ll go through these two, which I covered in the brain audit rip, where we rip apart websites. 

This was my own website.  I wrote the book, but I made the mistakes that everybody else makes.  That’s what I want to be very clear about.

You’re going to make mistakes despite having instruction manuals, even if you’re the author.

My site was all solution and a page wasn’t getting any hits because it said, “Before you invest in the brain audit, here is a special surprise for you.  And you will really love it.  Just read it below.”

It was all about me - it was nothing about you and it had no problem, it had no solution.

It had great testimonials.  It had testimonials from David Garfinkle, Kendra Cleveland.  It had all of that stuff.  It wasn’t selling. 

And then we just changed the headline.  “Have you seen a customer back out of a deal at the very last minute?  Don’t you feel like tearing your hair out every time that happens?  Is your next website or business card going to be a huge waste of money?  Do you know…”

And we go on and on and on, with problem, solution, problem, solution.  And it’s like a roller coaster.  You get to the top and you drop.  You go to the top and you drop. 

You can learn to do that.  Very simply, concentrate on the problem that the customer has and you will start to see results. 

Where are you going to use all of this?

You can use this in your e-mail, on your website - on your front pages and your sales pages.

If you go to PsychoTactics.com, you’ll find most of the pages adhere to this kind of formula, if you want to call it that.. It works, which is good.

You can apply it to your own marketing.

This could be any communication.  It doesn’t have to be off your website. Offline, you can do it with letters.  You can promote workshops like this.

I gave you an example of Andrew.  What was Andrew’s problem?  He had a quarter of a million people come to his website, and no one bought.  Did that get your attention?

That’s what I’m saying to you.

You’ve got to also understand is that consequences come right after the problem.  So you’ve got to tell a person that there are going to be consequences if they don’t buy, if they don’t do anything.

What are the consequences?  What is the price they’re going to pay if they don’t buy into what you’re selling?

What are the consequences.

Finally, this objection comes up almost inevitably, “Are problems negative?”

“We grew up to be like that, and we were told that we had to do benefits, benefits, benefits so I’m not going to do the problem because it’s very negative.”

It’s your choice, because it’s been tested scientifically.  We’ve tested it on the website, everywhere.  We find and we know that problems work better than solutions.

You can walk from here or you can drive.  You can drive or you can fly.  It’s your choice.

With that, I want to complete this overview of the Brain Audit.

In this article, I covered problems, solutions and target audience.  Lead with the problem and you’ll find results.

The second thing is triggers. Triggers are measurable. If you don’t get people saying, “How do you do that?” and “What do you mean by that?”, go back to the drawing board and start again.

Put a problem, solution and target audience together and you get a trigger every single time.

And finally, applications.  What is your communication?  Don’t take anyone else’s word for it.  Take the steps of the brain audit and put it in your communication, and you’ll start to see how it really, really works.

What is the biggest thing that you learned today?  Solution or problem.  Problems rule the world.  Come on, go for it and order your website today!