One of the most important things you can do in selling is to communicate visually whether it telling powerful stories, using analogies or writing sketches using a whiteboard. The reason for using pictures in your selling or marketing strategies is key for some very important reasons you may not have previously considered.
Belief: People have a hard time believing what they don’t see. Whether you are talking religion or buying a new car, whether the idea is ethereal or concrete you must be able to create a picture in peoples mind that they can see and touch (at least in their mind) for them to believe in it or about it. Religions have done this since the dawn of time with symbolism that is emerged in stories that allow people to get their head around the power of God.
Understanding: Stories that people can visualize themselves engaged in, playing a role in or even have had happen to them are another way to engage visually. We see ourselves playing in the movie that a sales person or a marketer has created and suddenly are stimulated to take action. Millions of “Life Alert” lanyards were sold when sons and daughters visualized their parents lying on the ground saying “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up”. We understood the emotional pain as well as the functionality of the product, we understood the “why to buy” in 30 seconds from one picture.
Non-Verbal: 97% of human communication is non verbal. The conversation that happens between the real conversation is what we need to understand. If we are not face to face then we must know how to make our self present and real so we can make that conversation as “real” to them as we can in a very short amount of time.
Relationship: People have a hard time understanding a system with a conversation. They have a hard time understanding the relationship between two things without seeing them. The right analogy that makes a word picture in their mind or a conversation that makes it real in the mind of the prospect can in seconds show the complicated relationship that would have taken hours to explain in a linear fashion.
If you have a complicated value proposition that many people take a lot of time to command then use pictures in the mind of who you are talking to in order to get them to understand what you are really doing.
