The other day I was walking on the sidewalk and I saw a “No Parking” sign posted on a garage door. But it wasn’t an ordinary “No Parking” sign—it also said “Visualize Being Towed.”
And I visualized it! I started to think about how terrible it would be to realize that my car was gone. I was even getting stressed about having to call the impound lots.
Before reading the sign, I wasn’t even thinking about parking. I wasn’t even in a car! I was just walking on the sidewalk. But I still visualized being towed.
That’s the power of visualization—to make you feel something that isn’t real.
Which got me thinking about visualization, more generally. There are a ton of applications, but of course, I was thinking about sales.
It made me remember something that a veteran rep had taught me when I started in my first sales role. He said, “You have to sell the dream. You have to make them live the dream before they’ve even bought it.”
Living the dream—this is visualization. The dream is a life with your product or service. And the nightmare is just one more day living with their pain point (without your product or service).
But just talking about it isn’t enough. Visualization is about making it visceral. They have to see, hear, and feel their dream.
The goal is to get your prospect to feel the dopamine hit from their dream. And that’s when people buy.
This could be anything. For example, maybe you’re selling a POS system to an old-fashioned restaurant. The restaurant owner has told you how stressful it’s been to keep track of all their orders on paper tickets.
So you say, “Picture this, Jan. All your servers will take down orders on their iPads and the orders will automatically pop up on a monitor for the kitchen staff. No more paper! No more sifting through stacks of receipts when doing accounting. No more losing track of orders and having customers get upset with you and your waitstaff. Doesn’t that sound a lot less stressful, Jan?”
The goal is to get into Jan’s world. You want to see the problem from her perspective. This way you’re not missing the mark when you try to walk through a visualization exercise. You want it to be as close to Jan’s reality as possible, so the emotions she feels are real.
Now, visualization can seem a little over-the-top. If executed poorly, it will just be awkward. Your prospect will feel shy about sharing their imagination with you.
But consider this: your prospect will be visualizing either way. Without your guidance, they’ll be visualizing the negative—their wallet getting lighter, how angry their boss will be if this doesn’t work, etc.
You need to walk them through a visualization of the positive—how great life will be once they’ve bought your product and finally get some relief from their pain point.
Take control of the power of visualization to help your prospect imagine a positive buying scenario. Otherwise, visualization will work against you as your prospect privately imagines a negative scenario and convinces themselves not to buy.