Here’s a story from Nobel-prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman.
In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman talks about a time he moved to a new state.
He had to get a new driver’s license, which meant he had to pass a driver’s license exam.
He didn’t study very hard for the exam. Instead, he scanned through the booklet of rules once and hoped for the best.
When the test came, he knew some of the answers from his experience driving.
But there were questions where he didn’t know the answer. And so he did what most of us would do — he just looked over the available answers, and picked the one that seemed familiar.
In other words, just because an answer seemed familiar, his brain had a suspicion it must also be true.
Now, here’s why this might matter to you:
If you do any kind of sales — in person or in print — you know the importance of following up with your prospect multiple times.
Each time you follow up with a prospect, good things are going on:
You build more of a relationship. You have a chance to answer more objections. You can build more vision. You might even get unusually lucky — and get to the prospect at a time when he is flush with money or ready to buy.
So all of these are good reasons to consistently follow up with promising prospects.
But something else is going on as well. Something very fundamental in the way our brain works.
In fact, it’s one of the topics that Kahneman himself studied and won the Nobel prize for. In Kahneman’s words:
“Anything that makes it easier for the associative machine to run smoothly will also bias belief. A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.”
In other words, familiarity, born out of repetition, is a kind of proof in itself.
It’s a particularly cheap kind of proof, because anybody can do it — it doesn’t require anything except persistence.
And while it can work for getting people to believe in falsehoods, it works even better when you have a legitimately good offer — and other forms of proof as well.
Which, in a nutshell, is why it makes sense to follow up with your prospects regularly — for example, by sending them daily emails.
If you have a good offer… And you keep presenting that offer in interesting and credible ways to your prospects… Day in and day out…
Then eventually, most of your real prospects will get convinced, and will wind up buying from you.
Of course, there’s the issue of actually writing interesting and credible emails. If that’s not your strong suit and you want some help, you might like my upcoming book. And you can even get a free copy when it comes out. For more info, check out the following page: