You’ve mastered S.P.I.N. selling.  You have your “hurt and rescue” technique down pat.

You get going (in your copywriting and sales pitch) with your question and listen plan.  Before long, your lead is wondering if the world will collapse on itself if they don’t buy your product.

Or are they?

You’ve starting drinking wine, trying different varieties at different price ranges.  You start to get a sense for how things play-out with your palate.

You know more expensive wines don’t always taste better.  So when a friend has a special occasion and opens a $200 bottle, you’ll just judge it by its qualities.

Or will you?

It’s an interesting side-note to consider how our attempts at persuasion work when the person we’re dealing with knows someone is trying to persuade them of something.

Many people now know that a salesperson will ask directed questions to try to get them to think of things in a certain context.  In fact for many of us, when someone breaks into a questioning strategy, it’s a clear sign to us we’re dealing with a salesperson.

I have a friend who recently spent a sizable chunk of money on new golf clubs.  He complains profusely about the chronic inadequacy of his game; you’d think he feels he’s beyond all hope.

Yet he persuaded himself to spend on the expensive clubs.

“That they might help my game,” he explains, “is a lie I let myself believe”.

The mind has powerful influence over itself.  It’s proven that the placebo effect works even when the subject knows the treatment is a placebo.  Tor Wagner of this study explained:

“What we think now is that they require both belief in the power of the treatment and experiences that are consistent with those beliefs. Those experiences make the brain learn to respond to the treatment as a real event. After the learning has occurred, your brain can still respond to the placebo even if you no longer believe in it.”

We can be, in a sense, too smart for our own good.  Or, we’re smart enough to let our mind do what it needs to do without overthinking the results.

Today, methodical consumers are so well informed, task-focused, and skeptical that it’s hard to pitch someone who doesn’t realize they’re being pitched.  Consumers put up their guard with salespeople and tend to pass over online material they see as “marketing”.

Or so we tell ourselves.

The truth is consumers often want to be persuaded.  When we feel a solution will help make our lives easier, we want to buy it.  When we spend a lot on a bottle of wine, we want it to taste better.

Despite our awareness, we let ourselves be persuaded.  We succumb to a sales pitch not because the salesperson was brilliant, but because we want to believe what they’re telling us.

And in this realization lies a difference between a good salesperson and a great one.

The good salesperson thinks they’re persuading the lead.  But the great salesperson knows that ultimately, the lead must persuade their self.

Likewise, the good online marketer thinks her content is reaching people and persuading them with a powerful story.  The great online marketer know their story is just a catalyst for getting their audience to create their own story – a story they’re at the center of.

There is an old episode of the program MASH where a practical joke onslaught engrosses the camp.  BJ is out to get everybody, especially the most important target, Hawkeye.

Hawkeye goes into defense mode to ensure he’s not the victim of the most insidious joke. By the end of the show, he’s barricaded himself into a barbed wire pen, up all night in paranoid defense.

In the end, the greatest joke is the one that never comes.  Instead, it’s Hawkeye’s state of mind – the story he tells himself – that ends up being the joke.  Everyone else just sits back and watches his absurd deterioration.

Sales pitches work.  So do placebos.  They work even when the audience knows what they are.

And they work really well when the marketer knows their audience knows what they are.