In order to develop truly compelling long form sales letters and VSLs (video sales letters) that get an audience to sit up, take out their wallets and buy, you have to deeply understand their beliefs.
Sometimes our prospects beliefs and motivation is simple. So simple in fact that we can make a list of what motivates a prospect to buy.
Or at least we like to think it is.
On a broad scale it’s something like:
- Fear of loss
- Promise of gain
- etc.
On a more specific level it’s something more like:
- To fit into a dress for a wedding
- To be healthier
- etc.
In either case we’re at a good starting point.
Any good marketers can quickly come up with their own list.
And many good converting pages start just there.
But with an increasing market place sophistication it’s becoming more and more difficult to convert them with just the list you can come up with on the fly.
The average health buyer has heard all of these angles before and are becoming more and more resistant to buying.
If we go deeper than just scratching the surface, however… We find that underneath all buying motivation lies our individual “self stories” which are rooted deeply in belief.
Self story is literally the story in our heads that we tell ourselves about our situation, about ourselves and about how our individual world works.
Our beliefs are at the fundamental bedrock of these self stories and our motivations.
And at the heart of motivation is desire, which drives our beliefs.
Here’s how we decode belief:
Belief = (Desire x Self Story) / Challenges
And our individual beliefs are created and intertwined with our self stories in the most mundane tasks.
So, let’s unpack belief by looking at a simple example of a sweet tooth.
The Stuck Jar Of Jammy Goodness
All kids love sweets.
In this case specifically, a little girl with a sweet tooth for delicious jam on bread.
But sometimes those jars of delicious goodness are hard to open, especially for a kid with a sweet tooth who won’t ask for help.
Struggling to open the jar of jam, she ran it under water just like she saw her mother do and she was able to open it.
At that moment a belief was created in her mind that would last for 16 years.
Her desire was to open that jar in order to eat some of that delicious jam.
Her self story narrative that she told herself was that running the jar under water loosened up the sticky jam that was caught under the lid causing it to stick shut, keeping her from the yummy goodness inside.
In our belief formula, desire is a multiplier to self story. (Desire x Self Story) works together to amplify a belief making it stronger.
But what about the challenges part?
Belief = (Desire x Self Story) / Challenges
Her challenge / obstacle in the way of her desire was a stuck lid. At least that’s what it was in her mind. In reality it could have simply been that her 8 year old hands did not have the strength to open the jar.
This belief that water loosens the sticky jam caught under the lid stayed with her until she had encountered a belief collision at around age 16.
The Catalyst And The Core Value
It wasn’t until high school physics class where she learned that heat and cold expand and contract. In a class demonstration a jar was run under hot water, thus making it easier to open since the heat from the water expanded the lid ever so slightly, at a different rate than the glass.
Simply being told how something works is rarely enough to change a belief.
It was not simply the new knowledge that she learned about expansion and contraction but a well established value about science that caused her belief to change.
If you imagine a time line of her belief with sticky jam at the far left and physics class on the far right, there was an established value system of science at some point between those two points on her belief timeline.
Her core value system of science went something like this:
I respect science, it makes sense to me and aligns with my default disposition.
Therefore I trust science.
I fancy myself as thinking like a scientist and that makes me feel good about myself because I elevate scientific thinking i.e. the scientific method higher than things that can not be proven with evidence.
Her core value of science acted as the catalyst to displace the previous belief that hot water washes away the sticky jam under the lid and replaced it with the heat from the water expands the metal lid, making it easier to open.
This is how belief is changed and also how we buy.
A catalyst is combined with a core value.
The catalyst can be the sales hook or the unique mechanism of your health product.
And if that is aligned with your prospects current core value then you have a sale.
Without the combination of (Catalyst + Core Value) belief will not change.
In that case, you change their mind, and create a sale and at the same time you also create a believer to your new way… And when that happens, you have a buyer for a lifetime.
Belief = (Desire x Self Story) / Challenges
Our individual beliefs come from our desires.
And desire drives our motivations and actions. Which are the reasons why people buy.
A new belief cannot simply be replaced by new knowledge. To change a belief you must have a catalyst that acts as the change agent on the subject.
The catalyst can be a core value that is attached to the new bit of information.
We’re not in the business of changing minds, we’re in the business of tapping into belief.
And when we tap into a prospects desire we can make a bigger impact.
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