The Psychotactics Parrrrtttttyyy!

Natalya Murphy and Christy Brennand: Winners of "Most Valuable Member" at The Brain Audit

Everyone won at The Brain Audit workshop because we all learned a lot and had a great time. However as you know we also voted the “most valuable member” in at both venues. And here are the two winners:

In Washington DC: Natalya Murphy
In Vancouver, Canada: Christy Brennand

Thanks to Before & After Magazine (big thanks to John McWade) and another big thanks to Stu McLaren and Tracy Childers from Wishlist Member.

Both these products are exceedingly good and you’d do well to use them in your day to day business.

Before & After Magazine: http://www.bamagazine.com
Wishlist Member: http://wishlistproducts.com/

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We have been hammered time and time again with the notion that we must provide a wide base of benefits to the consumer of our products and then they would come knocking down our doors… you know the scene… “Build a better mousetrap…”

So there you are with your head buried deep into the drawing board trying to extol all these features on paper so you can get your advertising department to implement the benefits of these features across all of your advertising mediums…

And nobody buys.

Well, okay, that geeky technophile that lives two blocks over buys one item, and maybe your mother buys another, but in general you really can’t see any great strides in increased sales.

So you get on the internet and try to find the latest whiz-bang method for increasing traffic, or tracking visitors, or writing better sales copy, or whatever glitters brightest from your inbox that day.

You find it, you buy it, you download it, you try to figure out how to use it, and then you give up.

And you totally ignore the greatest source of knowledge about buying your product that you could ever hope to find.

Your customers, and I’ve excluded your mother, bless her soul for buying your product to make you feel good, yes, your customers, both past and present are a veritable gold-mine of information on your product.

Now we are not saying you should mine them for product information, but an interview to see why they purchased will help to bring the ore to the surface.

Once this ore has been extracted, the refining process can begin.

And if we circumvent the process the dross remains and the pure metal we had hoped to bring to market is sullied somehow.

We can be so close, and yet so far away because we have not gone far enough in the process, or we have not let the whole process function to its fullest.

A big part of drilling down to find the uniqueness in our products will be found in the reasons our customers bought.

And the reasons our customers bought can be found out if we let their process of story-telling unfold in a natural manner.

So watch for upcoming news on how this natural manner is unfamiliar territory for your competitors and on methods for you to stake a claim on the process light ages ahead of them.

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In the most basic of ways, we are able to compete in the marketplace in one of two ways…

• Uniqueness, or
• Price

While it is often tempting to reduce our price in order to get more business, in the long run all we are really doing is cheapening ourselves and/or our product in the eyes of the consumer.

After all, you have reduced the price this week… perhaps you are going to bring it down even more next week so we will wait until then… ohhh! There’s a holiday coming up… betcha there will be a Thanksgiving blowout sale and then we’ll grab hold of the product.

And, true to form, while these customers are waiting for you to reduce your prices, you are fretting and preparing for a further round of reductions in order to attract more “non-buyers”

Perhaps it would be of more benefit to do something unique.

Something that sets you apart

That gives you more value in the eyes of the marketplace beholder.

Sean charges a fee just to get on a waiting list for one of his products.

The fee is not much, but it sets him apart… who in their right mind would charge someone just to be on a waiting list? (Okay, okay, it is Psychotactics, I know, but that is another digression)

Immediately the list has become more valuable because you have to qualify just to be on the list by putting your hand up and saying, “Yes! I am a buyer! And I will prove it by giving you this $10.00.”

If you happen to find something that makes you and your product unique, then, hey, all the more power to you.

But if you cannot find it, please don’t waste any more time searching for it… just make it up instead.

That’s right, you heard it correctly, make it up.

Make up something so outrageously unique that when anyone tries to copy it, their efforts will fall flat

Stay tuned to this same location to see further exposes on the art of making up uniqueness

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Often at events like this, we cram all kinds of information into our noggins and then retreat to our rooms and hibernate.

Sean has made it clear from the start that the social aspect was important as the actual sit down in our chairs and listen portions of the event.

So, we dutifully followed along to restaurants and joined in with a diverse group that we otherwise would not have met and we found similarities with these new people.

Yes, there were differences, but they tended to make the similarities even stronger.

We were now on a common front… each with a set of eyes focused on a different area of the horizon, but the same direction all the same.

And when some of us had to miss parts because of health challenges, or family or business commitments, the whole group missed us and our input.  Missed us, but carried on and functioned without us.

So when the next day rolled around and the conversation focused on areas where we had been unable to attend, we felt left out.  That uncomfortable feeling made us more resolved to adjust things so we could enjoy all that was left.

It was more than a herd mentality.  Some may call it tribe-like, but I would dare to state that it extended more into the core psyche of us all as part of the human species.

At any rate, this roving reporter will continue to post bits and pieces about this remarkable social gathering that was carefully crafted by the Psychotactics team

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So we thought we would sit back, relax, and be “taught to”…

But Sean forewarned us that we would only have the one long session in the morning and that all afterwards would be broken up with group exercises and brief sessions where he extolled his insights.

Everyone in the room thought they knew what he was talking about until we actually got down to the exercises.

Suddenly we realized that we were trying to re-invent the wheel rather than enjoying the ride.

Our target market, our own customers, could tell us things “in their own words” that we could never spend enough on copywriters to achieve.

We needed to be quiet, to listen, and to be quieter still, letting the silence fill the room to the point that our target customer felt uncomfortable enough to open up further just to fill that silence.

And by filling that silence with their way of looking at the problem we would find the objections and the problems, yes, even the solutions if we would only listen to the greatest source available to us… the customer.

And if we could watch them face to face to observe their gestures and emotions we could catch many of the nuances that we would otherwise have missed.

A very eventful day full of familiar things that we needed to look at with fresh eyes.

Ohhh! Do we ever need time to decompress from this experience and let it slowly filter inwards!

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