Asking questions that evoke vivid mental imagery - the secret weapon of master sales professionals that makes "objections" evaporate into thin air.

I'm not sure what you want most in life.

How could I be?

I'm writing to you from the other side of a LinkedIn article.

But, if the research is any indication, whatever that most powerful, innermost desire of your heart is, it could probably fall into one of three categories:

1. Money / Career
2. Relationships
3. Health / fitness

These seem to be the big three.

Let's just suppose that we're set on thinking about money or career goals.

Safe bet for LinkedIn.

Okay. If you were to imagine a time, say six months to a year from right now, when you had your absolute dream job...

You were making not only what you've been dreaming of making, but maybe 30% more even!

On top of that, you were supported by an amazing leadership team and colleagues, if your dream job involved employment...

Or...

If you're of the more entrepreneurial mindset, you were surrounded by your own team, made up of people you truly respected, trusted and admired, that were consistently awesome together and made you feel amazing.

Your team was so good, that raving five-star reviews were the norm, with each member of the team, including you, maybe especially you, mentioned by name by nearly every client you dealt with, all of whom were only too eager to leave glowing praise.

If you were to imagine such a situation now, what would you be doing with your time?

What would your day look like?

What would be your mission and purpose that you were helping to make the world a better place with?

What is the thing you'd be doing that filled you with energy and a sense of purpose, to spring out of bed every morning?

Now, before we move on, I want you to notice something. I learned this from one of my most influential teachers, Paul Ross.

I haven't said anything specific, in my statements or my questions, because I have no clue what is important to you, other than the generalities that are important to everyone.

I haven't clearly said why your team, in this mental movie in the theater of your mind, earned your trust.

I have no idea what you find important in how you begin to trust someone.

Or what your personal standards are for developing respect.

Or what your team would be doing that earned such great feedback from clients.

But asking the question, vague as it is, gives the brain a job it can't refuse, which is to match with its own experience and fill in the blanks in a way that makes sense to you.

Even though I wasn't specific in the least with my language, as you read it, you had very specific mental images and feelings, did you not?

As Dr. Robert Maurer put it in his incredible books on Kaizen, for reasons we don't yet understand, the brain is designed in such a way that it simply cannot refuse a question.

It is compelled and delighted to solve the puzzle, whatever the puzzle happens to be.

This knowledge is supremely powerful in the hands of a sales professional who actually cares about helping his or her clients.

This is because, when you truly enjoy connecting with and helping people, you find yourself naturally curious about them and what is important to them.

That curiosity helps drive the conversation, with the right questions asked, to exactly what the heart of the matter is, in a way that builds a vision so vivid and so delightful, it simply can't be ignored.

In fact, past a certain threshold, a vivid image must be acted on.

We can only take a tantalizing fantasy for so long before we've got to do something about it.

And because of this, vision is everything in sales. Really, vision is everything in human life. Most of our life, at least the way we're used to experiencing it, happens in the imagination.

It's a rare person indeed who makes the distinction between the world as it is, and the world as we think about it. Especially how we judge it.

To the untrained mind, the difference doesn't exist, really.

Most of us truly are walking around completely ignorant, thinking there are bad people and good people, or bad things that happen to us and good things that happen to us.

Most of us are walking around in a hypnotic daze of our own creation, not realizing we have created the entire universe around us as we know it, with all of our hopes and fears, likes and dislikes coloring dramatically the filter through which raw experience is interpreted.

And so, if you understand that your job as a sales professional is to create a vision in the mind of your client that is vivid enough to compel them to action, you will never have to worry about objections again.

Questions?

Concerns?

Maybe.

But think about the last time you were carried away with a fantasy of something you just had to have.

Did anyone have to talk you out of objections or "overcome" your sales resistance?

There was no sales resistance!

Humans are the types of creatures that cry when we don't get what we want (a phenomena that becomes more subtle than a flailing tantrum in the middle of the floor in J.C. Penny, but no less prolific as we age, as Twitter taught us all), and we will spend money we don't have at one in the morning on the 1-800 number to the shopping channel, to order that thing we just have to have.

We'll worry about telling our spouse about it later, with some trumped up excuse, after it arrives and the deal is done, and it can't be undone.

Not saying that's a great decision, or that you shouldn't be very careful to make sure ALL decision makers are on board and thrilled in your sales, I'm just pointing out with an uncomfortably common example that the objections that rise when someone is lukewarm about something are as far as East is from West when they're red hot and ready to buy!

And that the way you help your client to get there, if it really is what they want, is to ask questions that stoke the fires of desire!

But how do you learn which questions to ask?

I'm glad you brought that up.

Because tomorrow, in Part II of this article, I'm going to show you some very cool ways to do so that are not only very effective but protects your client from making a decision that really isn't in their best interest.

Which is something I consider bedrock and fundamental to ethical sales, and so should you, if you want long-term relationships that are fulfilling and rewarding over time.