Thinking Past the Sale

“People automatically gravitate toward the future they are imagining most vividly, even if they don’t want the future they are seeing.”

Scott Adams, Win Bigly

You sit down on a weekend morning with your coffee and boom there’s the email you’ve been waiting for. By the time you finish reading it, your brain is just gushing with ideas about how you can persuade and influence others.

And you think: boy, are you glad you subscribed to that Levers of Persuasion newsletter.

The above is a good example of thinking past the sale. It’s a lever of persuasion that others use on you all the time.

Don’t you want to know how you can use it yourself?

WHAT IS THINKING PAST THE SALE?

Restaurants get you to think past the sale by advertising images of what ordering their meals would look like.

“Thinking past the sale” is a persuasion tool where you get someone to think about what happens after they’ve made a decision or action. By doing so, you increase the odds that person actually makes that decision or takes that action.

HOW THINKING PAST THE SALE WORKS

There’s mounds of research showing that thinking about something increases the chances it happens. For example, there’s the Pygmalion Effect, where positive expectations empirically lead to positive performance. Similarly, there’s the Golem Effect, where negative expectations lead to poorer performance.

In everyday life, you hear people talk about these effects with phrases like “self-fulfilling prophecies” or “I thought it into reality”.

Thinking past the sale works because:

• The more you think about an idea, the stronger the neural pathways to that idea become in your brain (like in the Tetris Effect). The neural path of least resistance in your brain leads to that idea, and because your brain is lazy, you end up thinking about it more.
• By thinking about the idea more, you’re more likely to see opportunities to make it a reality. And thanks to the representativeness heuristic, you will think it’s more likely to happen the more you think about it.
• You also will consider the idea more significant, because you think things are more important than they actually are while you’re thinking about them.
• On top of this, your focus on an idea makes you functionally blind to alternatives; this is called inattentional blindness. By thinking past the sale, your brain will ignore alternatives.

Getting someone to think about an outcome makes that outcome more probable.

All of this increases the odds that thinking past the sale becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Importantly, these mechanisms affect you whether you’re aware of them working or not.

NEGATIVE IMAGINING

You can tap into thinking past the sale by getting someone to think about what they don’t want to happen.

How many times have you thought “oh god, I don’t want that thing to happen”, only to have that exact thing happen?

As long as you’re thinking about an idea, the chances it happens increase, whether it’s positive (I want X to happen) or negative (I don’t want X to happen).

VISUALIZATION

The more potent the “sale”, the more likely its effects will be. And one of the most potent ways to get someone to think past the sale is by using visualizations.

You can do this by using images that force the person to see the outcome you want. But you can also do this by describing, in words, what the outcome will look like.

IMAGINE

Watch for the word “imagine”, since it makes you think about a future state.

For example, imagine how much benefit you will get by subscribing to the monthly Levers of Persuasion email. Think about all the possible new persuasion tools you could learn and how they’ll increase your influence, impact, and overall quality of life.

Makes you want to subscribe, doesn’t it? Just imagine how you would be more influential…

EXAMPLES

• Insurance Commercials — Allstate has a great commercial campaign that visually shows you bad things happen that they insure against. Like this car thief commercial. It gets you to imagine those things happening, so you’re more likely to get insurance.
• Trump’s Wall — Scott Adams expertly breaks down how Trump uses thinking past the sale in Win Bigly. For example, by making us think about a “big, beautiful wall”, and by getting news media to frequently run pictures of a wall, Trump was able to get you to think past the sale and visualize the wall’s existence.

HOW YOU WILL LEVERAGE THINKING PAST THE SALE

You can tap into thinking past the sale when selling a house by getting the prospective buyer to think about what owning the house would be like.

Here are some ideas to help you get started using thinking past the sale:

• Copywriting and Selling — Vividly talk about what using the product/service will be like.
• Pitching Customers/Clients — Get the customer/client to imagine what working with you will be like. Talk about specific details like how you typically interact with customers/clients.
• Negotiations — Vividly talk about what the outcome you want would look like when negotiating.
• Visualization — How can you include visual elements in getting someone to think past the sale? What images could you include? What visual aspects could you describe?
• Selling a House/Car/Etc. — Get the prospective purchaser to think about owning it. For example: “How would you use the car in your daily life?” or “How would you arrange the house?”
• Buying a House/Car/Etc. — Similarly, get a prospective seller to think about how nice it will be to not own the thing anymore. “What will you do with the free time of not having to worry about having and having to sell this house anymore?” or “What will not owning this car anymore enable you to do?”
• Asking for a Raise — When asking for a raise, start out by getting your boss to imagine how useful it will be to have you around the next year. Talk about useful things you’ve done and will continue to do, for example.

How have you leveraged thinking past the sale to persuade and influence? Where have you seen it used by others? Share your expertise in the comments.

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