The Reticular Activating System And How To Use It In Sales

 
There’s a universal law that states you attract what you focus on. By focusing on ways which you can be productive in sales, you tend to see things that add to that productivity. And it works the opposite way, too. Have you noticed that when you focus on how bad things are, more bad things seem to crop up?

This is all due to a specific part of our brain called the reticular activating system.

What Is The Reticular Activating System?

RAS for short, the reticular activating system operates to provide an awareness of what is around us, deleting things that are natural and obvious to us, and highlighting things that are different.

Have you ever played the game in your car on a journey when you look for all white cars or all red cars? When your senses and neurons are heightened to look for them you will see them all over. However, you probably would never have noticed them before.

Not so long back we won a piece of business with a national electrical distributor. I’d never heard of them before to be honest but after the name become known to me and those little neurons started to work, I saw their vans everywhere!

What does this mean in terms of you smashing your sales target?

Well, if you want to look for all the things that are bad in your sales approach and performance, believe me, you will find them. You’ll become wired that way.

Reticular Activating System Example

Do you remember when you first drove your current car? Did you happen to immediately notice every other similar car on the road, the same make and model? And you thought you were unique in your taste. Well, that is an example of your reticular activating system working for you. It determines what you focus on and what you pay attention to. Interestingly, the brain mainly notices differences, so it will remember specific occasions in the past that had an emotional effect on you and will delete those days that just seem to melt into each other because nothing special happened.

This is useful when you are dealing with customers who are maybe seeing lots of suppliers before they make up their mind on who to choose.

If you think that they will be paying attention to anything that is different, how about sending your proposal in a different packaging? Make it stand out, rather than being exactly like everyone else.

Think of ways that you can make an impression on your prospect that will be different. Highlight ways that others have used your products. Send them a link to a video with customers using it, so your prospect can see it in action. Record satisfied clients on video, saying what their issue was before using your product or service and how it has improved their situation.

If you know that your client will be using their reticular activating system too, it will give you the incentive to make yourself different from the crowd. Think what you can do to be different and watch more prospects take note.

Here are a couple of useful sales improvement articles to help you if you can’t attend our Sales Training.

Improve your sales interactions by understanding and implementing the Solution Selling Methodology, improve your telesales skills with these Cold Calling Tips and Get Your Voicemails Returned.

Or take a look at our full portfolio of Sales Training Courses.

Happy selling!

Sean

Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Sales Training