maverick's
story
If you are in sales, then YOU are a hypnotist, but you just don't know it!
How I became a #hypnosales expert
When people first meet me, they think I am a quirky technical geek type who enjoys talking bits and bytes or going down deep analytical rabbit hole discussion about machine learning algorithms or programming techniques. And then, when I tell them I am a certified hypnotist, they are shocked at first, but then they are intrigued and want to know how someone like me got in hypnotism and eventually became a hypnotist.
Well, the truth is, I was exposed to hypnosis at a very early age. We were living in the midwest area of the United States and my dad worked for a large corporation and was always at his office or traveling around the world on business. Needless to say, my sister and I were primarily raised during those early years by my mother. When I was about nine or ten years old, my mom started having issues dealing with some situations in her life and decided to seek expert help from a doctor. The doctor, of course, prescribed some medicine to help her cope with her situations and also referred her to a therapist as well.
After a few years, she began to cope with her situation and eventually got better. I could tell because when it all started, my mom was usually sad and depressed and after all these therapy sessions, she seemed happy again. In some ways, it was like a miracle transformation and I remember I was about 13 or so and I asked her how all those session worked. How did therapy help her change from being sad to being happy again. I wanted to know because I suppose, in some ways, I was starting to feel sad myself as a pre-teen and I wanted to be happy again, too.
A few years past and now I was in high school. I remember being in math class meeting this kid who's father was a psychologist and often used hypnosis in his practice as well. I became friends with him and he showed me how his dad had taught him how to hypnotize people to help them change their bad habits, like smoking cessation, or over-eating, etc. He also showed me a hypnotic script that he used to help him study better and remember things for test, such as formulas and geometry concepts. He told me that our subconscious mind stores everything we experience in fine details, but that our ability to recall any of those memories in fine detail is not as easy or effective unless we condition our subconscious mind to be able to do it.
I was was like "Duh! I should be doing this, too!" So I did. I start writing my own hypnotic scripts to help me with my own studying habits and memorizing habits and remembering habits. As a result, I soon became a straight-A student.
As luck would have it, the next year, our high school had a guest stage hypnotist come and demonstrate the power of hypnosis to our whole school. We all assembled in the gymnasium and watched as this normal-looking man in a suit picked out a few students from the audience, brought them on-stage, gave them some commands, and started having them act out some strangely unusual (and hilarious) situations. It was at this point I knew I wanted to be on stage too, but not as one of the kids who were clutching like chickens. No. I wanted to be the hypnotist.
And I did.
I practiced and practiced and practiced. Then, while attending a huge party at a friend's house, I asked if anyone wanted to be hypnotized. Six fellow classmates raised their hands. I took them to a back bedroom of my friends house and induced them all into a trance, which took about 30 minutes. I gave them each and action command, a keyword to trigger that action, and another keyword to stop that action and return them back to “normal”, as they say.
For example, I told one of them that when I said "Peanut Butter" their tongue would become stuck to the roof of their mouth and they would not be able to unstick it until I said the word "Unstick". I told another kid that when I said the word "Hot" his seat would become so hot that he would not be able to sit in that spot anymore until I said the word "Cool".
So then I brought them back to the party and throughout the night I would casually say one of the keywords during normal conversation and kept the fun going.
But then the downloads started to drop off. At first, we were not sure why, but then it became apparent that, due to our popularity within massive amounts of organizations, the decision-makers were no longer the ones downloading our Freemium product. They were now upper-level managers and director-level titles that wanted to talk to us first before spending time to download. It became increasingly more and more difficult to generate organic leads and we knew we would eventually need to replace our inbound lead generation model with a more consistent outbound prospecting model, if we wanted to maintain our high level of growth and consistent customer acquisition.
The problem was, we were not yet used to outbound prospecting yet. We had become somewhat spoiled by the massive inbound leads coming from the Freemium model and some of the sales reps, both inside and outside, were not necessarily good at it either.
I remember receiving requests from some of the sales reps to help them tweak their prospecting emails so they could send them out to try and generate more prospective leads. Of course, my technical writing was pretty good and I am a creative person, so I actually enjoyed helping them.
However, the outbound prospecting attempts were not as successful as we had hoped and it seemed, for a while, that maybe our luck with lead generation might be running out.
Why not use that same hypnotic technique to help prospective buyers take a new action and reply back to you? Makes sense, right?
- maverick's hypnosis client
The next week following that conversation, I talked to a couple sales reps and told them we should try including some hypnotic language and phrasing in our outbound prospecting emails. Of course, their reaction was less than supportive and, in fact, most of them rejected the idea saying it was a ridiculous idea. They wanted nothing to do with it.
I, on the other hand, was determined to try it, even if I had to experiment with this crazy idea covertly. So that's what I did.
I took an existing prospecting email from a sales rep I was helping and reworked it to include hypnotic language and phrasing, embedding commands within indirect sentence structures, and focused mainly on creating rapid rapport with the prospective readers of the email, aiming to simply get them to respond back via email or a phone call. I even removed specific mentions of our product and replaced it with more vague language, just like I would use when hypnotizing my clients. I figured, “What the hell? It can’t be any worst than what we are trying now that is not working, right?”
I gave the new hypnotic prospecting email back to the sales rep, but I did not tell him it included the hypnotic language. I just told him to send it out and see what kind of response he got.
After about a week, the rep called me and said that new version of his prospecting email seemed to be working better than the previous version. I told him that was because I had modified to be more “hypnotizing” to create rapport and persuade the prospects to respond more urgently. He was amazed and told the other sales reps on the team and, before long, I was being requested to help everyone create more hypnotic prospecting emails.
And that was the beginning of my journey to become what I now refer to as a #hypnosales expert.
- maverick
I remember her pulling out this old shoe box full of cassette tapes, each marked with a date of the session. She told me her doctor had recorded every therapy session and had asked he to re-listen to them periodically, perhaps when she was starting to feel sad again because it would help her reinforce the changes and progress she’d been making. Then she told me I could listen to one, if I wanted. So I took one of the cassettes and placed it into my portable tape player and pressed play.
What I heard changed my life.
The doctor on the tape started instructing my mom to relax and to breathe and then told her that she would soon be going into a deep sleep. As I listened, I started to connect the dots and realized I had seen this before in a movie once. A man was waving a gold watch in front of this person while asking them to stare at the watch as it swung back and forth, back and forth, while he told them they were "getting sleepy, getting very sleepy".
This was my introduction to hypnosis and from that very moment I was intrigued and wanted to know more. So I studied and read about hypnosis anywhere and anyway I could. Back then, we did not have amazon to order a book online, but we did have a public library. So I would check out books on hypnosis and learned as much as I could about it because, if this approach could help transform a sad person into a happy person, then that was a skill I wanted to have.
I knew I wanted to be on stage, too, but not as one of the kids who was clucking like a chicken. No. I wanted to be the hypnotist.
- maverick
Of course, after high school I got a normal job working for a large corporation as a programmer and never really pursued the life of a professional stage hypnotist.
However, I never stopped practicing hypnosis or learning about hypnotism. Eventually, I even earned my hypnosis certification and I continue to help others stop smoking, over-eating, stay focused, have more confidence, etc., because it feels good to help others to overcome their “bad habits” and fixed their vocational (and avocational) issues.
Then, in November of 2006 I joined this little start-up called Splunk. There were around 30+ employees at the time and I was the third sales engineer hired. My job was to primarily support eight sales reps, including four outside reps and four inside reps. We were just starting to market what we called the “IT Search Engine” which was our product. You can think of it as a sort of Google for IT teams to use. And just like the general public might use a search engine to find web pages, tech admins and information technology team members could use Splunk to find issues and problems in their networks, applications, databases, etc.
Eventually, we became more and more popular because we had a Freemium product that anyone could download and use right away without having to talk to a sales person. The results of this were amazing and it eventually generated hundreds of prospective sales leads every day and, as you might imagine, we started to hire more inside sales reps to keep up with the demand. It was crazy successful.
And then one day, I found myself helping a client overcome some challenges with staying focused at work. He knew I was a hypnotist and had asked me to hypnotize him to reprogram his subconscious to avoid being distracted and to keep focused on the tasks he needed to complete at work everyday. Like many of us, he was continually checking his emails and cruising the Internet an, eventually, he would find himself behind on all kinds of work he needed to finish, but had fell behind on.
During the weekend, after one of these hypnosis sessions, my friend asked me how things were going at Splunk. I told him about how we were having problems generating new prospective leads for our “IT Search Engine” technology and how we couldn’t figure out how to write a good solid prospective email that would convince and cause people to reply back.
Then he said, “Well, why don’t you hypnotist them?” And I said, “What?” What do you mean?” And he said, “Why don’t you hypnotize them like you hypnotize me? Your prospecting email is like a script where you are trying to get them to take an action and call you or reply back, right? That is the same thing you are doing with me using hypnosis. You follow a script that you created specifically for me to help me change my subconscious behavior and take a new action. Why not use that same hypnotic technique to help prospective buyers take a new action and reply back to you? Makes sense, right?”
It was at this point that I realized either he was either completely wrong or he was completely right and I wanted to find out.
