Hey guys, I need the whiteboard today because what we’re talking about is the concept of visualising the villains. The sales growth blueprint shows us all the seven different strategies or accelerants that we can use to totally explode our sales and grow our sales at a much more rapid rate. Now, in the middle of the model is the concept of compelling story, and inside that is this concept of visualising the villain. So what is it all about?

Visualising the ‘Villains’

Well, the first thing that we need to remember is that people will do a lot more to solve a problem than they will to take advantage of a benefit. So a villain is any problem that you solve for a customer with your product or service. Remember, your product or service is not actually a solution until it’s solving a problem for the person you’re trying to sell it to or, hopefully, who’s trying to buy it.

Now, the concept of visualising the villains is this: if we can visualize the problems—or what I call the villains—that people in your target market are facing, those problems become much more real. People become much more emotional about them and much more likely to act on them.

So just think about this. If you had to draw a model to visualise all the problems that you solve for customers with your product or service, what would that model look like? Now, I figured an easy way to talk you through this is give you an example. As a lot of you know, I’m very passionate about life insurance because of what happened to me as a young child and the reality that we were massively underinsured when I lost my father.

How to use stronger visuals in sales meetings

Now, I wish that the life insurance salesperson who sold not enough insurance to my father—and my father didn’t buy enough either—had used this strategy to visualise what those villains were and really drive home the problems that the right amount of life insurance would have solved. So if I was a life insurance salesperson, I’d say, “Listen, there are three problems you’ve really got to get covered in case something happens to you.”

Now, I hope nothing happens to you, but if it does, there are three problems those that you love and care about are going to face. The first problem—and we visualise it by writing it down—is fundamentally the burden of debt. Now just by drawing that on the whiteboard in front of you, it becomes so much more real than if I’d just said, “The burden of debt.”

And notice that I’ve used an emotive word—burden—to identify or to label that part of the model, which is going to make you more emotional about thinking, “Oh, the burden of debt. I’ve got something to solve.” Now, I could add a more persuasive tag to that by saying, “Listen, your family are going to have to deal with the burden of either losing you or you losing your ability to earn income, so you don’t want to put the burden of debt on top of that.”

The second problem that your family are going to face, which is linked to this, is basically the downgrading of lifestyle. Even if your family does have enough money to pay out the debts on the family home, on the credit cards, on the cars, on everything else that you’ve probably got some debt on, the bottom line is the last thing you want your family going through is having to move out of the family home or having to not take a holiday or having to take the kids out of the private school because your income is no longer coming into the family. So there’s a real risk that your lifestyle is going to be downgraded quite dramatically.

Can you see that visually now the problem’s becoming even more real? And look, there’s a third problem a lot of people don’t think about, and that’s the lack of a legacy. What I mean by that is, these days, kids need their folks’ money to get into a house, need their folks’ money just to pay themselves out of university debt, and so the bottom line is if you die or something happens to you which causes you not to be able to earn income, there’s going to be nothing there left for them that’s going to help them get ahead in life.

As you can see, by visualising this, it’s become much more real. I can go one step further and say, “Now, I know that you have money or you have life insurance inside your super policy, but the question we’ve got to ask ourselves is: if this is your life cover in your super, or in America—your group cover, how much does that fill of these circles?” And now all the sudden they can see that, “Oh my gosh. I might have cover in my super or my group cover, but it’s not big enough to cover these circles, and I’m still left with a really big problem.”

The power of problem illustration

So I’m not sure what the model looks like for your product, but if you can’t visualise the problems that you solve and the things people should be thinking about when they buy your solution, there’s a high probability that you’re not impacting them in their visual senses, you’re not making it easy for them to understand the problems that you solve, you’re not setting yourself up for a nice structured conversation that helps you quantify all these problems and make them real, and there’s a really high probability that you’re not telling a very compelling story at all.

The bottom line is, today’s concept, visualise the villains that sit inside this concept of compelling story, which is the engine room, the emotion and the energy that drives the Sales Growth Blueprint. You’ve got to get this right.

If you want some more detail on this, I have virtual coaching programs around compelling stories. You got to check those out, and the bottom line is, all of us need to get this handled because when we can visualise the villains, we are influencing ethically at a level that’s causing people to get emotional and much more likely to take action. When people are taking action and when people are interested in your story and when people are inquiring and saying, “Tell me more,” that’s when you’re living the better sales life.