hazek
12-07-2010, 09:16 PM
Not a day goes by that I don't wonder how one can affect change in people and convince them to explore and adopt new beliefs about political systems that we live under. It seem that this is such an impossible task since every person when they are at or passed the voting age already has learned some sort of a beliefs system.
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein
First I think it's important to realize that no one is born with a certain set of beliefs rather we learn them in our childhood from our parents, the community we live in and the media we're exposed to.
Second I think we have to understand that beliefs are subjective. Beliefs are the assumptions we make about ourselves, about others in the world and about how we expect things to be. Beliefs are about how we think things really are, what we think is really true and what we therefore expect are likely consequences that will follow from our behavior.
Here's a simple definition:
A belief is an assumed truth.
We create beliefs to anchor our understanding of the world around us and thus, once we have formed a belief, we will tend to persevere with that belief.
It now seems pretty obvious that changing beliefs of a whole nation might prove more then difficult. :)
Third and probably the most important our beliefs even though taken as truths can change. They change as we continue to grow and gather new experiences. They can also change as we gather new information from books, the media, or professionals. As we learn new things and they ring true for us we adopt or embrace new beliefs. We aren’t consciously thinking about this fact, or calling it such, but it is in fact what we all do.
Well if I haven't lost you yet you are probably wondering where I'm going with this and what I meant with the title - The business of selling freedom.
If you think about it when we try to “convert” someone to our way of thinking or when we try to “wake them up” to the truth or when we try to “convince” them to care about their freedoms we are in fact trying to teach them a new set of beliefs – ours! In effect we are trying to sell them our beliefs. And here's my point. I think we should look at this process as a business.
The product are our beliefs, the employees are us and the customer is the rest of the nation.
So if we are in fact in the business of selling our beliefs then we have to approach it as such. How do businesses normally find customers? They seek people with needs and then they try to fill those needs with their product. So if our product are our beliefs we need to figure out why the rest would need to buy into them. And it's pretty simple. Our beliefs offer answer to problems. So the needs that our customer has are problems. These problems are not the same for everyone so if we want to sell our product to the most customers possible we have to get really good at figuring out which problems haunt which individuals.
I had this idea where we could make a webpage with a list of various social economic problems that our customers might have and then offer the solution through our set of beliefs.
I know this sounds pretty basic and it's almost what say Ron Pauls webpage for his presidential run was but it's different. It's different because that page was selling Ron Paul and you already had to have his beliefs to buy in and vote for him. This should not be our primary goal. I think it would be a lot easer to sell Ron Paul once we sold them on our beliefs it would actually be practically automatic.
But answers to problems are many and many sell them. The government makes daily sales of it's answer to problems and people make daily purchases. So how do we achieve our beliefs being bought instead of the ones of the statues quo. How does any company convince their customers that their product is the right product for them if their product is not the only one of it's kind out there?
We have to follow some simple sales guidelines:
As well as getting good product information to the people, it is important to translate the product's features into benefits for the customer, thus making it easier for them to buy in. Good product information, including the packaging, is important. The product information should be informative, true and complete. Ideally, it should give the prospect all the information they need to buy in on the spot. When selling the product one-on-one to a prospect, translating the information to benefits is even more important.
There's countless of sites out there that offer these tips, for example this not necessarily the best example but the one I clicked on first and most of their tips apply to belief selling too: http://ezinearticles.com/?10-Tips-On-How-To-Sell-Your-Product&id=708067
Remember it's not about what is true is about whether someone believes it to be true.
So there you have it. I think the reason we are having such a hard time selling our beliefs faster and to more customers lies in our method of how we approach this task. We like to teach people and argue with them about why our beliefs are true when we should be trying to identify their problems and show them how they can be solved through our beliefs and in effect sell them our beliefs.
Getting Ron Paul elected is just the next natural step ;)
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein
First I think it's important to realize that no one is born with a certain set of beliefs rather we learn them in our childhood from our parents, the community we live in and the media we're exposed to.
Second I think we have to understand that beliefs are subjective. Beliefs are the assumptions we make about ourselves, about others in the world and about how we expect things to be. Beliefs are about how we think things really are, what we think is really true and what we therefore expect are likely consequences that will follow from our behavior.
Here's a simple definition:
A belief is an assumed truth.
We create beliefs to anchor our understanding of the world around us and thus, once we have formed a belief, we will tend to persevere with that belief.
It now seems pretty obvious that changing beliefs of a whole nation might prove more then difficult. :)
Third and probably the most important our beliefs even though taken as truths can change. They change as we continue to grow and gather new experiences. They can also change as we gather new information from books, the media, or professionals. As we learn new things and they ring true for us we adopt or embrace new beliefs. We aren’t consciously thinking about this fact, or calling it such, but it is in fact what we all do.
Well if I haven't lost you yet you are probably wondering where I'm going with this and what I meant with the title - The business of selling freedom.
If you think about it when we try to “convert” someone to our way of thinking or when we try to “wake them up” to the truth or when we try to “convince” them to care about their freedoms we are in fact trying to teach them a new set of beliefs – ours! In effect we are trying to sell them our beliefs. And here's my point. I think we should look at this process as a business.
The product are our beliefs, the employees are us and the customer is the rest of the nation.
So if we are in fact in the business of selling our beliefs then we have to approach it as such. How do businesses normally find customers? They seek people with needs and then they try to fill those needs with their product. So if our product are our beliefs we need to figure out why the rest would need to buy into them. And it's pretty simple. Our beliefs offer answer to problems. So the needs that our customer has are problems. These problems are not the same for everyone so if we want to sell our product to the most customers possible we have to get really good at figuring out which problems haunt which individuals.
I had this idea where we could make a webpage with a list of various social economic problems that our customers might have and then offer the solution through our set of beliefs.
I know this sounds pretty basic and it's almost what say Ron Pauls webpage for his presidential run was but it's different. It's different because that page was selling Ron Paul and you already had to have his beliefs to buy in and vote for him. This should not be our primary goal. I think it would be a lot easer to sell Ron Paul once we sold them on our beliefs it would actually be practically automatic.
But answers to problems are many and many sell them. The government makes daily sales of it's answer to problems and people make daily purchases. So how do we achieve our beliefs being bought instead of the ones of the statues quo. How does any company convince their customers that their product is the right product for them if their product is not the only one of it's kind out there?
We have to follow some simple sales guidelines:
As well as getting good product information to the people, it is important to translate the product's features into benefits for the customer, thus making it easier for them to buy in. Good product information, including the packaging, is important. The product information should be informative, true and complete. Ideally, it should give the prospect all the information they need to buy in on the spot. When selling the product one-on-one to a prospect, translating the information to benefits is even more important.
There's countless of sites out there that offer these tips, for example this not necessarily the best example but the one I clicked on first and most of their tips apply to belief selling too: http://ezinearticles.com/?10-Tips-On-How-To-Sell-Your-Product&id=708067
Remember it's not about what is true is about whether someone believes it to be true.
So there you have it. I think the reason we are having such a hard time selling our beliefs faster and to more customers lies in our method of how we approach this task. We like to teach people and argue with them about why our beliefs are true when we should be trying to identify their problems and show them how they can be solved through our beliefs and in effect sell them our beliefs.
Getting Ron Paul elected is just the next natural step ;)