Have you ever wondered what future pacing is exactly?
It comes from Neuro-Linguistic Programming or NLP.
NLP can kick in when you find a common ground with your audience, such as when telling your story or using effective sales copy. That’s how you grab their attention.
Future pacing is about getting people to imagine something in their lives that’s possible in the future.
For example, if you’re selling a product, you want them to picture themselves using it and imagining how good it will feel to receive the benefits of that product.
Such as when you use my wizards that help you write a book in three days or three hours. Just imagine what it’ll be like when you go to a party, and someone asks you “what’s up?” and you say:
“Hey! I just published my book!”
How is it going to feel when people are amazed at your accomplishments as you tell them about publishing your book on Amazon?
That’s an example of using future pacing. You get somebody caught up in seeing and believing the results they could get with your product. They’ll get excited.
And feelings lead to sales.
So, using future pacing helps someone see a specific outcome. It’s really powerful.
But you can use it effectively in the negative too.
In some situations, if you tell somebody: “I want you to imagine what will happen if:
- you don’t make this change
- you don’t handle this problem
- you don’t take action
You will be using future pacing toward the negative.
You want to make your audience ask themselves, “How is that going to affect my family?” or “What’s that going to do to my children?” When they ask questions like these, their emotions will kick in.
Future pacing in the negative is useful because sometimes the negative is much more compelling than the positive.
It can make your audience take action faster. It will make people pay you! In fact, I believe it works better than talking about positive results.
Usually, future pacing is used when you’ve presented a problem or a significant benefit people want. It’s not an elaborate technique, and you don’t have to spend too much time on it. But it can make a big difference in the quality of your sales and the ability to connect with people.
Conclusion
Future pacing is excellent for making your audience take action faster. You can use it to your advantage like this:
- Focus on feelings and expectations
- Show your audience how your product or service can lead to a positive or negative outcome
- When using the negative, show them what’s going to happen if they don’t take action.