About 10 years ago, the U.S. Mint began printing quarters with the states on them. They released only a few at a time, and there were many companies that began selling beautiful display cases for the collectible coins. After collectors placed the first few coins in their portfolios, they felt they needed to find the quarters necessary to complete it.

An incomplete coin portfolio made for some interesting actions: collectors began to sift through their loose change to see if any of the coins helped in the quest. They began to scan coins everywhere they went, and some even went so far as to specifically request particular coins from the banks and retailers they visited.

The hypersensitive search for the missing items was not caused by a conscious decision to collect them; it was started because there was a place to put them, and it was obvious which coins were needed to complete the collection.

In a search for the items you needed, your brain works in much the same way a Google search does.  You input exactly what you are looking for, and the things you are searching for begin to appear.

The things that we begin to notice, such as coins, were always circulating around us, but an incomplete portfolio, be it of coins or anything else, causes us to start to notice things more readily. The joy in this realization is that your brain is much more powerful than Google, and you can search for a lot more than just missing quarters.

In fact, you can search for anything you wish to find, but you need to know how to start the search.  Start your search in much the same way you would start a Google search.  Input exactly what you are looking for, and your brain will search through your experiences to see if your search string finds any matches. When it finds a match, it will call your attention to the result.

Where most people come into difficulty is we fail to recognize how our internal search engines work. Consider being hungry and wanting to solve this problem using Google. You wouldn’t type the word “hungry” into the search field. If you did, you would only get results about being hungry, reasons people get hungry and some advertisements about hunger.

Instead of searching for the keyword “hungry,” you would need to search for solutions to the problem of hunger. If you were in Downtown Toledo and you were hungry, you would search for restaurants in Downtown Toledo. By shifting your thinking away from the problem and searching for the true solution, your internal search engine will have the information it needs to provide you with the best answers.

Your search all boils down to the case in which your results are kept. What are you collecting? Are you collecting new customers or positive feedback from new customers? What does positive feedback look like? Finding it may involve looking for a new type of customer. Try printing out your positive feedback and placing it in a notebook, making sure you leave space for future positive feedback. Your brain will operate the same way it does when you were searching for that elusive Idaho quarter.

The notebook of positive feedback serves as a tangible representation of what you are asking your brain to find. When you give your brain specific items to look for, it will bring your attention to those things around you that will help you complete your mission.

Tom Richard is a Toledo-based sales trainer, gives seminars, runs sales meetings and provides coaching for salespeople. For more information, visit www.TomRichard.com, call

(419) 441-1005 or e-mail tom@tomrichard.com.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 22nd, 2008 at 8:08 pm and is filed under Selling Points.
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