Business owners should be more like doctors.

Forget selling and start asking your customers where they hurt. Broken leg? Ulcer? Empty wallet?

Don't sell, diagnose. And what are you as a doctor looking for? Well, of course: that ever-illusive, yet ever- profitable disease called Dropped Jaw Syndrome.

OK, it may not be in any medical book. But Dropped Jaw Syndrome, however rare, is known to anyone who’s ever tried to sell something. The customer walks into your store, listens to your pitch and falls into an awestruck trance. "I'll take three of them."

Joking aside, dropped jaw, or at least its symptoms, are fuel behind every sale. When a customer is persuaded to buy, their reaction isn’t logical. You’ve connected with part of their brain that decides if you and your product are believable, limbic system. Sure, you still need to persuade with facts, but logic is a distant second to their desire to buy, their reflexive dropping jaw.

Diagnosing Dropped Jaw

The key is finding dropped jaw, tracking symptoms back to their source. But it’s there. And it’s quite easy to find once you stop thinking about your product for a moment and focus on customer... I mean, patient.

Don’t believe me? Well, put on a white coat, hang a stethoscope around your neck and do some market tests of your own. But this is a test you have to do face to face. Forget demographic studies, sales plans and benchmark reports, and get in front of a customer.

Now, take his temperature, make your pitch. And follow it through customer’s reaction.

Did his jaw drop? Hmm. You must have done something wrong. Try again, but listen like a doctor searching for a heart murmur. Ask a question, offer information, and then hear subtleties of his response. And when you’re diagnosing a customer, instead of trying to sell your product, something changes.

He (or she) is always cramming for an upcoming exam. That "exam" is next story he must produce for his newspaper, his TV station or his radio show.

It is job of reporter to become an expert in your subject just long enough to produce story.

The reporter is, by trade, a generalist. With rare exceptions, he has no specialized knowledge, other than training that allows him to transform a set of facts into a news story that will captivate his audience for a few second or a few minutes.

Thus reporter is highly depedent upon real experts -- just like you -- to provide information that will become his story.

The flack will toss information at reporter in a careless fashion, often overwhelming journalist with trivia that obscures story.

But PR Rainmakers understand reporter's plight. We use it to our advantage.

We spoonfeed story to reporter. We make it easy for reporter to see story, to gather facts, to digest information, to organize information, to structure story and to execute story.

How?

1. Offer as many news "elements" as possible. If you've read my book "PR Rainmaker," you know that there are four elements in news. These are change, conflict, problem and aberration. All news is composed of these elements. You want to make certain that your story touches on at least one, and if at all possible all four. Without at least one, you simply do not have news to offer.

2. Craft a story line. Stories have heros. They have villains. They have conflicts that are as yet unresolved. You want to position your company as hero in a conflict that has real meaning for reader, and thus for reporter.