See this here? It’s an oxytocin molecule:

It causes people to trust each other.

It gets released during sexual orgasm. It also gets released when you see the house you grew up in, or when you hug your mother.

If you sell stuff, you need to know how to make it appear in your customers’ brains, because without it, it’s unlikely anyone is going to buy from you.

Fortunately for those of us working for big companies, it gets released in our customers’ brains automatically when they see our logos. Microsoft. Bosch. Unilever. McKinsey.

But for those of us who run small shops or solo consultancies, there’s a bit more of an uphill battle. “Hi, I’m Joe from JoeCo” doesn’t trigger the same oxytocin flood as “Hi, I’m Joe from Microsoft.” And as a result, Microsoft wins contracts easier than JoeCo.

There’s good news for us little guys though: Certain word structures can also trigger a flood of oxytocin. If you are JoeCo, not Microsoft, your sales documents (proposals, case studies, etc) need to be using words in ways Microsoft doesn’t have to worry about.