Am I saying that product features, quality, specs, delivery options and speed, service, technology, locations, price, and other tangible attributes of your offering don't matter? Of course not. These things absolutely matter. All are tickets to the game, and a deficiency in one of these areas can eliminate you before you ever get started.
However, the sales profession, inclusive of salespeople, sales trainers, sales leaders, and the marketing teams that support sales, are and have been under the collective delusion that buyers make logical decisions that are in their own or their company's best interest – that they weigh decisions rationally and objectively.
Evidence upon evidence and data stacked on data refute this assumption. Frankly, you don't need to look far for proof.
I have no doubt that you've been frustrated with a prospect into which you've poured heart and soul. You've built the case why they should do business with you. You've analyzed their current situation and shown them how you can save them money, time, and stress, and offered them better service.
In such a case, the proof was irrefutable, your references were impeccable, and there was even a compelling trigger event to drive urgency. Yet, instead of signing your agreement, they gave your competitor (who had taken them for granted, provided shoddy service, pissed them off, and overbilled them for the headache) a second chance. I know – I've been there, and it's maddening.
If we were to ask your buyer why they chose to remain with a vendor that was not working in their best interest, they would lead off with a number of what they felt were logical, rational reasons. But refuting and arguing the facts would get you nowhere. The buyer would just dig in and become intractable.
What they would be unable to explain or unwilling to admit is their fear of making a mistake; or that there was just something about you that, at the subconscious level, they didn't trust; or that because they avoid conflict, firing the current vendor would put them in an uncomfortable position.
Layer upon layer of emotions – conscious and subconscious – drive this irrational choice. Yet they explain the decision in completely rational terms.
The Secret Ingredient
As a sales professional, understanding how emotions dominate and drive buying decisions is critical to supercharging your income and advancing your career.
When all things are equal – and in today's marketplace there are rarely huge gaps or differences between competitors (at least from the buyer's viewpoint) – your ability to influence the emotions of stakeholders while regulating your own disruptive emotions, as you move deals through the sales pipeline, gives you a distinct competitive edge.
If you'll just take a moment to consider the deals you've lost and won and how most salespeople approach buyers, you'll come face-to-face with the truth:
■ A truth that is invisible to countless salespeople.
■ A truth invisible to sales trainers and experts whose house of cards begins to fall apart when their process-based, data-driven, science of selling fallacy meets irrational emotions.
■ A truth ignored by the challengers who pontificate to stakeholders about how they're “doing it all wrong,” and the insight sellers who teach their poor, ignorant buyers how to “do it right.”
Borrowing one of my favorite lines from the movie The Big Short, “The truth is like poetry. But people fucking hate poetry.”
Emotions are difficult to wrap our arms around and are sometimes hard to face. It's so much easier to pitch the features of a widget than to tune into the emotions of the stakeholder sitting across from you. The brutal, inconvenient truth is you can pitch, challenge, teach, and offer insight to your heart's content, but it will not matter because:
People buy for their reasons, not yours.
Approach Buyers the Way They Buy
Selling is human. Buying is human. Both pursuits are woven into the imperfect fabric of human emotions. No matter what you sell, your sales cycle, or the complexity of the sales and buying process, emotions play a crucial role in the outcomes of your sales conversations, interactions, and deals.
Each time you (and the members of your selling team) and each stakeholder involved in the buying decision meet, those emotions collide.
Most salespeople begin the sales process from a position of logic and gradually shift toward emotion. In contrast, buyers tend to begin the buying process at the emotional level and over time shift toward logic.
At the beginning of the sales process, the buyer is asking a basic question about the salesperson: Do I like you? In the same moment, the seller is delivering a pitch on product features they believe will generate interest from the buyer.
Few things make sellers more unlikable than pitching. And so it goes throughout the buying journey. By the end of the sales process when the buyer is asking rational questions, putting objections on the table, and negotiating, the seller is reacting emotionally to perceived rejection, desperate not to lose the deal.
At the emotional level, the parties are perpetually out of sync (Figure 3.1).
Figure 3.1 Seller versus Buyer
Of course, I'm not blind to the oversimplification of this example. Human interaction is complex and often nonlinear. However, dealing with people in the context of sales conversations doesn't need to be overly complex or overwhelming.
A handful of principles and influence frameworks guide most human behavior. When you learn to master these simple frameworks, you'll become a master of emotions, influence, and persuasion.
I've already shared with you one of the most cogent truths in sales: People buy for their reasons, not yours. It follows, then, that to be effective, you must approach people the way they buy rather than the way you sell.
This new approach requires sales specific emotional intelligence – Sales EQ. Sales EQ is the ability to manage your own disruptive emotions while at the same time accurately interpreting and responding to the emotions of stakeholders, in the context of the sales and buying processes. As you'll learn in the upcoming chapters, it is this emotional control that sets ultra-high sales performers apart.
4
PATTERN PAINTING, COGNITIVE BIASES, AND HEURISTICS
You can't argue with the brain: it wants what it wants what it wants.
Stop reading for a moment. I want you to focus on being aware of every visual, tactile, kinesthetic, and auditory stimulus in your environment. Try to focus on the obvious to the mundane: the color of the carpet, walls, the chair you are sitting in. Study each person walking by you or near you: what they are wearing, their facial expressions, and the content of their conversations. What sounds do you hear? What textures do you feel?
Try to take it all in at once. Instantly overwhelming?
Now, imagine what it would be like if you were forced to experience this massive sensory overload all the time. It would paralyze you.
Much like a computer, our brains can process only so much information at one time. As the cognitive load6 grows, it slows down and becomes less efficient. The brain is unable to focus, and attention control diminishes.
From a purely evolutionary sense, this inability to focus can put you in danger. Should there be a threat nearby – say a saber-toothed tiger crouched in the weeds, or a bus rolling down the street – and you are so overwhelmed with incoming sensory information that you fail to see it, bam! You are lunch or a pancake.
Pattern Monster
Moving slowly had the