People are complex
To succeed in selling you need to get one thing right. People. They are complex systems and treating them as single-layer neural networks would be a mistake. We think, we talk, we do. But sometimes we lack the cohesion of all three. Why is that? Because we are humans.
What if
Would the world be an easier place to live, if we were consistent and our thinking, talking, and acting cohesive? Yes. Would it be less colorful? Sure. Would it be easier for sellers to live and work in such a world? Absolutely.
Reality
Now stop dreaming. The only thing that can happen is putting some effort into understanding people’s behavior. How? By understanding people are “interest-driven” mechanisms that do not act independently of their context. When you accept this, you can start putting efforts into discovering potential context influencers and human biases and patterns that affect decisions.
People make decisions based on their existing knowledge, previous experience, influencing context they are in, ingrained biases, provoked emotions, and interests they are pursuing.
Selling
If you are selling something, your job is to research the knowledge, experience, and biases of your customer, understand context and interests, and create a positive emotional environment. To do that here are some frameworks that can help you be more efficient. But frameworks are only frameworks, do not underestimate the power of questioning and listening as sellers’ best tools, and make sure you do your homework and research your customers and learn about their industry, company, and world they live in.
Context and interests
Context and interests are responsible for the action component of our customers. They will prioritize their actions based on their interests and the context they are in. This is especially important when working in a B2B, long sales cycle environment when spending time on the right opportunities with the right people is the only road to success.
Make sure you understand where people stand, what they are looking for, how important it is to them, and what value they assign to what you have to offer. Especially the personal value they will get. We are talking about status, recognition, benefits, all the things we crave as “imperfect humans”.
By understanding human drive factors, let’s learn something about the elements that influence them.
Regrets
One important catalyst of human behavior is regrets. Daniel Pink (https://principus.si/2023/03/09/daniel-h-pink-moc-obzalovanja/), categorizes regrets into four types:
- Foundational.
- Boldness.
- Moral.
- Connection (relationship).
Influence
Influencing is the quest of sellers to influence customer’s decisions. According to Dr. Robert B. Cialdini (https://principus.si/2019/02/07/dr-robert-b-cialdini-vplivanje-psihologija-prepricevanja/), we have six potential situations that can trigger influence:
- Likeability.
- Compatibility.
- Reciprocity.
- Consistency.
- Authority.
- Scarcity.
Dr. Dan Hill is putting those six perspectives in a selling environment with the below description from his book Emotionomics (https://principus.si/2020/01/08/dan-hill-emotionomics-leveraging-emotions-for-business-success/).
“Prospects will initially focus on whether they enjoy the salesperson’s presence, meaning whether they like the person they are with. Over subsequent meetings, if the interactions have been supportive and pleasant, familiarity will grow and the degree of liking will increase. But up front and at first, prospects are alert – even wary – and must be put at ease. Likeability is especially pertinent during the approach step when establishing comfort for the prospect is vital.
The other three emotional influencers are compatibility, reciprocity, and consistency. While emergent during the approach step, they mostly come into focus for prospects during the dialogue step, as follows:
Training programs that tell salespeople to mirror and match the prospect’s body language are half right. Ultimately, even more important is identifying and respecting the prospect’s belief system. Remember that nothing is more innate or deeply emotional than a person’s worldview. Reflecting a prospect’s beliefs respectfully is imperative because people are comfortable with and like those who are like them. Both liking and compatibility can be reinforced through favors or small signs of courtesy that invite reciprocity from prospects.
Not only do people feel socially obligated to return favors, but doing so makes them feel good. Through such acts of mutual generosity, an emotionally savvy salesperson can add glue to the budding relationship.
Consistency matters because during the first few encounters a prospect is still trying to figure out who the salesperson is as a person. A consistent manner will help increase comfort in the belief that the personality on display will stay the same once the deal is signed and support services may be required. Consistency demonstrates integrity. As such, it also sets up the quality of assurance that will make the presentation itself far more effective.
The last two principles, authority, and scarcity, are indeed more rational in nature.”
Emotions
Dr. Hill defines seven emotions and three (four) qualities of emotions. Below is his view as described in his Emotionomics (https://principus.si/2020/01/08/dan-hill-emotionomics-leveraging-emotions-for-business-success/).
These are the three universal qualities that characterize emotions:
- A feeling component. Physical sensations, including chemical changes in the brain.
- A thinking component. Conscious or intuitive appraisal.
- An action component. Expressive reactions (like smiles or scowls), as well as coping behaviors (fight or flight).
- Sometimes an optional sensory component exists. A sensory component like sights, sounds, etcetera, intrudes and serves to trigger the emotional response.
Seven primary emotions. One emotion is essentially neutral: surprise. Five are negative: fear, anger, sadness, disgust and contempt. The other is positive: happiness. Moreover, happiness can be divided based on two different kinds of smiles, true smiles and social smiles.
Personality
People are different and we should accept it and adjust our behavior to it. Especially if you are a seller.
Two general categorizations can help you.
First is the “big five” personality factors categorization. You can read about them in the book Develop mental toughness, written by Doug Strycharczyk, Peter Clough, and John Perry (https://principus.si/2022/04/17/doug-strycharczyk-peter-clough-john-perry-develop-mental-toughness/). The original model can be also called OCEAN and was a work of Paul Costa and Robert McCrae.
“Big five” personality factors (traits) that are used to describe humans:
- Openness: inventive/curious versus consistent/cautious.
- Conscientiousness: efficient/organized versus easy-going/careless.
- Extraversion: outgoing/energetic versus shy/reserved.
- Agreeableness: friendly/compassionate versus cold/unkind.
- Neuroticism: sensitive/nervous versus secure/confident.
Second is the four personality types theory, which has a few variations, some of them being the DISC model and the personality color model (you can read more about it here: https://principus.si/2023/09/10/thomas-erikson-surrounded-by-idiots-the-four-types-of-human-behaviour/). In general the four types are:
- Red as dominant.
- Yellow as inspiring.
- Blue as analytical.
- Green as stable.
When it comes to customers, to understand them, maybe think in terms described by Lisa Spiller in her Selling & Sales Management (https://principus.si/2023/11/24/lisa-spiller-selling-developing-skills-for-success/).
The potential influence of behavior style on buyer decision-making by revisiting each of the four behavior styles:
- Driver (Doer/Dominant). They make decisions easily and will be most influenced by the benefits associated with the product/service that enable them to achieve results.
- Analytical (Controller/Conscientious). Analytical buyers may interrupt you to question the accuracy of your statements as they will need proof and documentation that what you are offering will solve their problems and achieve the results that you are claiming.
- Expressive (Talker/Influence). Talkers are more concerned about what other people think of them, so they are reluctant to make buying decisions without reassurance that others will approve of their decisions.
- Amiable (Supporter/Steadiness). Amiable buyers avoid risk: thus, they are typically slow decision makers.
Rationality
Rationality is overrated. People don’t act according to the rules of rationality. No matter what Adam Smith said. That is the reason why behavior science is so popular. Understanding customers’ irrationality is the seller’s “gold mine”. Some of the irrationalities according to Dan Ariely (https://principus.si/2019/09/03/dan-ariely-predvidljivo-nerazumni/) are described below.
How do we act as humans and do not behave rationally:
- Relativity. We do not think in absolute terms, everything is relative.
- Anchoring. We make our decisions based on the anchor we have from previous experiences.
- Zero cost of free. We will always go for free options even if it is not the best ones.
- Price of social norms. We act in accordance with expected behavior.
- Emotional state. We should make decisions when we are aware of the emotional status we are in.
- The problem of delayed effect. We treasure now more than the long term.
- Ownership. Ownership is expensive, but we are still paying that price.
- Leave your options open. We do not consider the price of non-decision.
- Acting based on expectations. Stereotypes.
- Power of price. Sometimes we equate higher price with higher quality.
- Cheating. We all cheat if we can justify it, we usually set a limit.
- Circumstances. We act based on our circumstances, not on our beliefs.
Biases and decision frameworks
Based on the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (https://principus.si/2020/02/10/daniel-kahneman-razmisljanje-hitro-in-pocasno/) behavioral economics put a lot of light on human decision making.
We can simplify by categorizing essential concepts into one of two realms: either categorization or loss aversion. Below are some main concepts that Kahneman, Tversky, and other behavioral scientists like Richard Thaler (https://principus.si/2019/02/04/richard-h-thaler-nerazumno-vedenje-razvoj-vedenjske-ekonomije/) worked on.
- Framing: making a choice more attractive by deliberately comparing it with inferior options.
- Mental accounting: placing artificial limits on the amounts we’re willing to spend in certain categories.
- Prospect theory: judging pleasure based on a change in condition rather than on how happy we are.
- Anchoring: evaluating new information strictly in terms of what our baseline of knowledge happens to be.
- Recency: giving undue weight to recent experiences.
- Familiarity: having a bias towards the status quo.
- New-risk premium: inflating the cost of accepting new risks while casually discounting familiar risks.
- Fear of regret: not deciding out of fear, to avoid making a mistake.
- Decision paralysis: failing to decide involves lots of choices for fear of making the wrong one.
If you are looking for a longer list of human biases, you can check them here (https://principus.si/2020/01/02/pristranskosti-po-andrew-d-banasiewicz/), they were taken from the book Evidence-based Decision making from Andrew D. Banasiewicz (https://principus.si/2020/01/07/andrew-d-banasiewicz-evidence-based-decision-making-how-to-leverage-available-data-and-avoid-cognitive-biases/).
Call to Action
Customers don’t think, say, and do the same thing. But by looking at what they say and especially what they do, and by using some of the knowledge about human behavior, you can get closer to what they think. And by doing that, you can become a little better seller.
