Blink
When Your Clients Are Thinking Without Thinking
Spring 2005
Were you ever in a tense driving situation when you executed a quick maneuver to avoid a collision? You may have felt like time moved in slow motion and your senses were heightened. Perhaps you paused afterward and asked yourself, how did I do that? I didn’t think about it. It wasn’t planned. I never practiced it. Nor did I ever study how to do it. I just did it.
That phenomenon, the snap judgment, is the subject of best seller Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Little Brown, 2005) by Malcolm Gladwell. It is also the cover story of the February 28, 2005 US News and World Report. We commend both the book and the article to anyone interested in learning more about the Adaptive Unconscious, this fascinating part of our minds that has to do with snap decisions, those that are made in a blink of the eye.
We have always known that there are reflexive kinds of behaviors that are made in an instant. That is not new. What is new and exciting, however, is the growing scientific research that supports the legitimacy of decisions guided by the Adaptive Unconscious. While no one is proposing that we disregard systematic and careful thinking, we should also trust what our blink of the eye assessments tell us. In other words, there are two, not one, ways in which we process information and think. We have not one mind, but two and appealing to both can improve our selling effectiveness.
We see three powerful implications for applying what we are learning about the Adaptive Unconscious to improving sales effectiveness: 1. The Two Pronged Attack; 2.) Product and Package Are One 3. KISS (Keep It Short Stupid)
Two Pronged Attack
Decisions get made at two levels: the conscious and Adaptive Unconscious. Accordingly, we should plan and execute sales strategies for both. For the former, we want to build the rational case for our solution. This part is old hat. Those of us in sales are well accustomed to outlining the benefits of our products emphasizing Return on Investment and the like. We enumerate facts like past successes with similar clients and seek to persuade with logic.
For the latter, appealing to the Adaptive Unconscious, sales people are far less systematic, disciplined or skilled. That is not to say that those of us in sales don’t know the second level is important. Indeed, we do as evidenced in titles like “Relationship Manager” and rhetoric like becoming a “Trusted Adviser”. The problem we have is that we are not sure what to do to build relationships and earn trust. And, this is where we can take important lessons from Blink.
Gladwell offers a fascinating chapter which illuminates, the importance of appealing to the Adaptive Unconscious.: Listening to Doctors (pages 39-44). Therein we learn that, while some doctors are sued for malpractice, others are not. Thinking analytically, most of us would assume that doctors who are sued are those whose actions result in injury or harm to their patients. Wouldn’t you?
Guess what. That assumption is wrong. Doctors who are sued
aren’t actually the ones who commit malpractice. They are the ones patients
don’t like. Prominent malpractice attorney, Alice Burkin, puts it this way: “People just don’t
sue doctors they like.”
What do doctors who are not
sued, presumably those liked by their patients, do differently? For one, they
spend more time with their patients: 18.3 minutes compared to 15 minutes For
another, they practice “active listening” saying things like, “Tell me more
about that?”
If patients don’t sue doctors they like because they take more time with them and listen actively, it doesn’t seem like a terrible stretch to assert that those kinds of behaviors can help us in selling. Former colleague Russ Brooks is fond of saying,
“All things being
equal, people do business with people they know and like. And, all things being
unequal, people do business with people they know and like.”
Selling, like medicine, involves more than just diagnosing. Medical doctors prescribe treatments and sales people propose solutions to business problems. While skills like active listening certainly serve us well during the investigation step, we can turn to the SST® model for specific concepts and tools for becoming more effective when making proposals and presentations. Minimally, we need to take care to balance our messages to ensure that they appeal to all four preferences (Sensing, Intuition, Thinking & Feeling). When we know the client well, we can shade our messages so they appeal to that particular client and make that relationship “click” or “connect”, terms we hear about so often in SST® workshops.
What do active listening and SST® have in common? They both put the focus where it should be: on the client.
KISS: Keep it Short
Stupid
Recently, I was driving to a business appointment while trying to follow on line directions I had printed out. Finally, I had to pull over and convert the twenty-four steps the on-line site provided to four that I could manage while simultaneously driving my car. The on-line directions gave me too much information to process. They violated the KISS rule.
Many of us in sales have the same tendency when preparing business presentations. We behave as though the more information and detail we provide, the more persuasive our proposal will be.
Blink helps us realize that there is a hazard in the “persuade by the pound” approach. This is an instance where less is truly more.
This point was driven home not too long ago when I attended a meeting hosted by a Fortune 100 company. They had invited a select group of firms to their headquarters to review their criteria for a major sales training RFP. The point they emphasized more than any other was: Don’t bother submitting the proposal without an Executive Summary. They went on to explain that some of the key decision makers in their loop would restrict their reading to just the Executive Summary. Others would use it as a guide to the rest of the proposal to determine where they wanted to drill down for more information.
It is good advice because decision makers, whether consciously or not, often base their decisions on two ways of thinking: the deliberate (Conscious) and the instinctive (Adaptive Unconscious). Keep It Short Stupid and don’t overwhelm their Adaptive Unconscious with too much information because, as Gladwell (p. 142) writes:
“Overloading the decision maker with too much
information makes picking up the signature harder, not easier.”
Product and Package
Become One
Have you ever chosen a bottle of wine because you liked the bottle? If you have you, are not alone.
Gladwell (P. 160) cites a number of marketing cases from margarine to wine making the point that,
“The product is the package and the product combined.”
They couldn’t sell margarine when it was first developed until they made it the same color as butter and wrapped it in aluminum foil, just as butter was presented. Once it was in the right package, one people associated with quality, margarine started to sell.
Christian Brothers Brandy was losing market share to a competitor who consistently finished behind them in taste tests. But, the competitor’s bottle was more elegant, decanter shaped, with smoked glass and foil. Christian Brothers put their product in a better package, and they began to regain market share. The same brandy in a different package regained its market share.
How about your product? Is it packaged in a way that it will appeal to the instincts that reside in the Adaptive Unconscious? Or, are you making the mistake that a better mouse trap will sell on its own merits. It won’t.
Summary
Decisions, including buying ones, get made on two levels: 1.) the conscious, characterized by analysis and deliberation and 2.) The Adaptive Unconscious which is more instinctual. Both are legitimate. We can improve our sales effectiveness by appealing, not only to the conscious mind of the buyer, but also to his or her Adaptive Unconscious. Those strategies include: