Learn Sales Psychology

1. Sales Psychology intro: What is the psychology of the sales process? How do you know what kind of mode your prospects are in? How do you know when you should be asking for a deal? And how people are really behaving and why they're behaving that way. What can you do to impact the sales process? What can you do to identify when people are getting in a more defensive mode and when they are in a mode where you should be asking for business or next steps. It's a very difficult thing to realize, especially in sales when we're very focused on the end result. The end result is asking for the deal. But when we're looking at this, we need to take a step back and we need to say, where mentally is our prospect. That way we can understand what brain mode they're operating in, in. In doing so, have a higher chance of closing a deal and identify one prospects are pulling away from us. One prospects are becoming more engaged. Then start to identify our behaviors that impact those situations. 2. How to use Sales Psychology : So how do we use this? We need to be able to move people from the reptile brain all the way into the midbrain. We didn't to be interested in open by the time they get there. Then we need to also get people into the idea of these operating numbers making sense and justified as emotionally to the midbrain. This allows the process to buy without survival instincts from the reptilian brain, slowing down the deal or turning them away. To do that, you have to pick someone's curiosity. A good way to do that is take a look at how you've helped others in the industry. Short communications or answers about those are very powerful and they allow connection, it allows to the communication of, okay, we've done this before. This is how we can accomplish it later. It's similar to the idea of, I helped the manufacturer delta street, I helped ABC Company. Abc Company was in a similar situation to the prospect I'm talking to. I tell the Prosite george. This conversation is really had me thinking I helped ABC company down the road here a couple of months ago. And it wasn't exactly the same, but it was really, really similar. And that we were had to go through and we had to replace their inventory management system because their reps never knew how much they were selling. The same product as you. They're completely different industry, but the process was the same. Now we've gotten to a point where they know how much inventory they have at all times. They always know how much they need to purchase. Sales reps always know how much they're gonna, they can sell without having to tell customers, Hey, this got delayed and it's just really increasing their relationships and it's reducing the amount of follow-ups they have to have that or in a negative context, they don't have to call her customers now and say, hey, I know we just sold this product, but I don't want to let you know. There's going to be an extra week on it. They've got all that data just in their system. And that's really helping their relationships because we always check in about three months later and make sure things are working. So that's how we were able to help. Now, when you who say stuff like that, go over how you've helped other people and you go over. Other companies have benefited from using your products or your solutions. You're then able to take a few steps further and moving them away. From the reptilian brain. You're building trust. You're not presenting them with problems and money. You're not talking about that. You're talking about solutions. You're talking about how you've done it before, you're showing experience. 3. Understanding the buying process : Understanding the psychology of the buying process. The buying process is an emotional decision. Do you understand why people buy in order to connect with your prospects? We also need to understand the way that the brain operates and how people really processes decision-making. When we're taking a look at the buying process, somebody's looking for a product, somebody's looking for a solution. They're interested. How do we decipher between somebody that's interested in somebody that's boards. So they're looking at something. How do we move them from just being kind of interested into behavior of buying? We're going to go over that. As we take a look through the course, we're gonna take a look at the different modes of the brain. The brain operates in three modes, and this is according to the triune brain. We need to identify these parts of the brain and smoothly move between the parts. The volume process. When we're talking to somebody, we want to know why they're behaving the way they are. And many times it's because they're in a specific mode of thinking. There are three modes for the brain. What is the reptilian brain mode? Is taking a look primarily at problems, money, they're not a buyer. They might sound like a buyer if the money looks right, but they're not really a buyer. The neocortex. This is something that is trying to justify things. Since the part of the brain that when you're gonna go have a piece of pizza and you want the piece of pizza. This is the party of rain. That's saying, yeah, we can have this pizza, pizza because we we went for a run this morning. That makes sense. That this is good for me because I have to replace those calories. Then we also have the midbrain. The midbrain is where we want people. This is where people like what they're seeing, they're happy. The state of mind where good things happen. In the next few lessons, we're going to take a look at the parts of the brain, how they operate, and the modes of thinking associated with that. Then we're going to learn how to use it. The physical behaviors associated with some portions of thought. 4. The reptialian brain mode: Take a look at the reptilian brain mode. This is the part of the brain that's going to take a strong look at problems. And specifically it's going to take a look at money. So good signs that somebody is in this brain mode is they keep coming back to the money, they keep coming back to the cost. They keep coming back to it being too expensive. When someone's in this brain mode, it's very easy to think they are a buyer. And it's easy to think that because they're asking you about pricing, they're asking you about maybe even negotiating that price down. But they're not necessarily the buying mode yet. Roots billion brain. We have to build trust with the prospect. This mode because if all we do is hammer them, we will turn them off of working with us. If it's just constant questions, if it's constantly pushing, if it's saying, hey, you need to buy this now, those sales tactics that are that kind of threat of, hey, this deal is only good for the next 24 hours. That's not good for somebody in his brain mode because they're not gonna be interested. They're going to walk. We need to tell people our intentions immediately when they're in this frame mode. And this is so that we're not sneaking up on anyone with intention. Because if prospects don't think we're set up on a sales call, they'll revert into a reptile brain when threatened by that change. Say we would set up a call with the prospect. We're going to say, we're going to say, Hey, this is an account review. And instead of actually reviewing their account, we say, Hey, it looks like your accounts good. You want to look at buying more stuff. The whole college just about buying more stuff instead of talking about their account and making sure everything is good like we had presented it. They're not going to ever leave reptilian brain mode. They're gonna be stuck there. They're gonna be stuck there because we had lied to them. We said, Hey, we're going to go over your account and we got there. We show up and we tell them, look, you need to buy more stuff. We need to make sure that when somebody is in reptilian brain mode, we're able to identify that they might be withdrawing from conversation. They might be talking about money, they might be talking about problems. Problems with purchasing, problems with why they shouldn't do this, problems with the product. You're showing them problems with the service, your social in them. And they might even be acting in a defensive way. So when you say something, they might immediately have a counter to that. Some people live primarily in reptilian brain mode. They have a very defensive nature. 5. Physical Behaviors that bring out the lizard brain: There are a few physical behaviors that show the lizard brain. It's good to know those so you can see them. So whenever you're doing a in-person meeting, these are things to look out for. If you're doing an online meeting. It's always good to make sure we have cameras on. That'll increase your clothes rates, increases connection. You're a real person. They can see you, you can see them. Being able to see them will help you to understand what parts of the brain they're in. They look relaxed, it will look calm and they look agitated. Physical behaviors that can show lizard brain. For example, are someone who is retracted, someone whose distance they've crossed arms. They might be leaning back away from you in their chair with their arms crossed, with their elbows in, maybe with their knees together. Maybe they're not even looking at the camera or they're not looking at you. They're looking away the whole time. There's a noticeable physical gap between their engagement there, unengaged or pulled back there, and almost a defensive stance. They don't trust you because they don't like what's happening. They're not buying mode. They're not in the midbrain, there aren't even in the neocortex yet. Their tone may even be more course at this stage because it is almost aggressive nature to being in the reptilian brain mode. Because we're not looking for the solution. We're looking at only problems and money right now. We're not a buyer. We need to listen to filler tone. Tone is changing and identify what we said or what we did that made them move into the lizard brain so we can get all the way to the midbrain and bring something up and it moves them all back into a defensive stance and we have to figure out what is making that happen. What caused that shift? Once we have that, we're then able to conquer that problem. So say I'm talking to somebody and we're going over the terms and conditions on something and they realize that they didn't account for implementation cost. We're talking about software, they're going to buy something and they say, Well, nobody else had looked at edit mutation. I just assumed you didn't, and now you're just bringing it up now that I'm happy to interested. You just presented me with a hormone, that hurdle that snuck up on me. And in doing so, you might discover, okay, in your sales process, you should be more upfront with, Hey, there's going to be this implementation costs. You should boom that up sooner. So people aren't surprised later in the sales process when you bring it up with the initial pricing. That way they know, Hey, you're going to have the price of the software, the price of implementation, and there's ongoing years of maintenance. And just lay that out at the beginning so they know going in, this is what you should expect maybe and a half hour later in the conversation, once we've scoped out what we're gonna do. But at the end of the day, you're preventing surprises. Surprises are going to really cause the lizard brain to react. 6. Why Prospects don't call you back: You ever wonder why people don't call you back or what stops them from having communications with you when you think everything is always going so well. A lot of that has to do with the psychology behind sales. A lot of that has to do with you misunderstanding what part of the brain you're dealing with. When we're taking a look at the parts of the brain and how people behave when they're operating in different modes. Really important to think about what actions they are taking will stay to look at why someone isn't calling you back. Someone isn't calling you back. They likely not always, but likely didn't really see the full value. They likely didn't see the full impact and the full need. They didn't see how it was really going to benefit them. What that means is that we'd likely left them the reptilian brain. When they're in this mode, they are defensive. They are more confrontational. They are pulling back. If they're pulling away, they don't want to be necessarily involved. And when we take a look at how that behavior is going to show, that behavior is going to show primarily by having people not want doctors. They're not going to reach out. They're not going to have that conversation. They're going to pick up when we call them, they're trying to avoid you because their brain is viewing you as a threat. You need to be able to be viewed more as a friend. You want to be able to view you as someone that is reaching out to help them with the intent of getting that sale. But we needed them to believe you're helping them. You need them to understand it. You're helping them and really everything you're doing should be helping them. That's the point of selling in the product because it's gonna solve their problems. It's going to be a solution for them. It's going to help. And understanding that when people aren't responding to you, it's because they're stuck in that lizard brain. They're stuck in the reptilian section where their brain is saying something's not right here. They're just trying to get my money. This isn't really going to help me that much. So there's a problem. We need to know how we can solve that. Take good notes. When I read, talked to somebody and look back, what were their main problems? How can we solve them? If we now have people that should be a good prospect, they should be a really good use case for our product. We then might want to take a look and say, okay, what did we do to put them back into this situation now where they're not interested. As soon as they're not interested, we can try to get them interested. Again. The way to do that is they're not looking at the phone, send them a couple of emails with them, a couple of voicemails. Hit only on the things that are the solution. Don't ask them to make a decision. Don't ask them to push, don't ask them to push it further along in the company. All you're trying to do is talk. All you're trying to do is show them how you can help. All you're doing is offering helpful things. You haven't already shown them. Hey, here's scholar companies we've worked with. Show them other companies you've worked with. If you haven't already accomplished a major task for them or if you haven't gave them giving them any information, you haven't gone out on a limb per se for them? Do that. Extend the olive branch, bring them to your side. They're not responding, but maybe in a conversation you had with them, they were interested in a minor solution that you didn't focus on. Take a look at your notes. Maybe you were talking to them about inventory management and inventory processing and warehousing for the whole call. But you had to note that they also wanted to look at the sales side and see how their sales team was going to interact with that inventory product to be able to sell butter. Instead of getting stuck purely on what solution you are solving. Now, paint that picture for the future. Show them that the long-term working with you is long-term solution. There's more benefits than just that initial conversation. And we're not just going to solve this, we're going to solve everything. This is just how we start. Offered to scale back whenever you're doing if you need to. Some people get stuck in a situation where they realize, I want this, I can't afford it. Their own company could put them into the lizard brain. Their own company could have them in reptilian mode just saying, Hey, I don't want to be the guy that has to tell the sales rep, I cannot buy it. So given that Alex, hey, leave a voicemail. Voice moves all the time. It said, hey, if you can't do this, it's totally fine. I just need to know so I can check it off in the system on my end. So you just let me know how you're doing and sometimes those are the calls I get back. Was like, Hey, immediately after it and just Hey. Yeah, sorry. I haven't been at my desk. Just missed your call. But yeah, they totally just shut it down. Well, why? Now we can we can uncover what happened and we couldn't cover it, just wasn't what to do enough or if it wasn't going to actually solve the problem. Or if we were going to have a solution that now needed to be different because of a change inside the organization. Maybe budgets got completely cut. We just needed to scale scope back. Always ask people why appeal to that emotional side because they obviously were interested at some point because they went and asked to buy it or they tried to purchase it at a company. Now, when they can't, even when you ask them why, maybe there's something smaller they could get. If you're selling a solution that has multiple parts, maybe you're looking at them buying three or four parts and you tell them, you know, hey, but it's got cut, that's fine. We've got people that start with this product. They'll buy just one part, get their system setup started getting some efficiency this year. Maybe in two or three years, we do another part, maybe in two or three years after that we'll do another part. It really just depends on how your company scales. But from our discussions looked a lot like this part here, given you the best bang for your buck and really helped you in your position. It just gives you one more chance to say, Hey, we can scale back, we can do whatever you're comfortable with. I'm on your side. 7. Too many options: If you really want to confuse your prospect, you really want to get them stuck in the reptilian brain. If you really want to remove any urgency, if you want to make them slow down, if you want to make a deal harder, give them more and more and more options. If you've got the option between a and b, That's the easy choice. One or two. If you have the option of a and B, and C and D, and E and F, and every option has options within it. You have a lot of problems, especially when you're asking somebody else to make that decision, who just found out these things exist. It makes your products seem complicated. If you look at what a lot of sales reps do, their top performers are gonna be taking complex things and making them simple. We're going to be giving their prospects less options. You might have a solution that can do a billion things. But you're never going to present all billion things that you can do. You're going to present the ones that are needed for the prospect and you're going to present them with limited options. Technically, maybe they can have five options that would solve the problem. But as a salesperson, you can't go in and say, which of these five options do you want? Because they're going to have five choices, That's five things to examine its overwhelming for the brain and that push some weight into the reptilian brain. You want to give two, maybe three choices that are easily comparable, that have key differences. And maybe the main difference is going to be price. So we have option a, a 100 users, we solve all your problems today. We have option B, 20 users. We scale up to a 100 over the next three years. What one is going to work for you today? Or you do features. We have option a. It comes with solution. It comes with solution a. And two additional modules solves all your problems today, solution be is going to include everything in solution a plus that extra force thing that we talked about that you said wasn't a problem today, but will be next year. We can have that in place and ready as you scale into that. So you never actually have to experience that problem, which one works best for you? Do you want to solve everything now? And we'll fix the future when it gets here. If you want to fix the future now, which is the best choice for you. You've just think about too, when there's a lot of options you bring gets overloaded with data. And it gets really easy to say, Well, this isn't going to work for me. There's a lot options like data, people get cranky sometimes in the chart telling you all these, this is just a complicated system. It's just too hard to use. This product can't be that complicated. Here's most of the garbage because competitors showed me it was really simple. Those are really common responses. So keep things simple. Reduce your options, make it easy for people to buy. Make it easy for people to understand. And you'll keep them out of the lizard brain. 8. The Midbrain: And I just want to look at the midbrain. The midbrain is where prospects love the product. They love you, they want to buy now, want to buy right now is where we want the prospect slick, that nice middle area in the brain where they're not like the reptilian brain mode where they're all worried about problems and money. And they're not like the neocortex where they're wondering if it's good for them or if it's a good price, they're satisfied, they're happy. It can be also described, it almost has like a drunk brain. Because they're happy, they're not worried too much about consequences and stuff. They're good. When you get someone here, this is a great place to basically bring up anything you need to. This is a great place to ask those questions that might be essential to the deal, but might be a little bit more stressful to ask if somebody's in a more defensive mode, like if they were in reptilian brain, you would likely not want to bring up with somebody the challenges of going through a full implementation process. If it's gonna be something that could be painful for them. But once they get in the mid-brain, you might just casually bring it up, hey, this is gonna take like three weeks to get set up. That's totally cool with you. Alright? Alright, good. They're already in a good mode. They're already in a happy place. This is where they might be joking with you. This is where they're smiling, you're smiling. This is a really good spot in the conversations. This is where you want to ask for money or asked for timeline or propel the deal forward when they're in the midbrain because they're gonna be more agreeable. 9. The neocortex: The neocortex. Is this good for me? Is this a good price? This is the justification portion of the brain. This is where we all think logically. A type, a person oftentimes will get stuck here. They live here. This isn't purely features and benefits, but if you think about a type, a person very analytical, they want to know numbers, they get very stuck there. The way to sell to someone like that is a lot different than how to sell to somebody that's not that concerned ON numbers, that's not really stuck there, that's in a more fearful position. It might be just looking at problems and money, but not necessarily looking at the full justification for things and only looking at it as cost. Oftentimes what you'll see is somebody in reptilian brain move into the neocortex as part of that stage of getting in the midbrain. That's because if you take a second and think about problems, money, and you want to move into a happy place where like, Yeah, I'm interested in the product. You've got to go through a justification process. Typically, once you get them justifying why something is worth something, and you've got them agreeing with you. We can logically start to convince themselves. Now, this isn't features and benefits. This isn't features and benefits because if we get stuck with features and benefits, wherever we're going to get into the why of why they're buying or why they need something. While they're in the neocortex, it's really good to repeat, meaning information from the last time you're meeting was this actually will help to get people into the neocortex. This helps to move people into the neocortex because it associates that last meeting with what's happening right now. And it helps move them into this part of the brain because it reminds them of everything you've already gone over. Y, you justified it. Why they need it. They almost get to relive that quickly at the beginning of the call, then they'll help you move forward from that point because you've already recapped. It helps you move on from the neocortex to the midbrain in follow-up calls more rapidly because you've already got that rapport. You've already got the justification I already solidified. Most sales reps will never go over what they previously talked about meetings those go into the next column, say, hey, you know, you're gonna talk to your boss. You guys buy something like that or they'll just push for wherever. The next thing I was not even reminding the prospect of why they're talking in the first place. Typically people don't remember the full conversation from a week ago or even the day before. There's little parts that might be important that the sales rep knows is important. The prospect might not know those are important. Not realize how important they are to them until they hear them again. Just want to make sure we go over whatever we had talked about on the previous call. Just a few bullet points like, hey, we've talked about this, this, and this. Then whatever we are proceeding to next, that way everyone's starting on the same page because you could go over what you thought was important and they could remind you of something else that maybe you missed. It goes both ways. 10. How to stand out: How can we differentiate ourselves from competition and ensure that we're appealing to the right parts of how, the right modes of how somebody thinks. One really good way to help get trust and make people believe you care about them and none of them understand that you do is to respond quickly. Your prospects. They don't like to wait. No one likes to wait, especially in this economy. The idea of waiting since everyone's got smart phones and video on-demand, weighting isn't really a thing. No one wants to wait. Secondly, hit your site, you should be responding the second day. Send you a message if you can, you should be responding. And what that does is it builds up urgency, that you have urgency and solving their problem. Then they believe that you have urgency, which gives them more urgency. And that helps your sales process overall. It also helps let them know you care that they can depend on you. That appeals to a sense of security, that appeals to the neocortex. Logically, Hey, this is a guy that I can work with. He responds to me that appeals to the lizard brain, Hey, I had a problem. They've got solved immediately. I had a question, it got answered. Great. Quicker responses are very important. Another good thing is to take a look at consistencies. We wanted to take a look at what things we're doing consistently, the results of those. We also wanted to look at the team that we're on and what they're doing consistently. And there's also those, if we have certain team members that we know, always say the same thing. And that statement is one that generally gets a good responsive. Say the top sales rep, we have, our top cells are up. They always make the same kind of joke. They always make the same kind of comment. Those are probably highly effective jokes and comments, probably highly effective ways to get buy-in from the prospect. This are probably really effective ways to get the prospect on their side and have them understanding and believing this is a solution for them. What behaviors are other people consistently doing? What behaviors are you consistently doing? Did you change any behaviors recently? Did those behaviors lower your clothes rates? How do those behaviors impact what your prospects might be thinking?