Discover the secrets to getting that 'YES' faster than ever! Join Dennis Collins on Connect & Convert as he unravels the mysteries of persuasion and influence. Learn how your brain's System 1 and powerful principles like social proof and unity can make a world of difference in your personal and professional life. Tune in now for quick insights that lead to quicker YESes!

Hi again, it's Dennis Collins with another session of Connect & Convert.

We're here on a regular basis to help you sell more.

Tips, minibytes, ideas.

Things that are going to help you sell more.

Today's episode, how do you get to yes faster than ever?

If you're in sales, hey, even if you're not in sales, let's

say you're a leader, a parent.

Whatever.

How do you get that?

Yes, faster than ever.

Aren't we all kind of interested in that?

It's all about persuasion.

How important is persuasion in your day to day life?

If you're in sales, obviously, it's very important.

If you're a leader, very important.

A couple questions to start off today's session.

Do you know how to move people in your direction?

That sounds like a weird question, doesn't it?

But isn't that what it's all about?

How do you get people moving in your direction?

How do you change behavior?

I don't, that's a hard one, isn't it?

Is it possible to change someone's behavior?

Yeah, I think it is.

Here's what I've figured out over all these decades that I've

been trying to figure this out.

This is very clear to me now.

If you don't know how people decide to become part of your plan, you

are destined to become part of their plan, especially if you're in sales.

So the goal of this episode, let's explore some ways to get to yes

faster than ever, understanding how our brains work, how people decide

that's the key skill to improving.

Persuasion So I want to start with a with an experiment that was done.

I believe it was Stanford out in Palo Alto and out in California.

Uh, they did a A study on which message would be the

most persuasive in influencing people to conserve more energy.

Okay, so they came up with four messages.

Number one message Conserving energy helps the environment.

The number two message conserving energy helps future generations.

The number three message Conserving energy saves money, and number four, your

neighbors are already conserving energy.

Okay?

Four very different messages, and subjects in the experiment were asked to rate

the persuasiveness of each message.

Which message would they choose to be the most persuasive in improving

the conservation of energy?

Well, the survey says...

Almost all of the participants chose environmental protection, the

environmental protection message by far two to one over every other message

benefit to society was a number two, a way below number one saving money was a

little bit below benefit to society and the one about your neighbors are already

conserving energy that was dead last.

Number four.

That's what was chosen in the survey in the experiment.

And now what about real behavior?

When the scientists went in to test those four messages in real life

experiments, what do you think they found?

Did you, would you say environmental protection as it was from the survey

respondents would be number one?

Is that what you thought?

Maybe saving money, benefit to society?

Uh, wrong.

Number one motivating message to get people to conserve

more energy and actual tests.

Your neighbors are already conserving energy by a long shot.

No other message of the other three even came close.

Your neighbors are already conserving energy.

So what does that tell us?

First of all, people we typically don't know what's influencing our behavior.

We're not.

It's not at the level of awareness.

Also, we don't always act in line with our values.

We may state a value, but when we go out and actually check real behavior,

it's not in accordance with our beliefs.

And maybe the bitterest pill of all, when we ask people, Hey, what do you want?

What do you want in a new HVAC system?

What do you want in a new car?

We don't know what we want.

We can't answer that question.

We typically don't know what influenced behavior.

We don't always act in line with our values, and we really

don't know what we want.

So we delve a little bit into the brain.

I said we're going to talk about understanding the brain.

One of the gentlemen who's helped me understand the brain better than anyone

else is Professor Daniel Kahneman.

If you've done any study at all in persuasion and influence,

you've heard of Kahneman.

He's a Nobel Prize winner.

And here's a quote of his that I really like that kind of sums up what he thinks.

It feels like we believe in something because we have arguments for it.

But it actually works the opposite way.

First we believe, then we create the supporting arguments.

It's fundamental.

It kind of says it all about Kahneman.

He kind of was the first, at least the first that I read about, that talks about

the two systems we have in our brain.

System 1 and System 2.

System 1 is our fast brain.

Unconscious, automatic, everyday decisions.

Error prone.

That's the brain that keeps us moving every day.

We get up, we brush our teeth, we eat breakfast, we drive our car.

That's almost an automatic pilot.

We don't think about that.

We don't have to do any deep thought about that.

That's system one.

The fast, unconscious, automatic part of our brain.

System two, of course, is the slow brain, the conscious brain, the

effortful brain, the complex brain, complex decisions, options, reliability.

It's a very reliable part of our brain, much more reliable than system one.

So, understanding that the brain has two systems, system one and system

two, is fundamental to understanding how to get to yes faster than ever.

Okay, what else did Kahneman tell us?

Pay attention, Professor Kahneman says system one runs the show.

Okay, the fast, automatic, unconscious Everyday decision brain runs the

show attempts to use system to the rational brain usually fall flat.

That's why when we're training with salespeople, we talk about no, we

don't talk about features and benefits.

We don't talk about that anymore.

We talk about feeling the emotion, the emotional response that you're going

to have when you meet your needs.

That's system one.

It's fast.

Behavioral scientists now say 95.

That's correct.

95 percent of all of our behavior is determined by System 1.

So if you're going to appeal, To the way the brain actually works, not

the way you might like it to work, we've got to appeal to system one.

So I come to a word, you've probably heard this word if you've done any study in

sales and marketing called satisficing.

Satisficing.

What is satisficing?

Satisficing is a product of information overload.

Okay?

So how much information do we have available to us at any moment?

Well, our little...

Phones have more computing power than some of the most

sophisticated computers of years ago.

We have unlimited amounts of information that were never ever available

before, but let's make it real.

Um, my wife actually talked me into going to the supermarket the other day.

I try to avoid supermarkets, but hey, as a favor to her, I said, I got it.

I'll take care of this.

And we wanted to get some peanut butter.

Okay.

Very simple thing.

I mean, I love peanut butter.

She likes peanut butter.

I'm supposed to buy some peanut butter.

When I approach the peanut butter aisle, if you will, in the supermarket, I

was confronted with possibly hundreds, hundreds of jars of peanut butter,

hundreds, huge display of peanut butter.

I never knew.

Actually, I did a little homework on this.

Do you know that there are 87 different peanut butter products in the USA today?

87.

I think all 87 were on those shelves.

Maybe more.

So how can I ever decide what peanut butter I'm going to buy?

What am I going to do?

Bring my iPhone and research every, okay, here's one.

What's this?

Heavens no.

Heavens no.

Heuristics.

Shortcuts.

Heuristics.

Satisfying.

It's good enough.

Social proof.

What are other people doing?

So what did I buy?

What do you think I bought?

Of all the 87 different manufacturers, what do you think I bought?

I let social proof help me here.

What do most people do?

Most people buy a brand called Jif.

J I F.

Jif.

Okay?

Now, Jif, at this particular supermarket, was on the bottom shelf.

That's another thing, isn't it, where the placement of the products

in the supermarket are critical.

This, literally, I had to bend over and go to the bottom of the shelf to get the Jif.

But the Jif stood out to me because of heuristics.

Shortcuts.

Branding.

Satisfying.

It's good enough.

So when a consumer is confronted with that wide array of products and services, all

of which could meet their needs, I'm sure any of those peanut butters would be okay.

We often choose good enough rather than spend extra time, extra

effort, extra money to make the absolute best possible choice.

We settle for good enough instead of seeking the best option.

The behavior is the result of System 1.

That's all System 1 working, okay?

Prioritizing speed and ease over secure over accuracy and effort.

Another supermarket experiment.

Have you seen those little stickers?

That say everyday low price that are sprinkled all throughout the

supermarket, they put those little stickers on their everyday low price.

It's not a sale.

It says everyday low price.

It's everyday low price.

Okay, on certain products, the particular market that did this

experiment posted them randomly on random items in the store for 24 hours.

And at the end of 24 hours, they take those down and randomly choose

another group of products, randomly.

And the next day, they would take those down and randomly choose

another array of random products to get those little stickers.

Okay.

Every day, low price.

What do you think happened to sales?

I think we'd all like to say, Oh, come on.

We know that's a bunch of baloney, right?

Every day, low price.

That's a gimmick.

Okay.

Well, maybe it is, but guess what?

In almost every case.

Sales doubled randomly selected products.

No particular reason for the product.

Sales doubled because of a little sticker.

Another quick example.

Say you're this was a an example of an executive.

Large company was looking for a tech developer.

He needed to develop a new app.

He had dozens of candidates.

A lot of them were very qualified.

They checked all the boxes.

All the boxes.

Okay.

He didn't have the time.

Nor the desire or the the resources to do a deep dive on all those candidates.

So what did he do?

He makes his decision based on just enough information, just enough

to be satisfied, satisficing.

It's in every part of our lives, our personal lives and our business lives.

So if that's the case, how do we trigger system one?

If we want to get to yes, faster than ever, how do we trigger system one?

How can we account for the option four message, your neighbors

are already conserving energy?

That was the one by far that motivated the most energy conservation.

What is it that triggered that?

Well, there are two principles of influence.

Social proof and unity come into play.

We look to other people like us, people who are like us, okay,

to find out what we should do.

And we also look to people in our group unity from our neighborhood, our

church, our school, our club, our sports team, our family, our close friends.

So we had two very strong principles of influence in effect here that

had number four come out as the motivator, the influencer of behavior,

social proof people like, Oh, geez, people like me are doing this.

My neighbors and neighborhood.

Oh, I belong to that group.

I have to support.

What that group does.

Perfect example of satisficing heuristics and the Cialdini Principles activating

behavior getting to a quick yes.

Well, that's a lot.

We've got a lot more in future episodes.

I hope you'll continue to tune in to Connect & Convert.

If you understand how people decide to become part of your plan, you can

move more people in your direction.

If you don't know how people decide to become part of your plan, you will

likely become part of their plan.

System 1 is in control 95 percent of the time.

If you want to get to Yes faster than ever, appeal to System 1 and

you will get Yes faster than ever.

Hey, it's Dennis Collins signing off of this version of Connect & Convert.

We'll see you again soon with another episode.