Applying Personality Science to Create Impactful Emails with William Ballance

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Welcome to the live Better Sell Better podcast with your host, Kevin Dorsey of Inside Sales Excellence, the number one Patreon group and YouTube channel for tech sellers and tech sales leaders, where we dive in deep for tactical advice on how to book more meetings, close more deals faster, and lead sales teams to success. But we don't stop there. We also focus on the person in salesperson. We talk about mindset goals, time management, and so much more. So thank you for listening, and if you're interested, head on over to patreon.com InsideSalesExcellence now with that, grab a notepad, get ready, and let's dive into the good stuff. What up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of the live Better Sell Better podcast. This is your host, Kevin Dorsey, AKA kd. And today we're going to unlock the brain a little bit. We are going to dive into the psychology behind decision making, because there are things that have been studied, there are things that have been tested, there are things that are patterns across buyers because buyers are humans, buyers are people. And we forget that. But then we also forget the science side of this. Sales is always the question, is sales an art or is it a science? I firmly believe that it is art applied sales scientifically, which is why I'm so pumped to have William Balance on the show today with me. He's the CEO of Lavender, one of the number one sales email assistants. But what he wants to talk about is the psychology behind decision making. Because once you understand how people make decisions, that's what makes your messaging better, your sales process better, your pitch better, and at the end of the day, your results better. So, William, my man, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. Katie, Excited to be here. Dive deeper into communication, psychology, and how it all ties back into sales.

This is a good one. I hope people are ready for this one because I think this can go deep real fast. And so that's kind of what we'll dive into right out the gate here.

Right.

Is like when you say the psychology of decision making. Take me back. Like, where, where did that first come from for you? And what are some of the things you've learned along the way?

Yeah. So my first exposure to this as a concept, I was doing a fundraiser to help save a women's college in Virginia that was closing. And by complete chance, one of my donors was a consultant in D.C. for something known as the Hermann Brain Dominance Instrument. And I'd met her because her donation didn't go through correctly. And I emailed her and we started talking and she explained it to me, something known as the Herman Brain Dominance Instrument, which is how people think through decisions. It's generally used by leadership teams to structure ideal teams looking at problems from different angles. But some of the work that we did in our startup journey with Lavender, and before Lavender, was to tie that back into how people make their decisions in a buying situation.

Okay, now you gotta go a little bit deeper. How does it go from, hey, your payment didn't go through, to somehow talking about the Herman? You got to connect some dots for me there, man, because that was a big leap.

It was one of the most serendipitous experiences that I kind of filed away that ultimately laid the foundation for what would eventually become Lavender. The lady who made a donation, her daughter dated my freshman year roommate. So when her donation had a problem, I recognized the name and I'm like, hey, your. Your daughter dated my friend. I recognize the name. I think you to dedicate this to her. And she was very extroverted. And I said, let's get on a call, talk about the campaigns you're running. You're helping save the school. I really appreciate that the alumni are really, really involved with what you're doing. And I talked about what she was doing at the time. I was working in tech sales at an early stage E commerce marketing automation platform, and I was just doing this thing on the side to help save this school. And she was telling me about her work, which was in this field of the Hermann Brain Dominance Instrument. And she would work with large organizations and the government to do these assessments on people on their board or in their C suite to make sure each person was dominant in a different part of how they made their decisions. And I'm sure later in this, we'll dive deeper into what that actually means. But she did the assessment on me, which gave me a lot of insight into how I thought through decisions. And I kind of filed this away in the back of my head. As a result of me helping save this school, I had an idea where I wanted to help optimize young alumni fundraising. So I actually quit my job in tech sales and I started a mobile app, early stage startup, Bootstrapped Founder to solve the problem of young alumni. Millennial Gen Z fundraising. It was like a mobile app for social networking and mobile fundraising. And I went out like, super optimistic sales rep founder, trying to sell this to schools. And I found that the schools thought through the buying decision a lot differently than the marketers that I'd been used to selling to. They were way more resistant to change they were more hesitant to actually make a decision. They had lots of bureaucracy and red tape. But there are really two schools that stood out to me in particular. There's one school who said, I'm going to be a customer, but first I want to talk to your other customers. I didn't have any and they just went dark. They completely ghosted me after that. And then another school who said, I'm going to be your first customer and I'm buying this because I want to be the first person to have it and I'm going to pay you twice what you asked for because you should have charged me four times what you asked for. So as an early stage Bootstrap founder, I'm like, how do I find more people like that person who wants to be first, who wants to pay me more than I'm asking for, and really has this like vision oriented, big picture, pioneering type mentality. And I thought back to what I had learned while doing this fundraiser from this lady, that these people thought this buying decision in different ways. Some people needed proof points and data and the other one operated off of action and vision. And I had an idea of what if I could figure that out in their data and then target my campaigns differently based on how they think through that buying decision. And that led to me pitching that idea at a startup competition. I met my co founder, Will Allred, who some of your viewers might know, and we started building a Martech product that applied that communication psychology to digital marketing. And then a couple pivots later became what we're doing now with lavender.

I love this. So let's keep going down this path. What are some of those different types of decision making? It's called like modalities or like patterns. Like what are some of those main buckets?

Yeah, totally. So I'll start by defining it in the terms of the Herman brain dominance in particular, or HBDI for short. So moving forward, I'll just say hbdi. It basically says people think through their decisions in four quadrants. They look at the action, the vision, the people and the data of that decision. So what's that mean? The action is like the process or the steps to actually enact this decision and make it happen. The vision is like the big picture. If I do this decision, what are all the things that are going to happen, either positive or negative, as a result of me making this decision? The people are, who's involved in this decision? So other stakeholders and who's it going to impact? Who's it going to affect? And what's the result of that, of that impact? And then lastly the data. So what is the supporting data behind this decision? What are the facts and what are the figures? And everyone goes into all four of these quadrants when they make their decision. But depending on who you are, how you think and your personality, you go into them in different orders and different magnitudes. So you have some people that are like the really visionary founder who wants to just operate off of their instinct and their gut and they'll probably go buy that domain name or start doing sales or something without having done full market research or got all the data about their idea. And you have other people who spend so much time doing the research and getting the data that they never get started. And it's really important when you're thinking about not just in sales but in the, in the core use of the Herman brain dominance instrument, structuring a team that you have someone on your team that's going to be that, that vision focused person, someone's going to be that action oriented driver getting it done. Some people will think about the people involved and someone else is really going to research the data. And so it's normally used to structure leadership teams. But we started applying that same framework on how people make their buying decisions both in marketing and in sales.

And so how do you find that out about somebody, right in marketing and sales? Like is that something you can't? Like are there questions you can ask? Do they have to like fill out a survey? Like how do you kind of find out these preferences so you can lean into them or is it like you don't know? You just got to make sure you're checking all these boxes.

So there's a couple of ways to look at this. I think a lot of people that work in B2B have heard of DISC, which is a personality assessment personality framework. And it looks at two factors of what's known as the ocean or the five factor big five model of personality psychology. And this will all tie back into what you should look for next. But I think it's a pillar to understand the personality psychology before thinking about the decision making science. So personality is comprised of five factors and the five factor model or ocean disc incorporates a couple of them, not all of them. So we'll focus on ocean for this. The five factors are openness, so your openness to new experiences, conscientiousness, which is like your task oriented orientation, your dutifulness, like how, how good you are getting things done on time, things like that, your diligence Then extroversion, so how you respond to people or your introversion is the opposite of that, your agreeableness, so how likely you are to just go with the flow versus pushing back against decisions. And then neuroticism is the, is the in. In this acronym. Neuroticism is like you're proneness to, to, to emotional swings when exposed to stress. So depending on where you fall across these five factors, openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. It's your personality and you can learn that from doing an assessment. We have one that we have at lavender@officialpersonalitytest.com, which gives you the score. You can also look for things at other people. For someone who's working at a really early stage startup, for example, they're probably more open to new experiences or if they're traveling around the world and they're working remotely, they're probably going to score high on openness. Someone who is working in engineering and they're really detail oriented in their programming all day, they're going to probably be larger or higher on conscientiousness. For example, someone who is an executive who's like hard driving, really getting things done all the time might score lower on agreeableness because they've got to drive their ideas forward. So it kind of depends. And someone may be working in human resources or something like that might be really high on people. So you can look at it from the role that they're in. You can use a tool like our product Lavender, which in addition to helping you with their emails and optimizing emails, it also gives you this assessment on your prospect. It'll give you their personality assessment and what part of the brain they likely make their decision in. But if you don't have that, if you have no idea you've never talked to this person before, you can't take any insights off of their LinkedIn bio or their job history. You can structure your outbound or your messaging to hit on all four of those things. So we call it like the whole brain way of thinking. So part of your messaging would target the action involved or the vision or the big picture, the aspirational side of the sale, the people it's going to impact in the data behind it. And that could all be in one pitch or it could be in different steps. So different touches could target each thing until you find that it's kind of a lock and a key. Find the match for that buyer.

No, I really, I really like that. And so, you know, because I do think if you have the tool, you have something that helps you, but taking that time even to think through it. Like, obviously not everyone in engineering is the same, or not everyone in sales is the same, but there are definitely patterns there that then can lead, you know, to get a better feel for someone. So let's keep going down this path. Right. So then how do you apply it? Right. So, and like, let's pick a Persona. Let's go like VP of sales. Right. So let's assume they're VP of sales, like an early stage, so they're probably a little bit more open. You know, most salespeople, not the most conscientious with their tasks. Right. Like, they kind of tend to wing things a little bit more, maybe high on extroversion. Okay. And agreeableness, like, how do you start to craft messaging that is aligned with that?

That's a great question. So if you think about the four quadrants, the action, vision, people and data, and you're right, there are going to be patterns. Not everyone's going to align perfectly, but there are a lot of trends. And you can be pretty certain that you're going to hit on a lot of these things with a certain Persona, at least what we've seen. So when you're going after someone who's action oriented, which in a lot of cases could be that salesperson, that VP of sales, or other types of executives, you want to drive them to the decision and remove any sort of friction from that buying decision. Like, for example, myself, I went through a procurement of a tool that we use, and I knew I wanted to buy the product. I already done my own research, I was ready to buy, but they made me go through a discovery call, then go through a demo as a secondary call. Like, this whole process, it was so frustrating. And if I wasn't certain that I wanted that product, I would have dropped off way earlier. And that for someone like me, that is a bad experience as a buyer. But someone who's more data driven and needs more handholding or more details or maybe even more people oriented, that could have been really helpful for them because they were trying to fill in all these gaps. I didn't need to know every single thing that product did. I just needed to get the deal done and move on with my day. So if you're going after someone who's action oriented, you want to drive them to that decision and remove any sort of friction in that decision. For someone who is more vision oriented, they are the big picture thinkers. They're very high on openness. You want to inspire them in that decision making. You can see this a lot with like Nike commercials. Just do it. Like you look at those commercials and you're like, I can do anything. I can be an excellent athlete. I said to buy some Nikes. And it's really aspirational in their marketing that's targeting that vision quadrant of the brain. If I buy this product than or service, I'm going to have all these things. So if I'm selling like lavender, if you buy our product, you're going to get way more replies. Your team's going to crush it. They're all going to make president's club. Like you're going to crush your all of your goals and you're going to be a hero. And the people start thinking about, well, if this product works, all these great things are going to happen to me. Now for someone who's people oriented and maybe I take a step back. For people who are people or data oriented, they favor what are known as stability traits in the brain. That's the brain's resistance to change. For the ones that are action or vision oriented, they favor what are known as plasticity traits. And that's when the brain wants change. So you can see this for people that are action and vision oriented, they're far more likely to make their decisions with limited information and they're far more likely to be early adopters. Now when you cross that over, now we're looking at people and data oriented buyers, they do different things. So the ones that are people oriented, they need more support. They're going to be really favoring testimonials, case studies, how has this impacted other people? Or if I buy this, how will it impact the people around me? They might want more buy in from their peers. Where someone who's action oriented might make that decision unilaterally, just give it to their team. Where people oriented buyers are gonna say, well let me have Jeff look at this and Melissa and bring them in and get their opinions and have a more democratic vote on this buying decision. And then people who are data driven, they're gonna ask questions. You need to inform them. They're gonna ask questions of like, can I see a white paper? Can you send me some data, some statistics, How'd this work for so and so? They're gonna need a lot more handholding in that buying process. And they're not gonna. If you send them an anecdotal testimonial from someone, that's not enough. They're Can I see an analyst report or an industry report? I'm going to need some hard facts and figures, not just your sales copy. That's buttering up the story. So as you're looking at each of these buyer Personas, how you deliver the message and the things they need to kind of unlock how they think through, this buying decision will be a little bit different. And if you don't know, then add a little bit of each of those things.

God, I'm just loving this. This is so good. Because this is where it's like, call it, the science behind the art is like you still have to write a good email, you have to give a good pitch, but when you start applying like the science behind it, right then you start to craft, you know, something for the person you're talking to that fits for them. So let's go another layer deeper. Here you have a tool and maybe we can break down like how it's kind of crafty and like what those personality traits are. But how can I kind of get a feel quickly, like if I'm on a disco call, right? So let's say I have a call. How can I try to find out if they're action oriented, vision oriented people or data? Like, are there questions I can ask that would give me hints at that? Like, how do I start to maybe suss this out a little bit about the person I'm talking to in the sales process?

So I think there's a couple of ways you can do it somewhat indirectly with just like general small talk, like, what are you doing this weekend? Or what have you been doing recently? Like when you you DM me on LinkedIn asking about my experience remote working in Mexico and you're considering something like that, I could assume that you probably score a little bit higher on openness to new experiences than someone's. Like this weekend I stayed at home and that's it. The same thing I did every other weekend. So asking questions like that to kind of start figuring out what are they doing in their normal life can give you, especially for the openness score, start to figure out are they high openness or not. And then I think also just looking at their LinkedIn, what types of things do they do, what's been their kind of career trajectory, what do they talk about if they have content now for other things you could just be more direct. Like, what about this is important to you? And I always ask that when I do discovery calls with lavender and people will say different things and maybe it's about I want my team to really perform well. And that's kind of an obvious one. But they're thinking about the people involved in this decision. Other people are just like, my sales team writes really bad emails and I want them to do better. That's like a very action oriented statement. And some people are like, I think that my, our reply rates are already really, really good, but I think with Lavender it's going to be so much better. So we're already really good status quo, but it's going to be better. They're definitely skewing toward that vision quadrant. Even though they're satisfactory right now, they think they can do a little bit better. And then other people are just like, I really want to see your analytics dashboard. What are your coaching features? I heard this was the gong of email, like what types of things can you say around coaching? And those people that start with the data, I know they're going to be very data driven. And it's always interesting in demos. Sometimes I'll do the analytics and coaching dashboard last the demo and every now and then someone's like, man, I wish we had started with that. And I never hear that. Normally the analytics are like the thing that my Persona, my buyer Persona of the sales rep is the least interested in. But then every now and then you get someone who just wants to dive really deep in the analytics and for them, I know that they're a data driven person. So kind of sussing out what's important to them, you'll start to see trends where they skew into one of these four quadrants.

Yeah, no, I like that. And because that also too, as we keep going down this path, it's like it's forcing you as a rep to really listen, like to not just ask questions, to ask them, but ask with intention. Like I'm trying to find out, like, are they vision oriented, are they action oriented, people oriented or data oriented? And so, and maybe I missed this because we've jumped back and forth between them a little bit. How does the action vision people data cross over with ocean? Because we've kind of like, we talked action, but we've also talked openness, we've talked vision, but also like where I guess, what's the, I guess the link between those? Maybe I missed that connection.

Yeah. So this is something that we actually figured out on our own, like in our own team. Before we were building Lavender, we were building this communication psychology marketing product that was inspired by the science and we applied some of that within Lavender to help write better sales emails. But one of the things we looked at was how do we take someone's personality score? And there's a lot of research around that, around how to predict your personality off of online data, which is what we were looking at when we were building that product. But we knew we had to get the personality science into this framework for how decisions are made to have them actually convert and buying. So we built some models to predict the decision making based on the personality science. So there are some things that you can track back. So people who are going to score really high in openness are going to be more likely to score higher in their vision quadrant. People who are very low on agreeableness, but they're really high in extroversion, meaning that they're going to be putting out energy to get things done. Regardless of what people say, they're just going to break through any sort of barriers. They're going to likely be very action oriented. And then people who are very high on agreeableness, for example, they're going to probably be more people oriented and fall more in that people quadrant because they don't want to have a lot of conflict. They want to get along with everyone around them. And then people who are very high on their conscientiousness, they really want to get all their tasks done. They're very detail oriented and in some cases maybe lower on extraversion, they tend to dive really deep into those details and thus be more data driven. So you don't have to understand all the personality science. And it definitely goes way deeper than this. But the simplest way to think about it is these four quadrants. Action, vision, people and data. And then figure out which one are they going to skew in towards. And we kind of gave them characters. If you were action oriented, you were the mover, and if you were vision oriented, you were the motivator. And if you were people oriented, you were the collaborator. And if you were data oriented, you were the thinker. So it's. You kind of can think of this Persona like what is a thinker going to like, what's the thinker going to respond to? What's the mover going to respond to? They're going to move forward. So I think if you kind of distill the complicated personality science into these four characters, it's much easier to think about. And there's other frameworks out there, like 16 personalities and they're thinking of 16 different characters. And that's a lot. So I think it's just easier to look back at the four and figure out where are they most likely to fall out of these four and then just move forward in your process.

Yeah, no, I really, I really like this. So like, so what we'll do before we, you know, we get into starting to wrap here is let's talk about these four and then just give a couple of quick tips on like okay, if someone is high in action, what are some quick tips when crafting messaging, if someone's high on envision, what are some quick tips? Let's go through each one of those four real quick with some high level like okay, if they're action oriented, here's how you kind of pitch. Here are things that are important in that decision making process.

Cool. So if you look me up in lavender, for example, and you get my personality or my quadrant of thinking, it calls me a mover. So wanting to get things done. And, and if you email me, email me like one question or one or two sentences. If it's a long email, I'm just not even going to read it really. But other people, if you sent them one question, they might just, or one sentence they might be like, what is this? I'm missing so much information. Like if you emailed our CTO that he'd probably just be like, where is all the detail? He's a thinker if you look him up in lavender. So if you're looking at these four Personas and again we'll tell you in the product which one they're likely to fall into. But even if you don't know, making your own assessment from their LinkedIn. If they're a mover, think about anything in your email that is fluff or even in your, in your pitch on the phone. Anything that's fluff, it's going to add friction into their decision making. You want them to understand the key points as quickly as possible and then make a split second decision just to respond to you and then get the next step going. Anything that's going to be a delay, like go find time on my calendar link or something like that. I got enough think about my schedule or even sending me different times. I've got to figure out am I free on those days or not. That's going to slow things down. So just get them to respond before anything else just to move the deal forward, just taking friction as much as possible. And then even for them maybe a pricing type thing. If you're like, hey, if you sign up today, I'm going to do xyz. Like that moves the deal forward in a very structured way for them. Now the Next one, the vision quadrant. That's when you can start thinking about these really good case studies. So like when I pitch Lavender, I always reference Sendoso, who's been Our most effective customer 4x their reply rate in our product in one month. And not everyone achieves those results, although most achieve really great results. But when I anchor Sendoso as like the possibility, people start thinking about that's where we could get to if we use this product and they can. But for them I paint this picture of what are the possibilities you can get to with the product. That's like the vision of, of the, of the four quadrants. So think about your own product and your own service and think about examples like that, where if you do all the things that I'm telling you as a sales rep and use our product appropriately, you're going to get these massive results or you can at least get there and they'll fill in the dots from there. So painting to really successful case studies. Then the third, the, the people oriented ones, these are kind of similar to the vision in that example, but for the people oriented one, they're going to be really curious around how other people have used the product and some cases that may not be your all star testimonial. So when I do this with Lavender, I give two examples. I'll give Sendoso as like a really great example and I'll give a company like Lucidworks who had a lower increase in replies, 42%, they still doubled their meetings booked. And I'll kind of show, here's like a really high example, here's someone who maybe they didn't have as much, but it's still two different testimonials and then they can figure out where they align. So giving testimonials and giving support, offering to talk to other customers, that comes up a lot as well. And then for someone who is more data driven, they're going to likely want to read, or may not read, but at least skim some data, some facts, some figures, maybe a white paper. They may not read that white paper in the very first email you send. So don't send that in the very first one, get the reply first. But at some point they might actually want to look at a white paper or maybe a summary of a white paper. Not the full thing, but see if you sent the white paper to the action oriented person, they're going to have information overload. It's going to create what's known as cognitive load for that reader and they're going to ignore it and they're going to in their list of things in their mind. Like I've got this sales rep sending me this like 20 page white paper. I have to get to that before I can make a decision. They never make that decision. But see if you sent the CTO or the data driven guy just a question or something, he's gonna feel like so much information is missing. So you gotta find this mental matching with your content and your messaging based on how they're going to think. And again, if you don't know, just use some elements of each. Like you can start off and say here's an example of a great customer and here's a testimonial and here's a quick factor figure not every factor figure, just one or two. And here's an easy way to get started and move the deal forward. Just respond yes or no or something like that. So you can kind of hit on each of them if you don't know who they are.

This is so good. This is so much gold. Like this is, this is truthfully is an episode where I'm learning a lot right now, which is just like, I love that when like you just get all this drop. So like this is amazing. So I guess two last kind of questions here as we wrap up is one, where can a rep learn more about some of this stuff? Obviously lavender as a tool, if y' all are listening, like go look this up because this is just a secret weapon to have. But like, what resources, like, are there good books on this, good topics on this that kind of dive into this a little bit more?

Yeah, I'm actually going to plug our old blog. So before we were building lavender and lavender is an email assistant that helps write better emails. We tie a lot of this communication psychology into our product. We don't need our product to understand the psychology. Before we were building it, we were building a marketing product and we still have our blog up and we wrote a lot about how to apply personality psychology, behavioral economics, personality science, et cetera into marketing and revenue in general. So you can go to blog.sorter s o r t e r dot com. It's our old blog. All of our old content is up there for when we were really focusing in on this. From there, if you're interested in your ocean analysis, we have it up@official PersonalityTest.com. it's just the generic Big Five test. And then if you want to go down the rabbit hole, just look up ocean on Wikipedia and just start clicking.

Oh man.

Well, now I know some of the.

Stuff I'm doing this weekend, right, Just pour a good whiskey and dive into it. So this is like I geek out on this stuff. Like I love this stuff. So this is so cool. So now the last question I have for you as we wrap up on time here, right, because the name of this podcast is Live better Sell Better. Because I also have this weird idea, you know, if we took better care of ourselves, if we had more energy, more joy, more enthusiasm across our lives, that the sales would also improve. What would your live better advice be for people listening?

If you have the ability, if your company is remote first and you don't have, you're not tied down with children, things like that work remotely. I've been working in Mexico for the past 18 months and the majority of our products been built with me traveling around Mexico and I think just being open minded to new ways of doing things, new cultures, maybe a less stressful environment than like New York or something where I was. It's been really great for productivity in our product. Our sales have continued to just climb and everything has gone really well since I got out of my day to day just routine and started traveling as a result of COVID and with so many companies now doing remote first and able to work from anywhere, if you have the ability, I would take advantage of that. It's been great for us.

I love that. That was something we were even talking about a little bit of just like changing perspective, changing environment and what's funny. And it's great to see leaders like you doing this is like companies, they're embracing remote, but they're still weird about international with a lot of people.

Yeah.

Where it's like, yeah, you can work remotely. It's like, okay, cool, I'll move to Costa Rica. It's like, well, hold on, don't, don't do that. It's like, well, why not? Like it's remote. Like let me move to Spain, let me move to Brazil, like whatever it is. So I think people listening, like, let your people go like they're getting their work done and let them experience life in a different, different area and different culture. William, my dude, this was amazing. Where can people learn more from you learn more about lavender as a tool. Like where can they get more of what you're putting out right now?

Yeah. So we're pretty active on LinkedIn. Most of our talking on LinkedIn is about sales, sales, email and startups and kind of building a startup in public for the product lavender AI that will link to us on LinkedIn. Also you can install the product and give it a try for free. But really, LinkedIn is where we spend a lot of our time as far as putting out content and being active in the community. Awesome.

Well, we will include a link in the show notes here man. William, I appreciate your time, energy and insights man.

This was really good. Thanks Katie. Glad you enjoyed it.