Sales is easy... PEOPLE are complex with Mike Lever

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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 Doyle Dorsey, AKA kd. And today we're talking about the hardest part of sales and sales leadership. People. With all the focus on products, tools, Personas, automation, B2B, B2C. It feels like the sales industry has lost sight of the one underlying commonality, which is people. People sell, people buy. And that's why I'm so excited to have Mike Lever on the show today. Because Mike is an expert when it comes to things. Human behavior, buyer behavior, insights, and most importantly, how to change our behavior and our prospects behavior for the better. He's a national speaker on buyer behavior, creator of the ABCD and the 3WT method. We're going deep on psychology and behavior today. Mike, my man, welcome to the show.

Yeah, I hope I can live up to that introduction. That's not too bad, Kevin, is it? I'll have some of that, yeah.

No, I mean, I'm just speaking the truth. That's what makes this exciting is these are the things that you dive into. And, and speaking of dive into, that's why people listen to the show is we go right into the tactics. So we're going to go into this right away. The ABCD behavior model.

Yeah.

What is it and why does it matter?

Well, it matters to me. And it all goes back, probably goes back about six, seven years now. And I was working with a doctor of psychology who was a specialist in the consumer behavior side. And he's been doing that for about 30, 35 years. And innocently one day I said to him, he's called John. I said, John, why do people behave the way they do? Why on earth do some people do. Some people do some things and you kind of see it and you scratch your head and go, what were they thinking? And obviously only ever other people, never yourself, isn't it? It's always other people who get your head scratched and think why do people do what they do? And John being the academic he was, he didn't answer it. He just set me off to go and do some research. And three years later, and I took a qualification in neuroeconomics along the way, and I'm sure you'll have a ton of questions about that, but three years later I drew up a model and I'd set myself a challenge which was it's got to explain human behavior, adult human behavior, children's human behavior is far too complex, so keep away from that. But adult human behavior is the bit that I wanted to look at, but I wanted to not only understand from an academic point of view, I didn't want to just draw up a model that said there you go, that's too high level, you can't do anything with it. I wanted it to apply initially to sales because that's my bag. I wanted it to apply to sales. And what I realized very quickly was there were four key components that can cause us to change our behavior, but it also means that you can observe other people and see. So whether they're the customer, whether it's a member of your team, whether it's someone you're coaching, what can I do to understand and therefore influence their behavior? But really, as sales, exactly what you said at the top there, everything came back to the seller. So what is it the seller can do to influence the performance if you like, so that the customer does want to buy and wants to buy more and it doesn't matter if it's B2B, B2C or B2B to C, whatever, it doesn't matter what they're selling. It all boiled down to what can we do to cause this to happen? And the model I set myself for so many challenges. I had to be able to draw it on one sheet of A4 paper. I had to be able to explain it in under 10 minutes. It had to have practical application, which I'm pleased it does. It had to apply. It didn't matter what sales methodology the seller was already using. It had to fit with that. If they didn't have a sales methodology, it had to sit with that, and it had to be able to be used everywhere in the world. So in other words, it crossed all cultures and it crossed all sectors and industries. And it does. But what does the ABCD mean? The abcd? Four words. Awareness bias, comfort, as in comfort zones and decisions. And they are the four key ingredients that sit within a bigger model, which is the ABCD model of behavior. And yeah, I have a phrase I use which kind of is the. The strap line for it, which doesn't make me many friends in the sales industry, which is, selling is easy, but people are complex. And I've sold a lot of different stuff in a lot of different places. And selling is easy. The process of sales is very easy. You know, somebody's here for what your customer is here, wherever here is. And for whatever reasons that same person wants to be there, wherever there is, and for whatever reasons, and we all know it's, how do I get them from here to there? That's it. Whatever you're selling and whatever the process, that's it. But the people bit makes it complicated. The seller makes it complicated, the buyer makes it complicated. And in B2B, it's even more complex because there's a whole bunch of buyers, some of whom you never meet. So that's the gist of it, Kevin. No, it couldn't be any more straightforward than that, could it?

Yeah, straightforward. Don't worry, we'll get into it for sure here. But I think that's the key of this and why I was pumped to have this conversation. Because sellers don't read buyer, economic and buyer behaviors. They don't read Neuroeconomics. They don't read Consumer Psychology.

Everything.

Salespeople. Well, let's be honest, most salespeople don't read anyway. But even of the ones that do read, they're not reading Consumer psychology.

Right?

They're not reading. There was a great quote from Bezos back in the day, and I've loved this ever since someone interviewed him. They're asking, like, how does Amazon stay ahead? How do you Keep knowing what's going to happen and stay ahead and innovate. His response was so great. And it's where we're going to go with this conversation. He said, well, what I think makes us unique is I actually don't think about what is going to change. I think about what isn't. And that's where we double down. Buyers are not ever going to want more expensive prices. Buyers are not ever going to want longer shipping. Buyers are not ever gonna want fewer selections with less trustworthy products. And we focus on what isn't going to change and we master it. And so this is why I'm pumped to talk behavior, because people haven't changed that much over the past millennia in terms of what drives us. So let's start getting into the A, B, C, D. As you said, A is awareness. So what does that mean and how does a seller use it?

So if you think about the brain, this massive supercomputer we're all carrying around with us, mine goes on the blink now and again, but it's semi reliable. But we carry around this phenomenally powerful computer in our head and it can do all these wonderful things. And they have put it up against computers. They did some, I think it was a joint piece of work between some German researchers and some Japanese researchers back in 2014. They did this fabulous piece of work and they kind of pitted the human brain, the adult human brain, against what was then the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world. And the human brain smashed it. It came out like 240,000 times more powerful. So you think about that. So everybody's got one of these things that they're carrying around. Now, on the other hand, you have got access to it, but you've got quite limited access to it. So as you know, the subconscious does all the work, it does all the hard graph. And then you've got the conscious bit of the brain, takes all the credit for it. But you've got such a small amount that you can choose to focus on. And right now is a good example of it. So we can see each other, we can hear each other, and I'm aware of the background that I can see on your in the room that you're in. But I can only focus on so much of that at any one time. I can't focus on all the information coming in. There's calculations been done, the wreck, and it's about 11 million bits of information per second coming in now. I can't process that. The brain does it, but I can't so I'm given a small amount. Some say it's between five and nine. So we go for about seven bits of information that I can focus on now. When I'm with a potential client, I better make sure that I'm focusing on the bits that I need to focus on because I've been given a gift there. Even if it's only five bits of information, my awareness better be what am I choosing to focus on right now? Which means I've got to get rid of all the other distractions and there's techniques for doing that, but even at the top of it, I need to be aware of what am I focusing on right now and what do I need to stop focusing on. Because I've only been given. Even if it's five things, I've got five bits to focus on. So if I've had a rough journey getting to that client's premises, that's not one of the things I can focus on right now. If we're doing it over zoom or teams or whatever it might be, and I've been having trouble with my Internet connection, that better not be one of the things I'm focusing on right now. So we have to push all of that aside and say. People call it being in the moment, but I explain what it means to be in the moment and say, what am I focusing on right now? And why.

I love that. Like, one of the themes for my own team right now is execution with intention. And intention is the word that we harp on the most. Are you being intentional with that cold call, with that email, with that demo, with your meetings, with your one on one? Like, what's your intention? Because intention will bring you to the present moment. So I think that's really key. So awareness focused, right? We're in the moment, we're giving everything we can to our buyer, processing the bits that we can. Now, I want to talk about this B, because this might open up a whole can of worms right around biases.

So the bias piece. So bias is not a. It's not a pleasant word in everyday conversation, but bias is a really important thing that happens in our brain. So that can that you're drinking from right now, you've never drunk, I'm guessing you've never drunk from that particular can before. So imagine if, even though you've drunk that drink many times before, in very similar, almost identical packaging, imagine if you'd had to have been trained before you opened that can on how to open that can, how to hold it and how to drink from it. That's going to make life pretty exhausting every single time you use a new pen. I've got to be trained on this. I'm sitting in a new chair. I'm going to have to train you on how to sit down. We can't go through life having to be trained on every single thing when we've done something incredibly similar before. So one of the biases that we have is we take shortcuts, and more commonly they're known as heuristics. But we have these rules of thumb that I know how to open this can, I know how to drink from it, and that serves as well. So there are good biases, the bad biases, and there's about 200 of them have been cataloged by Kahneman and his associates over the years. So Daniel Kahneman's the kind of the godfather of all of this. And the biases affect us in sales primarily through language. So your last podcast, which was really good, talking about those deep dive conversations, those deep dive questions, as opposed to this floating on the top of the surface, is a really good example of bias. And this fits again in with my model. So one of the bits that's in the model is the filters that we look through or the lenses that we look through. And the main three that I talk about are the mirror, the microscope, and the telescope. Now, I've observed enough salespeople to recognize that some people will only ever ask questions that are based on the product or the service they're trying to sell. So what they're really doing is they're holding up a mirror saying, I've got this product or service, and all my questions are so blatantly geared around it, I'm just going to chuck some stuff and see if it sticks. That's not good. But that's their bias. Equally, you'll have some people who will ask the questions that are a bit cleaner through the microscope lens. But what that normally sounds like is a whole bunch of operational questions and that might be appropriate to what they're selling, but probably not going to lead to long term trusted advisor status. And then you've got people who will only ever ask questions through the telescope, and they'll ask a whole bunch of strategic questions and miss out some of the operational stuff. So the trick is, so you can see how it links back to awareness, am I aware enough of the questions and the shape of them that I'm asking? And through the bias piece, I might break my bias of I tend to ask these questions because I'm looking at it through this lens and then critically, the flip side of it is when I'm listening, am I listening or am I just scanning? And the big one that most sellers I've ever come across are guilty of is the confirmation bias, which is I know this, therefore I'm going to scan for that. And once I've heard that I'm going to jump on it. Yeah, but what about all this other stuff that they said for the last 20 minutes that you've noticed you've not been paying attention to? So awareness and bias are so interlinked that we can break the awareness piece and in doing so we can start to affect the shape of the questions that we ask, which is critical. And this is before we even get into the fun stuff like body language, because the number of people who think they can read body language and really can't. And to be fair, it's probably possibly down to training that they've had which is based on just made up stuff. I mean people who pedal the whole Moravian 55, 38, 7% without ever having read Moravians on papers, so they jump to these crazy conclusions that you know, oh, it's all 93% of communication is nonverbal. It's a load of rubbish. If that was the case, we could do this without speaking.

Right? It's true and it is so fun. Matt, this is gonna get fun because we read some of the similar things. So I'm actually reading a book right now called the Art of Impossible and one of the sections in there it talks about is the brain is a comparison. A comparison and prediction machine.

Yes.

It's constantly comparing and trying to predict what will happen in a certain circumstance. And that when it comes to language we actually can't communicate without comparison. You can't describe, dark or understand it without the concept of light. And so as so often with salespeople, we have to find what we can compare it to that they will understand. Whereas sales often is taught as like tell them how different it is. This is so new, so shiny, so great, so extraordinary. If they have nothing to compare it to, that's what then causes the lack of understanding or buy in. So I think that's, that's awesome. Talking biases, past behaviors, choices they've made, how they compare. And I love the mirror, microscope, telescope and to listen because where salespeople I think trip on this is you have to listen to the types of questions you're getting asked. So it's not just what they're saying. Are they asking you mirror questions, telescope questions, or microscope questions, so you can pick up on what seems to matter to them. So I think that's really, really good. I love it. Okay, so we got awareness, we got bias. Now we're into comfort.

Yeah, well, it's comfort zones. The whole prison zone fits in beautifully with what you're talking about. So the we are. There's a lot gets written about comfort zones. I think they get a bit of a bad rap, to be honest. Comfort zones are very important to us as an animal. We cannot constantly live outside of our comfort zone because mentally and physically, it will break you. I've got friends who have been in the Special Forces and they go through very specific training. You may well have friends similar. And they go. They are gradually taken outside of it. No one throws them into a ridiculous situation because they know it will break them. And the CIA changed their whole interrogation techniques because they found that quite a lot of the things that they were told to do, they simply don't work. You don't get the useful information that you need by throwing someone so far out of their comfort zone that they're in a crisis, meltdown situation. It doesn't work. We can wander out of our comfort zone for so far and for so long, but only we're safe in the knowledge that we can retreat back in. And of course, through life, we start to push that out. And for some people, having this conversation with you would be too intimidating because you are Kevin Dorsey. And some people will be. They'll be frightened at the prospect of, oh, my God, I can't handle this. But it's through a process of what are the steps that have got us to where we are. I've pushed the comfort zone out a bit further. And we're happy with that. The problem lies in if you were only ever in your comfort zone, you pretty much only ever do what you ever did. And if you're too far out your comfort zone, you're not going to make a good decision because of the way the brain biology works. So the release of different chemicals will cause you to operate in a different way. And from a sales point of view, this is great. Do you remember back in the day as a relatively young puppy in sales, and it might be your line manager or whoever it was, I'm going to come out with you, I'm going to observe you. I want to listen to you do some calls, and you get asked questions that were so run of the mill and things that you've answered like a million times before, but because you were Being observed, you couldn't remember or you didn't listen to it and you couldn't come up with a solution. Well, that's your brain trying to protect you. Because what happens is, from a comfort zone point of view, we've all got a different threshold. But when you're under stress, your brain goes, right, Mike's feeling a bit stressed there, let's release a bit of cortisol to try and calm him down. Okay, so your brain releases a bit of cortisol. It's not working. We need to pump some more in. But I've got a threshold, My brain's got a threshold that says, you go past this level of cortisol and we're going to start shutting off some of your executive functioning. And from a sales point of view, it's hilarious, because what are the three bits that get shut off? Listening. You don't need listening. It's a luxury we'll put your hearing on, but your listening is going to get shut off because you're in a threat situation. Access to memory. Now, this is all down to whatever your muscle memory is now. You're going to go straight to. Every one of your biases will now kick in because we're not going to give you access to memory because you don't need that now. We haven't got luxury and we're going to shut off your access to creativity. Now, you think as a salesperson, being observed. And I know this, all of those three things have gone. Now, the beautiful bit is the brain was designed to have this failsafe built in. But we were also given the override switch, but too few people know about the override switch. And it's the simplest thing. The technical term for it is the vagus nerve. And we can stimulate the vagus nerve, but all it's through is breathing. Breathe in through the nose, breathe out through the mouth. As long as the exhale is longer than the inhale. After a while, tells your brain the amygdala, step down, everything's good, we're back in control. Cortisol stops getting produced. Your brain goes, all right, we're good with this. Here's your executive functioning back. But these things happen. Now you link that back to awareness. If sellers were told this from day one, one of your secret tricks is do your breathing. Now. We're not sending them off to a yoga retreat for six months. We're just saying this will happen. And this is what you do about it.

It's so true. It's so true. We actually do talk about this internally on my own team, like before a call blitz or before a big demo, like, we talk about breathing. We've done breathing exercises as a group and as a team because of this, right? And this is also why I actually don't believe in shadowing. I believe in review and practice. I don't believe in shadowing because of what you just mentioned. Now, we can get into quantum physics, right? But anything observed changes its behavior. Anything, right down to the particle. A particle being observed acts differently than not observed. And so that observation crushes a lot of people. I'm so glad you called out breathing, because generally speaking, we hold our breath, right, when we start getting in stress, which only amps it up even more. And so I hope people caught that. It's just a very simple technique to bring the functions back. Because I also think as an industry, sales has created this fear environment, right? Like you're always on. If you don't hit quota, you could lose your job. You don't know what you're going to make. Like, there's so much uncertainty built in. In that it causes these things. So we wonder why salespeople aren't good listeners. We wonder why salespeople aren't.

So with the listening. I love the listening piece, as you probably know. So over here we've got the National Health Service, the nhs. So that's our free. At the point of access, we have our NHS system. And within the NHS they have a listening team. So they have a team who are specialists in hearing and listening. And we have our techniques that we train out. And we had the opportunity to speak with some of the folks in the NHS listening team and we wanted to compare techniques. So we said to them, this is how we train people to listen. And they said, that's exactly what we do. And then they said, you know when they do that cheeky leaning and go, do you want to know the advanced stuff we do? It's like, yeah. So what they said, the issue is a lot of people will go to the NHS thinking that they need a hearing aid. They don't. They've just forgotten how to listen. So what they do is, they said, we give them techniques that help them to listen more. And this is brilliant. I mean, this is so simple. So the tech. I'm going to share it with you right now, what you do is you put your TV on and you have the TV on, on, say a news channel. It's not a music channel. It can't be a film or anything. Like, it needs to be on something Like a news channel. And then you get something like a radio, you get whatever it is. So you got your tv, you got your radio, you have them at the same volume and you have them near each other, so the sounds coming out from the same place and you have the radio on a talk show or again on the news, but they're going to be on two different channels. So you've got two different voices coming out. And what you do is you choose to listen to one of them for, say, 90 seconds or for two minutes. So what you're doing is you're not just learning to listen, you're learning to block out. So it links back into awareness. It sits with bias as well. And then what you do is after, say, 90 seconds, 120 seconds, you switch to the other sound source. So they're both still playing, but you switch between which one am I now actively listening to? So it's all right people saying, you've got to actively listen. Okay, do you want. I'd never met a salesperson who had been trained on how to actively listen. So we train listening.

So I want to go a layer deeper here, though, because to me, though, that still I think falls into the bucket of actively hearing, but maybe not actively listening, because in a sales environment, you are only talking to that one person, right? So you're not having to choose between everything. But I still don't think a lot of salespeople listen. They hear it, they. But they're not actually taking the content out and being able to apply it. So do you see a difference there? Cause I agree with being able to direct what inputs you're allowing to come in. But I still don't think most salespeople are great listeners. They're hearing me, I'm not listening.

So then this is the next step, which is, what are you actually listening for? And there's some good stuff that's been shared by Chris Voss and the Black Swan group. Some really good stuff out there. Again, sitting with the model. There's a saying which is treat other people how. And most people say how you like to be trapped. It's a lot of rubbish. Treat other people how they like to be trapped. So there's number one, because otherwise all your biases are going to come into play. So when it comes to listening, what's one of the things that we listen for? Well, from our side, we work with the. The output from Shelly Roh Chavez research. So we talk about, is this person using towards or away from language? Is this person demonstrating that they, like, process or they want options. Is this person a reactive or proactive speaker? Has this person gone external or are they still internal? And this is what we're looking for. So, yes, there's an intent piece, which is important, but we need to understand what are the language patterns going on here? Because again, how many people talk about rapport but without explaining, well, what does that mean and how do you keep it? And more importantly, how do you stop from breaking it? While at the heart of it is, were you making sure that you listened for and applied the language patterns or did you just press on with how you speak?

I thought all I had to do.

To build rapport was talk about the weather over here. You can't go wrong with that. Okay, yeah, don't let yourself over to Britain. No problem. Talk about the weather all day long, all day long.

That's all you know, that's all. Just find a commonality. That's all you need to do to build rapport. So.

And the problem is how many people are still being trained? How many people today were trained that? How many people today were told, I'm going to train you on how to sell? And it's all based on how I sell? All right, that's great for you, but how many people have you seen wandering around with a. With a selfie stick, giving it all, you know, I'm going to tell you how to sell? And it's all based on my success? Well, it's great it works for you, but doesn't mean it's going to work for other people. It's a nonsense. So how many people get sales training time and money thrown at them, but it's never going to work because it will only work for that person who says, well, it works for me. Well, bully for you. It doesn't mean it's going to work for everyone else.

And that's something that I really harp on with my team and with my managers is we try to make the foundation of what we teach people. No matter what product, no matter who you work for, you can do this anywhere, right? There are definitely things that I would personally do as a salesperson that my team isn't ready to pull off yet. They're not ready for that yet. They don't have the experience in that yet. And trying to teach them, like with my managers, anytime I hire a new manager, someone gets promoted, the first thing that I say to them, I am not you. You are not me. We are not them and they are not us. And you need to understand, you can't just Teach the way you were taught. You can't just sell the way you sold. That's not how this works. And you need to create systems and processes that other people can follow with foundational things. Right. Doesn't have to be fully scripted, doesn't have to be perfect, perfect. But there's foundations, there's systems, there's things that we can do in here, like your abcd, right. There's ways to leverage it at an individual level. It's not just black or white. So we did Comfort Zone, which I love. Now we get this last one, decisions.

The D is the decision making. So all of those things affect the decisions we make. And there's a separate piece of play which is courtesy of a bit of the brain called the orbital frontal cortex. But the decisions piece, we become more aware, we're more aware of the decisions we're making. We break the bias. If we don't break the bias, we're just going to make the decisions for the same reasons we always did. If we're in the comfort zone, we'll make the decisions we always did. If we're too far out the comfort zone, we'll have decision paralysis and we won't make any decisions and who knows what's going to come out. So all of that feeds through to the ultimately decisions we make. In turn, all of that feeds through to the beliefs, which then feeds through into the behaviors. And that's the behaviour bit is what does my customer say I'm doing? What does my customer hear that I'm asking them, and how am I doing it? So everything pops out as a behavior, but it's what's going on inside the seller's head and equally what's going on inside the buyer's head. But what's going on in there that I can choose to control or just say I'm not going to control it. I'm not going to affect awareness, bias, comfort, decisions. I'm just going to do what I always do. And if you do that, it's a Sales is a numbers game all day long. Sales is only a numbers game if we choose to ignore what goes on in the head. As soon as you start to take control of that. Not a numbers game anymore. So we've proven this. I mean, I've been able to show salespeople, just by taking them through this model and a couple of associated bits, they will double their conversion rates. And that's before I give them any tools on how to ask different questions. That's just by understanding that this thing exists. They will double their conversion rates.

I like it. Now you and I can debate on whether it's a number game or not, because conversion rate is still a number. And so.

What I do is I give them this as a new input. Yes. And sales will always. Because commercials, they'll always want to see what the output is. One of the outputs they want to look at is the conversion rate. And that's fine. I'll show them how to change one of their core inputs. If they want to measure that, it's fine. But the feedback comes back that this is doubled our conversion rates. Great.

And that's in line with how we coach as well. It's like behaviors affect the outputs.

Yes.

Right. You can't just say, improve your conversion. Something at a behavior or skill level has to change in order to improve that. Now, something popped in my head as you're talking. I want to back up on biases, right?

Yes.

On the seller side, I guess, or on the prospect side. Are you trying to break their biases or do you lean into their biases? Right. So if this is how they've made decisions before for, or if this is their mental model of the world, are you trying to shift that or are you trying to discover that so you can lean into some of those biases?

So the cop out answer is a little bit of both. And I'll give you an example. So for quite a long time, I was involved in financial services and I would work with mortgage advisors. And one of the common questions, so if you had a couple who were coming to get a new mortgage because they've been on a deal, the deal's finished, they want to go on a new deal. And it might be that they were with Lender X in the past. And one of the things that typically a mortgage advisor would ask is, what deal did you sign up for before? And they say, well, it was five years ago and we signed up for this. And the lazy seller would say, so do you want the same? Now the customer's thinking, this is familiar. I know where this went last time. I'm comfortable with that. Yeah, let's go with that. And the number of people who would end up going from, well, I was on this deal previously, or you offer something similar, I'm very comfortable with that. All my biases, every box is ticked. We'll go with that again. That's really not the point of a mortgage advisor. It should be to understand, okay, you did that before, that's great. And maybe we'll explore the understanding for that. But let's look at because that was then five years ago. Where are you now? And talk me through the expected journey of the next five years. Now, part of the problem is too many sellers are trained on. And again, this will have happened today somewhere in the world there will have been sellers who've been trained on features and benefits. And I have never met one person in my life who has ever bought anything on the back of the feature or benefit of a product or service. Because we don't. We're not wired to buy on the back of. But too many sellers are told you sell on the back of features and benefits. And all this is supposed to sit in with the biases and whether we're challenging it or we lean into it or what's a nonsense. Now, we'll buy on the back of motivators and we'll buy on the back of our primary and secondary motivators. But I've never met anyone ever who was bought on the back of the features and benefits of a product or service. So then that's too many. Too many sellers leave it up to the customer or the prospect at a subconscious level to make the connection. And they hope they can make the connection between, well, I'm talking features and benefits and somewhere in your subconscious going, well, I'm only interested in primary and secondary motivators. Does that match? I think that matches. Right, we'll go with that. So it's. We speak in two different languages and again, this is part of the awareness and part of the bias from the model.

So then I'm glad you connected the dots there at the end.

I was like, hold on.

Like, benefits matter as long as they are connected to the why. Right. So we call them internal whys, why's, motivators. So how do you find out some of those things? Right.

Because you ask the right questions.

There we go.

And this is it. This is why it's not complicated. So again, you go back to we need to ask the right questions. Well, what we're trying to understand links back to the listening piece. What do I understand? Well, I need to understand what are your reasons for wanting to do this and if it has been done, what does that allow you to go on and do? So if you're selling, I'll give you an example. So I worked with the owners of a wedding dress boutique, okay. Which is a pretty niche sector. And I was explaining to them and said, what is it? And I asked the group, I said, if you were the bride, what is your primary motivator for coming into this boutique, right? If that's now been ticked, what does that enable you to do? And it was so funny around the room, there was this aha moment. The penny dropped for every one of them. They went, we get it now, we get it. And then you can work back and go, so what are the questions we need to ask to understand those things? And they realized this is not a complex thing, but what they've been taught to do in the past was to talk about features and benefits. And they realized it's irrelevant. They don't care if this was designed in Italy and made in Spain and it's using these techniques. They don't care less about that. They want to know is where does this sit with my primary motivates? Did I make a good choice to come here in the first place and to do these things? And ultimately, if I can tick those boxes, what does that then allow me to do? It means I can do these things. Financial service. I work with a lot of financial services institutes. And again, people want to put the money away. Okay, well, why do the. Why do they want to put the money away? Well, they want to tick these boxes. Okay, and when that's been ticked, which by the way, you can do in a whole lot of other places, what does that allow them to then get on and do? All right, I get it.

Love it, I love it. We actually, in August or September, we did a big, like a lot of work on like emotion based selling, where it is.

Like, why?

Okay, oh, they want to make more money. Why? Everyone says they want to make more money. Why? Oh, well, to invest.

Why?

And we went like three layers deep, why? On why people would do these things and go through and to pull those things out. And our top sellers always are able to link back to the whys with the benefits.

And it's a funny one though, isn't it? The why one's an interesting one. Because again, children are very good at asking that. So that natural curiosity. But the problem kind of comes about as we get older and we see it as a threatening question or perceive it to be a threatening question. That's great. We've got. There's enough words in the language to ask, all right, Kevin, I want you to imagine that that's been done. We fulfilled it. We tick that box. What does that mean? What does that then allow you to. What does that give you freedom to go and do? Or what does that prevent from happening now? So again, you need to tie all of this up. How many salespeople have been recruited on the basis of they're good at finding solutions and fixing things. Great. All that's telling me is you've got towards language pattern. What happens when you meet a client who's gotten away from. They don't want to fix things, they want to prevent things, they want to avoid things that seller and that customer are not going to get on might look like on the face of it, that rapport is going to get broken. And neither of them will understand why, because they'll go away and go, well, I like them, but for some reason it didn't. I don't quite want to buy from them. So it's interesting how all of it's like one big jigsaw. All these pieces come together to make.

That's why I love it. That's why I love it.

It's really interesting.

It is like this. This is like, for me, the close to me is actually the least exciting part of the sales process. I love all the stuff we're talking about taking someone from 0 to 99. Once someone's at 99, the close is simple. It's all the other things that lead up to it where I think the true art and the science of all this starts to come in, which I love.

And so.

And I want to make a shift here real quick before we wrap because I really wanted to get into buyer psychology.

Yes.

How people make buying decisions. Let's talk about this real quick. You know, obviously you're well read on this. You're well studied on this. You teach it. What do you think are two to three key things that sellers should know about buyer behavior that would help them close more deals?

So the first thing is, and it picks up on what you've just said about closing. Again, loads of people will talk about and will be taught what buying signals look like. And there is a mental. There is a mental process that happens which causes somebody to be ready to be closed. And there is a physical buying signal. There's one. There is one facial buying signal. So the facial buying signal looks like this. That was it. I did the facial buying signal, which is so subtle, most people miss it. It looks like someone's just had a little suck of a lemon. So they will purse their lips ever so slightly. It is so subtle. So the physical buying signal is that it's not the whole leaning in for the pen or trying to get, you know, it's none of that rubbish. It is this very subtle shift of the mouth. Now, what happens in the brain, and I mentioned before, the internal and external, you will have people who will make up their own mind. So you get folks who come in and they want to make up their own mind on things. As soon as they go external, they are now inviting you with your expertise to say, this is what we need to do. And what it sounds like is something like, what would you do? That's as complex as it gets. But mentally that represents a shift from I'm internal to I'm now going external. So I'm inviting your opinion in and we need to be ready for that. Because you know what, that could happen in five minutes into a call. That could happen an hour into a call. It might happen two months into it. Depends what that cycle is. So there's a physical one which most people will miss. There's the verbal one, which is that manifestation of the internal bit that's gone on. So I've gone from internal to external, but from a brain point of view, the bit that we can affect and this sits with awareness. Again, as I mentioned before, the orbital frontal cortex. The orbital frontal cortex sits at the front of the brain. So it's part of the executive functioning piece. And there's a lot of bits of the brain that are involved in decision making. But the orbital frontal cortex is kind of the gatekeeper to, to it all. And what happens is if the orbital frontal cortex has been engaged, it allows us to make decisions. It's got two jobs. The first one is it helps us to make sense of our emotions and to make sense of other people's emotions. And it allows us to make decisions. It activates the decision making process. And what it means is if somebody is in a positive state, whether that's naturally they're in a positive frame of mind, or whether it's been induced into them for whatever reason, if somebody is in that positive state of mind, they would not only go on to make a decision, but they're much more likely to buy and to buy more, and they will be more adventurous. Now you put this in traditional sales speak, that means you're going to get an upsell and a cross sell. And you put it in McDonald's terms. Do you want fries with that? And you want to go large? So the key, this all boils back down to how do I engage then the orbital frontal cortex, how do I cause somebody to be in that positive state of mind? How do I put them on what we call the green line? And the trick is you've got to make sure that that prospect is on the green line, is in a positive state of mind. So that they are going to want to buy and they are going to want to buy more, and they will consider things that previously they wouldn't have done. So you've expanded their comfort zone. You switched off some of their biases purely by causing an engagement of the orbital frontal cortex. Now, I'm sure you've heard of buyer's remorse, where you buy something, then you wish you hadn't. When you buy, when your orbital frontal cortex has been engaged, when you buy in those cases, it is the complete opposite of buyer's remorse. And when you buy with your orbital frontal cortex engaged, the brain rewards you with a release of dopamine. So it's the complete opposite of buyer's remorse. Not only do you feel like you've made a good decision, you've programmed yourself to want to do it again. So the trick is, get somebody on the green line, put them in a positive state. How do we do that? Some really easy things. You smile, you say hello, you know, you listen when they talk, you ask sensible questions. All of these things are really straightforward, but they're so key to cause that prospect to be on the green line so that the orbital frontal cortex is engaged.

I think that it's key, the smiling, the hello, treating people well, even manners, storytelling, all of those things really pull in. And it's the emotion side. And I think to your earlier point of. So many sellers have been taught features and benefits and they try to make it very logical, it becomes very logical. And that's not how we make decisions. Right. You've read the studies. If that part of the brain that controls the emotions is too damaged, we can't make a decision. We'll know what to do, but we can't even make it.

Phineas Gage is still the most written about in history for this. And you're going back almost 200 years for that case, but it's still the most commonly written book on it. Case study, but it's been proven time and again. You know, there are people living with this now, and it's funny enough, I trained somebody and we're having this very conversation, and she disclosed, she says hers was underdeveloped and she finds it difficult not only to make decisions, but to process and read emotions and understand her own emotions. So I've met somebody with an underdeveloped orbital frontal cortex who said, this is what it's like living with it.

That's crazy. This is why I love this stuff. Our brains, we know so much about the world around us and we still know so little about the world in us, so little about how our brains work. And so now with. Oh, go ahead.

No, I was just going to say there was a bit of a pebble thrown into the lake a couple of years ago. So there's the functional MRI scanners, which are proving to be really useful in supposedly helping us to understand which bits of the brain do what. And one of the original team who worked on developing them had started a longitudinal study, and it was either a 10 or 15 year study that just kicked off. And what they realized very quickly was that they were wrong from day one. They got it wrong in terms of what the MRI scanners were actually able to do and what they've realized. And they've had to restart their own study. But what they realized, it doesn't necessarily tell us that that bit the brain does this just because it engages, just because it lights up, just because the date shows that some blood has gone there does not mean it does what they thought it did. Now, the work that I've been doing, it's important that from a neuroeconomics point of view, it looks at economics, it looks at psychology, but it looks at brain biology. And it's not reliant on MRI scans. So it is based on other ways of discovering. Does this bit the brain actually do what it's suggested? It's done. And the model itself has been independently verified by two doctors of psychology and a clinical psychotherapist. So it's been rubber stamped as robust three times.

That is amazing. I am loving this stuff, man. Now, man, I want to keep going for forever now, but I got to wrap this up eventually because I know we're throwing a lot at people. So I got two questions left here. The first is I call it the big three. We've been riffing for almost an hour on this stuff, right? And you also know with the brain, in terms of memory, we remember what happens at the beginning, and a lot of times we'll remember what happens at the end. So if you could give people the three key things from our conversation today that you think would make them a better salesperson, what would those three things be?

I would say that most of them will link to the awareness and the bias, and it would be get a coach. Now, that doesn't mean you've got to go out and spend $500 an hour on somebody who's going to coach you, but get somebody who you trust who will ask you some of the questions about what you're doing and why you're doing it. So we Said about shadowing. Normally shadowing isn't great because it's your boss who's doing it in a very formal capacity. Not always, but often. But if you've got the possibility of somebody listening in and reviewing and being able to ask you, you know, you said this, why did you do that? You can record the interactions. Great. And go back over it. That is good because it doesn't cause it to happen in the moment, but it helps to break some of those awareness and bias. So I'm putting coaching inverted commas, but get a coach. The second one is it's quite common for people to say I reflect on it at the end of the day, keep a journal. And there's some good reasons for doing that. I would say don't rely on reflection and echoing what you said about memory because your memory will distort the truth. It will always try and make you look like the good guy doesn't want to show that you made mistakes. And we never access the same memory twice. So don't rely on your memory. Be in the moment. Which links to the third bit, which is you've got to take more of a scientific approach, which links back to the focus piece, which is what am I actually observing now? So if we've got luxury of five things that we could can focus on, dedicate one of them to focus on what you're actually doing in the moment. The other four will serve you enough to deal with the prospect, the client you're talking to. But invest one of those in yourself. In terms of what am I asking? Why did I ask that? What am I trying to achieve here? There's a cheeky fourth one which goes with it, if that's all right. Which is before you have these. Define what perfect is going to be, not what the fallback option will be, not what the easy option is, but what's the perfect outcome that we could be looking at here. And define that in advance, because if you do that in advance, that will trigger that awareness to be more heightened, that will challenge the biases that will allow you. It gives you permission to expand the comfort zone and it will cause the decisions to be different. So there you go. You asked for three, I gave you four. I love it.

Just a rebel to the core. Like, I'm not going to stop at three. I'm gonna go with four, too. And so. Okay, right, whatever. I got more than that. Kd. Shoot. Don't limit me. And then the last one here, man. And a lot of what we've talked about, I think falls into this bucket. Right? But the name of the podcast is Live Better Sell Better. Right? Like, I have this really weird idea that if we took better care of ourselves, that we were more fulfilled in life, that we had more energy or joy or focus, that our sales also go up. What would your live better advice be for people to get more out of life? Whether that is energy, focus, joy, like, what would that advice be?

So. So what you don't know is this is my second life in 13 years ago, I should have died. So I had a brain hemorrhage. And the brain hemorrhage I had normally kills people instantly. And for whatever reason, I got through it. I mean, I have a permanent migraine. So from waking up to go to sleep every single day, I have a migraine. And I'm not allowed any medication for it. So I've got one right now. I had to learn to walk again, which is rough. And I know there's a lot of people around the world who are going through a lot more with COVID but I can genuinely empathize with that because of what I've been through. And the model itself isn't just for sales because it's about human behavior. What it means is we are able to look at it and apply different stickers. So one of the bits on the model is identity. So how do I self identify? And for too long, I put myself down as a victim, which was, woe is me. Why did I have to go through this? Why do I have to live with a constant migraine? Why did I have to learn to walk again? What is all of this? And as soon as I took that off and I replaced it with a survivor, my behavior has changed. That's all it took. But in here, I was all, oh, this isn't fair. Life's not fair. And it's like, hang on, this is up to how am I self identifying? Because my option is take that sticker off, stop feeling sorry for myself, and put on, well, I'm a stroke survivor. If I can survive what most people don't, I'm ahead of the game here. And all of that feeds through into it. Affects our values, affects our motivators, affects our beliefs, affects our attitude. It all pops out as, what's the behavior then?

I love it. I love it. The identity is so important and how that affects everything you've already talked about with the awareness and your biases and all that can change just from an identity change and making that decision. We might have to riff again at another time. Not A lot of people know this, but I also had a very near death experience experience in college from a staph infection. So I was six inches away from this podcast not even being a thing. So we can riff on that sometime. But dude, this, I mean complete. And this is not a noctie. This completely blew away my expectations. I didn't know what to expect coming into this. I didn't know all this stuff you were going to drop. This was phenomenal. Like, how can people get more of you? Like where can they find you? Where can they follow you? Like, what do you have out there where people can get more?

Just connect with me on LinkedIn. You know, I've got some of my articles are on there. I try and share as much as I can without damaging what is a career, without damaging it and giving it all away for free. I think there's enough though that people can start to play with and if they want to get in touch, I'll always answer. You know, they want to drop direct messages on there. Feel free.

Oh yeah, my dude. Well, I feel a follow up episode coming up on this because I think there's still so much we can dive into. But dude, thank you so much for your time, for your energy, your insights, man. This was amazing. And we will be in touch.

Thank you very much. And it might be on the back of the two books that are coming out. Who knows? Okay. Even though. Yeah, you didn't even touch on.

I just asked where they could get more of you and you like follow me on LinkedIn. Oh, I've got two books coming out. Please, I want an early copy. I want in, my man. There's got to be some gold in there.

You take care. Thanks, Kevin.

Yeah.