Control is a major human addiction, and thinking we have control by keeping everything in our heads is deceiving. When we combine money and psychology then we’ll begin to understand that there is more to a rich life than just numbers in a spreadsheet. During my study of human behaviour and psychology, I became fixated on this question: "Why do we know what we should do but still don't do it?" I think that regardless of our backgrounds, we can lead a fulfilling life. While a higher income can be a significant aid, similar to improving fitness, we all have the potential to enhance our lives starting from where we are now.
Shaping the future
As time goes on, an increasing number of business inquiries will shift towards behavioural and psychological aspects. I think this shift is due to the growing recognition that relying solely on past data to forecast future behaviour is becoming less reliable. Consequently, a significant portion of business inquiries will essentially transform into marketing questions, and as a result, it will become essential to give marketing a higher priority in the business hierarchy. The significance of marketing in terms of driving innovation and facilitating change has now been amplified by a factor of five.
The sweet spot
I think many economic problems are marketing problems in disguise as the root of these problems lies not in the logical aspects of economics, but rather in the psychological realm of human perception and desire. This perspective emphasises the importance of understanding and influencing consumer behaviour and preferences in order to create value and solve economic challenges effectively. One key aspect of this argument is the idea that value is subjective and exists primarily in the minds of individuals. While there may be inherent qualities and functions in a product or service, their value is ultimately determined by how they are perceived by consumers. And this is why many of the problems we try to solve logically would be easier to solve psychologically.
Psychological safety
Yesterday I wrote about research from Carnegie Mellon, M.I.T. and Union College that showed the number one factor that influenced team effectiveness was psychological safety. In other words, for teams to work well together, team members must feel comfortable enough to be themselves, then, and only then, will they contribute to their full potential.
Here are some tips on how to build a psychologically safe culture in your workplace:
· Listen more, talk less.
· Praise generously.
· Reframe negative feedback.
· Pay attention.
And if you cannot do these things, I know someone with the skill set you require, contact me via e-mail for details.
Anxieties darken the skies
Look at what the world believes about selling, the world believes selling is about pitching and persuading. The way targets are set up are for example, how much did you sell this month? The problem is salespersons dive into pitching before creating an urgency for the product or service they are selling and this causes pipelines to clog, and sales cycles to slow down. Just imagine if the sales managers better understood the psychology of selling and trained their sales teams to listen to the buyers and understand the problem they are trying to solve. The better the salespersons understand what it costs them by not solving the buyers’ problems, the more likely they will change the way they approach sales meetings and presentations.
A need is a necessity arising from a certain problem, a real problem; and a want is what people think or say they need. I think salesperson’s really need to learn how to listen to their buyers and not to pitch or persuade them before clearly understanding their needs. Contact me via e-mail for sales training and workshops.
Your perception is your reality
On a daily basis we evaluate others, we also regularly look into our own hearts and minds. Many aspects of our minds are hidden from us, we think in two different ways: self-judgement and how we judge others. I think the way we judge others is to look at their actions and the way we judge ourselves is by our use of words.
I have recently been made aware that in social psychology they use the term: “naive realism”. This is a human tendency where we see the world around us objectively, and that people who disagree with us must be uninformed, irrational, or biased.
What’s in it for me?
When asking for help appeal to people’s self-interest as subconsciously, they are asking themselves: What does one stand to gain from this action, activity or situation? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “self-interest” means a concern for one's own advantage, interest, and well-being. I have found that when you discover something that will benefit the other person, usually they will respond more enthusiastically to your request. A key step is to understand the other person’s psychology. Once you make them see how you can in some way meet their needs or advance their cause, their resistance to your requests for help will magically fall away. You must train yourself to think your way inside the other person’s mind, to see their needs and interests and get rid of your own feelings that obscure the truth.
I would like to think that this cynical truth is not the way I behave or act, but the personal gratification of sharing, helping, or sacrificing can never be truly altruistic as I gain an intrinsic reward. According to my mentor, the validity of this argument depends on whetherintrinsic rewards qualify as "benefits". Unfortunately, the harsh reality is that everyone acts out of self-interest as humans are always motivated by self-interest and selfishness.
Going against the grain
Advertising has been around for millions of years old and nowadays people use advertising as a heuristic for knowing whom to trust. I think that innovation tends to happen around the edges as if you design for the middle market you’ll end up in an overcrowded field. We don’t get an endorphin rush from mid-market retail. The people who successfully innovate are the people who actually understand that there is a margin and there is an extravagant treat.
By modelling social science on physics, we think that being scientific means that there is a right answer and a wrong answer. In marketing, the rules of the game aren’t constant, and you can re-write them, for example, by changing the context you can change what good means. The first assumption of science is that magic is impossible, which is absolutely true in physics but not true in psychology. Magic is possible in psychology, for example, you can make something worth 10 times as much simply by tweaking with the brain and not the thing itself.
The way to solve a problem may be trivial and silly, and our attempts in business to make ourselves look serious and important by always talking about higher order may also make us look stupid. Sometimes all you have to do is implement a very small “butterfly effect change” and actually you can. Big inputs can have small effects and small inputs can have big effects, that’s why human behaviour, I mean complex behaviour is not like high-school science.
The mental vs. The physical
I can highly recommend the renowned sports psychologist and culture coach Dr. Pippa Grange’s book, “Fear Less: How to Win at Life Without Losing Yourself”. For over 20 years, Pippa has helped leaders and athletes (including the English football team) reach their true potential. Pippa has found that even the most successful people experience fears of inadequacy, what sets them apart is their ability to pinpoint their fears and “turn down the volume.”
I think that your results are just an outcome, they are not your worth. Contact me via e-mail for real world strategies, sales training and workshops opportunities.
Pleasure & Pain
The two P’s of motivation are pleasure and pain. I think that people buy products or services for one or two reasons and there are hundreds of books out there around the psychology of selling. In my experience, people buy products or services either to move closer to pleasure or to move further away from pain.
Nowadays it appears that marketers focus all their attention on marketing towards the pleasure, it may also be extremely effective for marketers to target solutions which moves the consumer further away from pain. It’s unrealistic to think that we are going to live our lives in a solely pleasurable way, so brands need also to look at their consumers pain points. Contact me via e-mail for an introspection into your buying process.
Sales is an art and science
My interest in psychology stems from the fact that I’ve always been a lover of people. I have always wanted to know the reason behind certain behaviours and why people do certain things. Sales is about helping your clients and from a psychological perspective you become a real trusted advisor when your clients become comfortable disclosing certain things. From the psychology stand point, it’s allowed me to be more understanding, empathic and better listener. Most people who know me will say that I have a natural air of confidence and I am very easy to talk to.
Selling is an art that requires the ability to form good relationships with others as well as a science that requires the development of successful, repeatable strategies. The Covid-19 pandemic has made it easier to be yourself, challenge the status quo and transform the ways in which you work. Contact me via e-mail if you would like to learn how to move away from your own needs and focus on the customer perspectives?
It really matters how we frame things
The circumstances of our lives may matter less to our sense of wellbeing than the sense of control we feel over our lives. It has always baffled me why in western societies we are never given the opportunity to solve problems psychologically. I think that it is because there is an imbalance in the way we treat creative, emotionally driven psychological ideas versus the way we treat rational, numerical, spreadsheet driven ideas.
If you are a creative person, you are forced to share your ideas for approval with people who are far more rational than you. You have to have a budget, cost-benefit analysis, ROI study, etc. This is probably correct and sensible - why does this never apply the other way around? Perhaps, it’s because people who have an existing framework, whether it be economical or engineering, feel as though logic is its own answer. Traditionally, we prioritise mechanistic ideas over psychological ideas.
I think when we solve problems we should look equally at technology, psychology and economics, and if possible, we should base our decisions on the conclusions that sit in the "sweet spot” somewhere in the middle.