What We Think We Know
WMMM #053 - This week, I share a tragic story that exposed a psychological phenomenon.
Jeff Keplar Newsletter February 10, 2024 7 min read
TRUE or FALSE?
Subliminal messages can persuade people to purchase products.
Playing Mozart’s music to infants boosts their intelligence.
IQ tests are biased against certain groups of people.
The Polygraph test is an accurate means of detecting dishonesty.
ANSWERS
False, False, False, False
We are all psychologists in everyday life.
We all know, or at least we think we know, something about love and memory, friendship and dreams, and things like that.
The downside, though, in sales and life, is that because something seems familiar, we may think we understand it and make inaccurate assumptions.
In this week’s edition of Win More, Make More, we explore this phenomenon, what clinical psychologists sometimes call pseudo-science.
Bystander Apathy
Safety in Numbers: the more people present at an emergency, the more likely someone will intervene.
True or False?
Early in the morning of March 13, 1964, a 28-year-old woman named Catherine “Kitty” Genovese was brutally attacked in Kew Gardens, Queens, which is a relatively quiet community in New York City.
Two weeks later, the NYTimes reported on its front page that 38 law-abiding citizens had watched for more than a half-hour as Kitty was attacked and murdered.
Apathy
Apathy was the tagline that Abe Rosenthal, then metropolitan editor for the newspaper, gave to the story.
9-1-1
For years after the murder and the headline “38 Watch and No One Calls the Police,” this tragedy has been the subject of different movies, television dramas, and countless magazine articles.
People thought big cities were the problem.
Television violence was blamed.
New York City was then considered a place of violence and apathetic citizens.
All sorts of things were part of the problem, leading to us losing our moral bearings as a society.
“How could people just stand by as a woman was brutally attacked over a significant period of time, ultimately ending in her death.”
One of the results of the uproar over Kitty Genovese’s murder was the adoption of the 9-1-1 system, which is now used all through the U.S.
Before the tragedy, it wasn’t all that easy to report a crime in process.
Another came in the field of behavioral psychology.
“How do we remain silent?”
John Darley and Bibb Latane, professors at New York University and Columbia University, respectively, embarked on a series of studies to find the answer.
Lady in Distress
Lady in Distress is what they called their series of studies where they would simulate an emergency that a group of test subjects would unwittingly witness and record the results.
For example, they varied the studies by changing the number of people exposed to the emergency.
They found that the victim was far more likely to be rescued if only one person witnessed the emergency than if there were two.
The more witnesses, the less likelihood of help.
Pluralistic ignorance and diffusion of responsibility are the two processes that represent the psychological underpinning for why the opposite of “Safety in Numbers” is true.
Pluralistic ignorance occurs when we are unsure - there is ambiguity - and we see no one else intervening.
Diffusion of responsibility explains why, with other people around, we feel less personally responsible and, therefore, have less guilt about doing nothing. “No one else is doing anything.”
So, a supposed psychological phenomenon - bystander apathy - turns out to be misinterpreted and misread.
What We Thought We Knew, we didn’t.
No Mind Reading
Have you ever made an assumption about a sales prospect that turned out to be false?
One prospect says: “This looks great! It’s looking like we’ll be doing business with you.”
The salesperson thinks: “We’ve got a deal.”
Another prospect says: “We were hoping for a larger discount.”
The salesperson thinks: “I’ll need to get a few more points from my management to win this deal.”
Each salesperson is guilty of mind-reading - assuming facts not in evidence and misreading between the lines.
In the first example, exactly what does ”looking like” mean?
We have no idea. We need to ask.
Was the second prospect’s “hope” for a larger discount a requirement that, if satisfied, produces an order or merely a fishing expedition from a paper tiger?
There is no way to tell without asking for clarification.
No one can know what a prospect is thinking.
Isn’t it worth a few questions to find out?
The Sales Learning Curve
Less experienced salespeople are more likely to violate this rule. (True or False?)
FALSE
Veteran salespeople are more likely to “mind read” because they have more experiences (“at bats”) to call on and relate to a current situation.
Veterans are more likely to say to themselves, “I’ve seen this before,” making it easier to jump to a conclusion.
Baggage is another name for this accumulated “experience” - this “knowledge” - from selling for a while.
Baggage
A salesperson who thinks they “know” what a prospect is thinking, why a prospect made a statement, or how a prospect will make a decision because of all of their experience is carrying baggage with them.
The Sales Learning Curve
Unconscious Incompetent: A person without prior sales training or coaching and sales experience. They do not execute because they don’t know how.
Unconscious Competent: A person who has experienced some success, possibly due to natural talent or luck. They can execute but not replicate it because they don’t know which behaviors bring them success.
Conscious Competent: A person who has embraced sales training and coaching and has a track record of success. They repeatedly execute because they know what to do and why.
Conscious Incompetent is not a step in the learning curve because it implies that a person knows what to do and why but chooses to ignore it.
Dumb It Down
A common mistake in industries requiring highly intellectual people to build a product or deliver a service is to think that it needs the same intellect to sell that product or service.
In fact, this thought process mistakenly extends into selling their product or service.
“If we show them (their prospects) how much we know by telling them what we think about their industry and their business, we can tell them everything our product/service does, and they will buy.”
FALSE
Telling isn’t selling.
This phenomenon is never more evident than when subject matter (SMEs) or industry vertical experts are thrust into sales roles, presumably because sharing their vast amount of industry or subject matter knowledge will convince a prospect to buy.
Similar to the veteran but unconscious competent salesperson, they are more apt to jump to conclusions because they “know” (or think they know) what the prospect “should” be thinking.
It’s not what you know that makes sales.
Why do you suppose an elite sales leader in the software industry would address his national sales team as remembered in our June 10, 2023 edition?
Dumb it down.
Ask questions even when you know or think you know the answers.
The objective is to get the prospect to self-discover the answer and share it with you.
Best Practice
Identify a couple of common objections you encounter in your sales cycles.
Simple examples are:
“Your company isn’t on our approved vendor list.”
“Your price is above the amount we have budgeted.”
More complex include:
“Solving that problem would require our entire company to change how we do things.”
“We can’t just change our domestic operations, and the laws in each international location are prohibitive.”
Write out a few reasons why a prospect might make each statement.
Develop a few questions you could ask to suss out the real meaning for each statement.
Credits
This week’s content is courtesy of:
James Solomon, director and producer of “The Witness”
Scott Lilienfeld, author of Fifty Great Myths of Popular Psychology
Freakonomics Radio, Jan. 22, 2024
The Sandler Rules, Sandler Sales System by David Sandler
Thank you for reading.
Jeff
When you think “sales leader,” I hope you think of me.
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I offer my help to sales leaders and their teams.
I possess the skills identified in this article and share them as part of my service.
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