Reason or emotion?
Why do people do what they do? Is it Reason or Emotion? Why do they choose one thing and not another? Endless ink has been spilled on this topic in books as well as countless sales training and sales processes. Back in Business School, I learned all manner of tools for evaluating, managing, deciding, measuring. Yet, these mechanistic and purely rational methods of explaining human decisions missed something essential: the underlying, raw humanity we all possess. The oomph that powers us as human beings: our human, emotional animal.
Humans are unique in the animal kingdom in the way we expend an enormous amount of energy pretending not to be what we so deeply are. We crave, lust, fear, hunger, anger, mourn, hope, bore, tire, yearn, detest, and love. This emotive core is the very essence of our humanity. Yet in business and in much of life we’re encouraged, nee required, to hide emotion, pretending that our decisions and choices are strictly rational. Pure. Calm. Unfettered, untainted by any trace of our humanity. “Make a business decision” we are urged. “Hey, calm down!” Make rational justifications. “Take the emotion out of this.”
Well, this is a lie. An entire pile of bovine excrement, actually. We humans are, at our core, raw, churning, emotional animals. Asking us to remove emotion is like asking an aquarium manager to raise fish without water. We die without it and thrive in it. From our emotions emerge every powerful drive that makes everything in our lives “go.” We may labor to attempt to temper these emotions with reason. But it is really just that — an attempt — one that will not succeed in the end, though we may well mask the emotion that drives our choices. In the end, we use our reason to satisfy our emotions. Then we pretend we are rational.
Your customers are people. They’re doing this too. You should help them.
Think I’m wrong? Look at that last car you bought. No emotion there, right? All practical. I’m sure. (I’m telling you, that’s why I bought the convertible!) The clothes you picked up at the store - it was totally reason that made you purchase that pair of designer shoes. Heck, look at your credit card statement and I bet that most items on that list evoke some emotion inside yourself — emotion that resulted in each transaction.
This pretense of rationality is a dirty lie — one that you should know well and be prepared to run with, exploit and serve. Because when you understand people as the volcanic, emotional animals we all are, when you learn what the source of the hot magma that is powering their volcano, you’ll serve them deeply, in a way that is so much more satisfying for them that you’ll be vastly more successful.
Drivers: magma powering the volcano
On Wall Street, there is a saying that the stock market has just two drivers: fear and greed. When, fear prevails and the market swings down. Greed prevails, and up it goes. But what is a driver? In our context today, consider it to be a prime motivator - the magma powering any given person’s volcano.
Like magma underneath the ground, you won’t see it until it erupts. But you can tell it is there if you explore carefully. From drivers come the emotional energy of any decision. They create all the movement that can be made. If you identify and effectively meet a person’s driver, you will be successful. If you’re unaware of the driver or which one is at play, or you serve it poorly, you’ll miss the opportunity and may not even know why.
In sales, I’ve found drivers are expressed in three main situational themes - each with a primary driver. I’m sure you can construct a bigger list of themes and drivers, but over decades I’ve found sorting customers into one of these three themes makes serving them quite effective. Here are the three themes, with primary drivers.
Be a Hero - Ambition
Save Your Neck - Fear
Get a Life - Desperation
Be a Hero
Tom had just been promoted the Chief Information Officer for his organization when I re-connected with him. (Incidentally, having regular sync-ups with people in your network over time is a pretty good strategy for being present when something important changes.) He was hired in this new role as a recognition of his work at a subsidiary. There, he accomplished transformational change that saved the organization a boatload of money. After a few minutes of conversation, it was clear to me he wanted to make his mark in his new role. Tom was ambitious and wanted to Be a Hero.
When someone embodies the Be a Hero theme, they are open to risk taking. Big visions. Swing-for-the-wall home runs. People in Be a Hero can be:
New to role (newly hired or recently promoted, looking to make a mark)
In competition with someone else for a prospective opportunity and wanting to stand out
At an early stage of career and highly ambitious
A climber - one who has big plans for her career
Your key in serving Be a Hero is to:
Show how you can be a resource to help the client to Be a Hero
Seed, brainstorm, and develop approaches for helping the Client to Be a Hero
Ensuring every part of your solution aligns with and can be explained by the Hero’s goals.
For Tom, we mapped out a plan he could take to his board for a proof of concept, yielding quick results that demonstrated the viability of a more dramatic longer-term strategic overhaul of his infrastructure. The plan had lots of places where he would declare victories and show accomplishment — ensuring the continuous increase of his hero status over time.
Save Your Neck
As fun as it is to help heroes to fly, most of the time, I’ve found that people need something much more ordinary: a way to save their necks. That’s because it’s pretty routine these days for companies to vastly raise the bar on their people or otherwise set them up for failure. Often this happens to a ridiculous level. They reduce staff, consolidate roles, collapse levels. The survivors of such changes often wonder if it would have been better to have been let go. I remember one client, Laura, survived a brutal re-org. Afterwards, she was assigned the responsibilities of three people: her own previous responsibilities plus those of two of her former colleagues who were laid off. “Do more with less” she was admonished. The implicit warning was if she couldn’t do so, maybe the company would just decide that they had kept the wrong person and she’d get a taste of the layoff medicine.
I had the good fortune to speak with her (on another of my frequent sync-up calls) right after the re-org had placed her in near panic. Her formerly high flying, successful career had resulted her being assigned far more than any reasonable person could accomplish. She was looking to Save Her Neck.
I was ready to help.
Together, we identified what success would look like to her manager. Then we brainstormed some ways that by working together we could meet or even exceed those expectations of her manager. We developed a detailed plan with milestones and a communication strategy. I leveraged resources in my organization to have higher level touches in her organization to reinforce what we were doing. We provided support resources and personnel so that she re-gained leverage she needed to get the plan implemented.
She was able to exceed her manager’s expectations and hit a place where she left fear behind and could begin to think about Being a Hero — a real window of transformation.
Get a Life
David had been working to support a dispersed group of partners in a way that required extensive travel. In conversation, I learned that at the beginning, it was easy, but now this was coming with an increasingly grave personal cost. As he succeeded, his responsibilities grew and the travel, eventually became crushing - especially after his marriage and birth of children. He was working all the time. Traveling some 80% of each month. He was legendary at work, but the work pressure to travel constantly was causing deep conflict and harmful impacts in his marriage, family, and happiness.
David was desperate to Get a Life.
Working together, we identified ways he could replace about half of the travel components his job with faster-to-deploy technology that accomplished the same goals. We also determined that this strategy would allow him to not only serve his current customer base but also allow him to pretty much painlessly expand his audience by a factor of two.
So, David bought from me to Get a Life, but rationalized the purchase internally with the ability to grow the business. Without the magma of needing to Get a Life, that volcano would never have erupted.
To use this type of thematic/driver approach with your clients, you’re going to need to Identify the theme/driver, Serve it, and Provide Rationality.
Identify the Theme and Driver
The magma that’s driving the volcano is under the surface. You’re going to need to get to know your customers as people and dig a lot deeper. You’re also going to need to be there when the need arises. If you haven’t done so, already, you should be rigorously setting sync up tasks in your planning system. Keep notes on who these people are. Also pay attention to news about your clients — re-orgs, layoffs, as they are excellent sync up points, as well. Your scheduled task should have specifics around why you are following up and reference your past research and calls with the customer. It is amazing how much opportunity you can uncover by calling when the customer’s need is top-of-mind, and you can link present to past effectively.
When you speak with your customer, you’re also going to want to intuit their motivations. Here are some questions open ended questions that I use sometimes in the course of sync-ing to figure out where the magma is that can power that volcano.
“What made you agree to meet today?”
“What, in particular, would you like to take away from our time today?”
“Can you share what is top of mind?”
“How are things going for you?”
“If we look back on this a year from now, what will be different for you?”
What are you smelling in the answers to these questions? You’re looking for hints here of ambition, fear, or desperation to divine where this person is in her journey. When you detect those, you can test your guess and see if you might elicit a bit more information to understand what it is underneath.
“Sounds like this is crushing: there is way too much to do for one person. Say some more about this.”
“Boy, this looks like an exciting time! What opportunities to make your mark in this new role do you see?”
“That project you inherited looks like a lot to do and expectations sound huge. What are the pieces that make it up?
Once you’ve tunneled into the causes and energy of the moment (ambition, fear, desperation) you can move forward, understanding and serving the theme that relates to that driver in greater detail.
Serve the driver
To serve a theme and its driver, you need to understand its power source.
Be a Hero is fueled by ambition.
Save Your Neck is fueled by fear.
Get a Life is fueled by desperation.
Be-a-Hero Ambition is best addressed by the bold language and acts of achievement. What are the goals, the milestones to be achieved? Help the customer to think those through and define them. The broad vision to be addressed with the more immediate “wins” called out. Let’s develop a plan for the next 6 months together that shows how we’ll get there and what it will look like! Let’s show the initial and (hopefully large) ongoing investments and the projected payoffs — personal, political, and business — that make that plan a sure-fire winner. To be accomplished with your products and services, of course.
Save-Your-Neck Fear is best met with immediacy and impact — actions we can quickly take that will ensure success. These actions may often require the customer to make significant investment and in our plan, we might build multiple paths to success to ensure that the client is going to get there, no matter what. We’re only going to have one shot to get this right and we can’t miss. Perhaps we’ll have two concurrent paths or a stage 1 and a stage 2 that allow us to show how we’re going to get there. Each thing we do, though, is going to be tied to proving that the thing they fear is going to be defeated. For a client in the fear-driven Save Your Neck theme, your products and services — and your calm support — is like a lifesaver.
Get-a-Life Desperation is best addressed with a plan tailored to address the cause of the desperation linked carefully to a business rationale. Of the three motivations, Get-a-Life can be the most challenging as you’ll often work hardest constructing the business rationale. You’ll need to put on your creative thinking cap to help the client determine how working with you will get them more time with their family, fewer hours or work, simple sanity, etc. while also being able to demonstrate to their company that it is smart business and worth the investment.
Provide Rationality
Now you’ve defined what theme is driving the customer and how you’re going to help them to address it. You need to spend an equal amount of time working with them to sell it internally. And unlike the driver powering their volcano, what you are building to sell your initiative will be hyper-rational and business based.
You’re helping Tom to satisfy his ambition, build his CIO empire and get to his next speaking engagement, but the plan you put together with him has measured value around reduced TCO, maximum ROI, increased satisfaction scores, and improved security.
Or maybe you’re working with Laura, in fear for her neck after the massive layoff. She’s one person doing three jobs. You develop a plan to automate, refine, and pare down functions quickly to keep the business running. At the same time, you work to ensure that her customer satisfaction metrics will be off the charts, setting her up to move from out of Fear in the near future. You help her to prepare a presentation showing the payoff and brilliance of her plan.
David is just desperate to get a life, so you show him how he can outsource his work to you, directly or via your products, while demonstrably doubling his addressable audience and accomplishing much more for the company. While his costs will go up, his time to market is reduced dramatically, as it is no longer dependent on David’s travel across a broad region. His company loves it because they can grow without hiring. David loves it because he finally gets more life for himself.
Look for windows of transformation
For each person, themes and their drivers rise come and go at different times in their career and lives. Their rise can be based on a phase of life, or some event that occurs, or a particular circumstance. It is likely the drivers change as you help them. Because of this, you should always re-confirm the current situation rather than assuming things are the same as last time. Maybe things got better or worse? Perhaps someone who was looking to Be a Hero just got terrible word of a situation that now has them scrambling in Save Their Neck.
I loved sales because in serving others well, it was possible to make a great income. And often in serving others well there are times when you can help customers to positively change their lives. Identifying what theme and driver a particular customer is in at any point in time is a great short cut to allow you to dial in, focus, and serve them well.
If your experience is like mine, most of your customers will be in either Save Your Neck or Get a Life themes. This is not surprising because most people are only motivated to meet or take action when something isn’t going well. By serving them well, you can often get to a place where they can contemplate Being a Hero. That is a window of transformation — where that customer can move from somewhere difficult to a place that is exciting and full of opportunity. It is both super fun and tremendously satisfying to help someone go from fear or desperation to seeing a desirable, bright future for themselves.