Sales and the Brain

Angelo Wong
Jul 10, 2017 · 6 min read

Our brain has around 3 pounds of blood vessels. It’s responsible for about 25% of our energy expenditure. It’s average mass is around 2% of the human body.

This means that the brain spends about 12 times more energy than the rest of the human body. Our biological imperative is to save energy, because wasting energy kills us. As such, we’re only aware of 10% of what our brain’s doing. No, we’re not only using 10% of our brains — we’re aware of 10% of what our brain’s doing, and the other 90% does stuff like digest food, fight plaque, and the like.

Three Brains

According to the triune brain model, there’s 3 parts to our brains, and I’ll describe them briefly before you pass out from the energy exerted from reading this article.

Neocortex — this is responsible for rational thought.

Limbic system — this is responsible for your subconscious thought, or your “gut feel,” or your first impressions of a person.

Lizard brain — this is responsible for digesting food and other shit you take for granted. This is the oldest part of our brain.

We’re mostly going to talk about the neocortex and the limbic system in this article. The lizard brain will do whatever it wants to do anyway, and we can’t really do anything about it and so is not an interesting discussion.

Here are some characteristics of the neocortex vs. limbic system:

  • Limbic — Emotional. Neocortex —Rational.
  • Limbic — Fast. Neocortex — Slow.
  • Limbic — Pre-aware/pre-sensory/subconsciousness. Neocortex — Aware/sensory/consciousness.
  • Limbic — Automatic. Neocortex — Manual/controlled.
  • Limbic — Nonverbal communication. Neocortex — Communication with language.
  • Limbic — Old. Neocortex — New.

This list suggests that the limbic system lets us process nonverbal information way faster than we could process language. The limbic system also costs a lot less energy than our neocortex. Because of this, we’ve evolved in such a way that the vast majority of our influence comes from our subconscious mind as opposed to rational thought.

As much as you’re experiencing this world through your senses and as “real” as your logical mind seems, it turns out that our entire sensory experience on Earth is just 10% of the brain’s doing. So as much as you want think you’re some logical being, capable of making good decisions constantly, you’re not. To think you’re this rational person that is able to always make great decisions is to deny you have a human brain.

And the evidence is staggering. If we were completely logical, many phenomena wouldn’t exist. Road rage. Stock market losses. Gambling. Drug addiction. Murder. Wars. Impulse buying. And so on.

But with this understanding, we can safely say that people buy on emotion and not logic. The next time you are talking to your prospect, don’t just focus on the logical value (e.g. profits, productivity) that you can provide them, but also on the benefits of the benefits (e.g. freedom, more time with family) which triggers an emotional/subconscious response.

Let’s dig deeper. It’s one thing to just say that our limbic system is really the driver and our neocortex is basically just the passenger isn’t nuanced enough. So let’s discuss this even further.

We like to think of ourselves as logical and not “emotional,” because the stigma of making “emotional” decisions is that it is generally incorrect, or inferior to logical decisions.

But before we do that, let’s dive into a study to understand why we bother with our limbic system.

Thin Slicing

So there was this study where they showed a bunch of people muted videos of college professors teaching. Some of these people watched 2-second videos of teachers, some of them watched 5-second videos, and some of them watched 10-second videos. Then these people had to form opinions about the teachers they saw.

The result? People who watched the 10 second clips turned out to judge the teachers the same as the people who watched the clip for 5 seconds only. And the people that watched the 5-second videos agreed with the 2-seconders.

So basically if you watched a 2-second muted video of a professor teaching, your opinion of him/her is the same as if you watched a 10-second video. Fair enough. Wow, surprise surprise somebody give these guys a Nobel Prize. Much groundbreaking. But no seriously, like duh.

But the real interesting result is that the 2-second snap judgments predicted with a high accuracy the ratings of the same teachers by people who actually took their classes for an entire semester.

Source:


Meaning, you could watch a shitty, muted clip of a professor speaking for 2 seconds or you could spend an entire semester with the same professor in the flesh, and your opinion of him would be the same.

This means as far as judging people goes, no new information is gained after the 2-second mark. And nonverbally at that.

This also means that yes, first impressions matter, and new people you meet have already judged the fuck outta you before you’ve finished uttering your “nice to meet you” line.

So yes, there is a certain class of decisions where the neocortex is superior. The stock market, driving, and other games with rigid rules. Our “emotions” can guide us here and we often use it to guide us because it takes less energy than activating the neocortex, but in general this tends to be a poor idea.

But in another class of decisions, the limbic system tends to be vastly superior. And this is judging people’s characters. Being able to do this well (and luckily you can, without you even knowing it apparently!) is super-important. From the buy-side, doing business with the wrong person is terrible since you’re gonna lose a lot of money. From the sell-side, you’ll end up with a pain in the ass client.


And the efficiency cited in the study is staggering — we can make a fairly accurate decision about a person in 2 fucking seconds. This is why by default our brain works like this: the limbic system casts a vote about a decision (“yes” or “no”), and our neocortex can choose to veto it or override that decision if need be.

From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes sense as that scheme saves us the most energy. The limbic system quickly processes a situation and says “yes” or “no” — whether it’s a professor, or a prospect, or a product. The neocortex is just there to veto it if necessary (think about a scenario where you have a gut feeling about a purchase but you think it might be wrong so you actually think about it logically), but is not the primary process in making decisions.

So fine, we kind of understand the framework of how the mind works now — the limbic system says “yes” or “no,” and then we activate logic to veto that emotional decision if necessary. This saves us energy, but there’s actually another thing that the limbic system does to ensure we don’t get killed: there is a heavy bias towards voting “no” to stuff. In other words, our brain heavily skews towards false positive signals of danger and tells us to avoid the shit out of everything we can.

And the reason behind this is simple — it’s better to have false positive signals of danger than false negatives. The former is conservative and keeps us alive, and the latter exposes us to really dangerous situations and we won’t even have the intellect to be scared.

As a result, if our limbic system can’t process something quick enough, it’ll just say “no.” It helps us avoid danger, and it helps us conserve energy. Meaning we tend to say “no” to things we don’t understand as opposed to wanting to learn more.

All this to say, if you’re going to do a sales presentation and you’re going to explain your product to someone, make sure you’ve practiced it enough so that even a 3rd grader can understand it. Otherwise, you’re making them expend too much energy — in an evolutionary context, you’re threatening their lives — so of course they’ll say no and you can’t fucking blame them if they don’t wanna take the time to understand you.

Make it short. Make it simple.

This article is a counterexample.

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