Ghosts In The Machine | Introduction
The beef short rib at Leopold’s is outrageously good. Like, so good that I’ve never wanted to try anything else on the menu. And that’s the problem.
Before we go any further, a point of clarification: This is about sales, not food or restaurants. Believe it or not, the phenomenon behind my short rib obsession is related to the age-old sales struggle of meeting prospects and converting them into buying customers. They aren’t exactly the same, but they are cousins.
In trying to understand why a person would be so fixated on this culinary delight perhaps we will also shed some new light on the battle to win business from a prospect or customer. Maybe our eyes will be opened to a perspective that we’ve been missing, one that’s been there all along. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll uncover the primary reasons salespeople struggle so mightily just to get the “at bats” they deserve.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Back to Leopold’s.
Your Real Competition
In 2012 my wife and I moved to the Russian Hill neighborhood of San Francisco. Not long after the dust had settled on moving in, we headed out one evening to explore our new ‘hood and find somewhere to eat. I don’t remember what we expected to find, but I do remember that it took us all of five minutes and two blocks to wander into Leopold’s, which would become our favorite neighborhood restaurant and somewhere we went for dinner and/or drinks at least once a month for the next five years.
Leopold’s is an Austrian-German Gasthaus (German-style tavern). It looks and feels exactly like you would expect an Austrian-German Gasthaus to look and feel: communal wooden tables, waitresses in dirndls, huge steins of German-style beer, a big wooden bar anchoring the back of the restaurant, a boisterous atmosphere, and lots of vaguely Bavarian décor on the walls. It’s a special place and I highly recommend it if you’re ever in the neighborhood.
Although we loved everything about Leopold’s, the main reason we kept going back was because we loved their beef short rib the most. And I almost missed out on it all together.
Generally, I am not a fan of slow-cooked meat. Pot-roasts and fall-off-the-bone type meat don’t do much for me. I prefer putting in a little work and gnawing meat off the bone when the occasion calls. You could say I have a bias against excessively tender meats. As a rule, when presented with a restaurant menu, I immediately disregard any slow-cooked meat options. That being the case, on that maiden visit to Leopold’s, I jumped right over the short rib and ordered the schnitzel (breaded and fried pork). My wife, in her infinite wisdom, ordered the short rib.
The schnitzel was good, as good a schnitzel as you’ll find in the states. Given different circumstances, I’m sure I would’ve ordered it again. Meanwhile, all it took was one bite for my wife (who is typically stingy when it comes to sharing her food) to look across the table and say, “You gotta try this.” Which I did, expecting to be underwhelmed. Instead, I instantly knew that I had made a mistake. That one bite kicked-off a love affair that endures to this day.
Leopold’s short rib is the best kind of comfort food. Unassuming and inviting in presentation, it’s served with braised red cabbage, cheesy mashed potatoes and crispy onion strings. When you take a fully composed bite with a little bit of everything, all five taste sensations are teased to life in just the right way. It is tender, without falling apart under the pressure of a fork and knife. It is juicy, without being sloppy. It is perfect. During the five years we lived in the city, I probably had that short rib 60 times, each time as good as the time before. And that, as I mentioned at the top, is the problem.
Other than the distant memory of the schnitzel from that first visit, I have no idea what the other entrees on Leopold’s menu taste like. 60 times and I never really even been close to ordering anything else. It’s possible that they have other entrees that are just as mind-blowing, but they shall remain unknown to me because whenever I get the chance to go back I’ll probably just order the short rib again. I simply don’t want to risk the letdown of trying something that isn’t as good.
That is the critical point.
As much as I enjoy the short rib, the fear of the unknown, more than any other single factor, is what keeps me from trying anything else. Specifically, the fear of being let down by the unknown is what keeps bringing me back to this delicious culinary treat. And it’s not just me, and it’s not just food in restaurants.
Sticking with what you already know applies in a wide variety of contexts. Habit researcher Wendy Wood and her colleagues found that 43% of our daily behaviors are performed out of habit. If you look around, you’ll find the phenomenon behind “ordering the same thing every time” basically everywhere:
- It accounts for the fact that nearly 72% of Americans live in or close to the city they grew up.
- It’s a foundational motive for the >60% of Americans that maintain affiliation with religious beliefs in which they were raised.
- It’s the driving force behind the incumbency advantage enjoyed by currently sitting elected officials.
- It’s the main reason certain products or services become “sticky”.
- It’s why Los Angeles sports fans root for the “Lakers”, “Clippers” & “Dodgers”. (don’t think we don’t see you too, Utah “Jazz”)
This phenomenon proliferates because it is driven by a universal human truth: People instinctually prefer the status quo. In addition to a preference for the status quo, human beings have a variety of other instincts that often defy reason, which affects the sales process, which brings us to the reason we are here. THAT is the problem.
Sustained success in sales is not determined by reason and logic alone. Rather, success that can be replicated no matter the product, service, industry or company being represented is driven primarily through an understanding of and appreciation for these “irrational” instincts. Learning how to manage these instincts is the main problem that salespeople need to solve.
“Irrational”
It goes without saying that human behavior is extremely complex. The decisions we make are driven by an infinite number of rational and irrational factors. Unfortunately, most organizations train their salespeople to approach prospects and customers as if they were making decisions based on purely rational factors, as though they were Homo Economicus and not Homo Sapiens. Based on insights from behavioral science, we know that nothing could be further from the truth.
We often lose sight of the simple humanity of our prospects and customers. Instead, we think of them as purely rational decision makers. Similar to the Vulcan-like Homo Economicus of traditional economic theory, we assume the people we call prospects and customers are primarily motivated to “maximize their utility”, which is to say maximize their rationally-quantifiable outcomes in any given situation. As a result, we assume they are driven first and foremost by rational arguments, things like price, speed, efficiency, the bottom line, etc. In reality, prospects and customers are just regular old people and their decision-making is primarily directed by a handful of seemingly-irrational mental biases (e.g. preferring the status quo).
Behavior scientists have done remarkable work in shedding long-overdue light on the various ways in which human beings are irrationally motivated. Theirs has been an uphill battle, working against deeply-entrenched and widely-accepted beliefs about how and why people behave the way they do. It’s really only been in the last 20 years or so that their work has broken into the public conscious and gained a critical mass of acceptance, including a couple Nobel Prizes.
One of the key insights behavior science offers is that, while they may appear to be irrational, these biases are actually some of the most powerfully rational behaviors human beings have ever adapted. In evolutionary terms, they are inherited and learned behaviors that have historically increased the odds that we would survive and pass our genes on to the next generation. Given this view, these “irrational” biases are some of humanities most successful behavioral strategies.
Take binge eating, for example.
Today, binge eating is seen as an “irrational” scourge that humanity seems hopelessly drawn towards as society develops. However, given the long view of human history — going back hundreds of thousands of years — it’s actually pretty easy to understand why ancient human beings would have been rationally incentivized to binge eat:
- For the majority of the time humans have been walking around the planet, food sources were not consistent, nor were they guaranteed.
- Without reliable cold storage, the only place you were able to store excess calories was in your own body.
- If you came across an abundance of edible plants, or if you were fortunate enough to hunt and kill a large animal, you were wise to get while the getting was good.
- Taking advantage of excess supplies of calories would increase your odds of survival, which would increase your odds of passing on your genes, which, per evolutionary logic, is the most rational thing a person could do.
To state the obvious, the world today is much different than it was back then. Our modern, post-agricultural revolution reality — only the blink of an eye in our long view of human history — is a radical departure from the daily life and death struggle our hunter gatherer ancestors experienced on the savannas of eastern Africa.
- For the entire time you and I have been walking around the planet (especially if we are fortunate enough to be walking around in the developed parts of the world), nearly all our food sources are ridiculously abundant.
- We benefit from the miracles of electricity and cold storage, which will extend the life of any/all the calories we might want and/or need later on.
- Yet binge eating persists to the point that there are more obese people than there are starving people in the world today.
If we were perfectly rational and optimally adapted to our present circumstances, if we were Homo Economicus, binge eating and obesity would not be a thing in today’s world. We would take only what they need in the moment and move along, comfortable in the knowledge that we will be able to conveniently satisfy whatever craving we may have, whenever we want, no matter where we are.
Why hasn’t our behavior adapted to this new food-abundant reality?
Simply put, this new version of reality evolved too quickly and our survival instincts haven’t had enough time to adapt. Given the context of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years of fine tuning our binge eating instincts, the last 10,000 or so post-agricultural-revolution years just haven’t been enough time for our instinctual behavior to adjust to our current food-abundant reality.
Behavioral adaption, at the instinctual levels we are focused on, is reactive and it takes a LONG time. When the world we live in goes through a radical change in a relatively short period of time, human beings continue acting and behaving in instinctual ways as though nothing has changed, long after the world around us has found a new normal. As such, many of the rational biases and behavioral shortcuts that have served us so well for so long are now mismatched to our present circumstances. In other words, they have become “irrational”.
That’s rub. That is how once rational behavior becomes irrational.
When our behavioral biases become mismatched to our present-day circumstances, systemic glitches are created in our mental machinery. These glitches — like having a preference for the status quo — can and will disrupt and supersede otherwise rational thought. And oh boy do we human beings have a lot of glitches in our mental machinery. This is true of all people, your prospects and customers included. No matter how rational we try to be, or how hard we try to optimize our decision-making, our thinking is forever haunted by these systemic mental glitches. They are the Ghosts in the Machine.
The “ghosts” are all the biases and heuristics we have inherited from our evolutionary past. The machine is our awe-inspiring mental capacities, also inherited from our evolutionary past, which enables our unmatched decision-making abilities. Ghosts in the Machine is a systematic breakdown of those biases that have the greatest impact on our decision-making abilities in the specific context of the sales process.
Tipping the Scales
In this exploration, we stand on the shoulders of giants. Much of what you will find here has been taken from work done by the greatest minds known to behavioral science (or behavioral economics, if you prefer). Men like Kahneman, Tversky, Shiller, Thaler, et al have done most of the heavy-lifting in revealing how and why these behavioral “ghosts” exert their influence on human thinking, and what interventions are effective in mitigating their glitch-y effects. Here, we are simply taking those insights that pertain to the sales context and organizing them into an actionable system that should be able to significantly and positively impact your business development efforts, no matter what you are selling or who you are selling it to.
While a seemingly endless variety of ghosts have been cataloged by behavioral scientists through the years, many of them will not be found here. It is not to say that those neglected ghosts are unimportant, rather they are less important than the ones we will discuss given the specific context of your professional life as a salesperson. We aren’t trying to boil the behavioral ocean. We’re trying to better understand and learn to manipulate the thermodynamics of this one particular tide pool. With this approach, we are confident that you will increase the number of opportunities you earn to make your case, increase your odds of closing sales, and be better able to manage and grow your relationships.
Trying to sell something, be it a product or service or idea, is nothing more than attempting to influence another person’s thinking. In order to influence another person’s thinking, or their decision-making, with any consistency or sustainability, you must necessarily influence the ghosts that haunt their mental machinery.
Lack of appreciation for the impact a person’s innate behavioral biases has on their decision-making and focusing on a purely “rational” approach is where most sales methodologies fall down. While these types of methodologies present enticing and clearly-defined structures, they do so without consideration for the universal drivers that underlie the decisions customers make. As a result, most sales systems are either too narrowly focused on a specific part of the sales process and limited in their applicability (we will actually reference a few of these, as they are exceptional in applying to their specific focus), or they tease short-term and immediate results that invariably underwhelm.
Anchoring firmly to a behavioral science perspective of the sales process, the approach here is wonderfully applicable to the vast majority of situations you will find yourself in when engaging a prospect or customer, but there is no promise of instant results. If you’re looking for the promise of radical changes and the ability to magically eliminate the resistance you experience throughout the sale process, you’ve come to the wrong place.
Let’s be clear: Awareness of the ghosts in the machine won’t magically open doors, and you won’t suddenly be able to bend people to your will.
There is no short-term, quick fix for these ghosts. Your goal is not to eliminate them. They have been around long before you and will last long after you are gone. Just as 10,000 years of time has been unable to loosen the grip of our binge eating instinct, your most sincere efforts will not clear your prospect or customer of the biases that resist you.
Instead, your goal is to become a behavioral jujutsu artist, to recognize and understand these ghosts so that you may work with them and tip the decision-making scales in your favor. Knowing what to expect from these ghosts, and responding accordingly, will minimize their resistance to you, thereby strengthening the connection between you and your prospects and customers.
Any influence you hope to have, or succeed in having, will take time and perpetually test your patience. Working with these ghosts and managing their resistance of you is an exercise of consistency over the long-term. You need to be the tortoise, not the hare. Strap in for the long-haul. There is no end to this game. No finish line. It is infinite.
Fortunately, the persistence of these ghosts, though frustrating and exhausting, also presents us with an opportunity. Because they are so sticky and consistent, we have the opportunity to get up close and personal with them, to really understand them. And they are not shy. When the spotlight hits them, they proudly and predictably demonstrate their effects.
Their predictability presents us with another opportunity. If they are predictable then we have the opportunity to anticipate and prepare for them. Doing so should tip the scales in our favor in each phase of the sales journey, helping us earn those additional opportunities we so desperately desire.
This process provides an understanding of and game plan for attacking the key drivers behind the resistance you experience from your prospects and customers throughout the sales process, which will earn you more opportunities to present your value proposition. Once you understand the whole behavioral puzzle, including where and how the Status Quo Bias fits into that picture, you’ll be able to consistently tip the decision-making scales in your favor, building stronger relationships, closing more deals, and creating a sustainable sales growth engine.
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Those of us who spend our professional lives selling things are faced with a problem that is asking to be solved.
That problem is how to manage and overcome the resistance we receive from our prospects and customers throughout the sales process. Contrary to popular opinion, that resistance does not primarily come from a competing product or service. That resistance primarily comes from all the ghosts in the machine that impact the human decision-making process.
In the following pages we will deconstruct the most critical ghosts in the machine, taking into account how they interact with one another. Rarely will you be able to affect another person’s decision-making by focusing on a single ghost. Rather, the resistance you experience comes from the inter-linking of combinations of ghosts, like the inter-linking of cogs in a machine, which will vary from person-to-person and situation-to-situation. The recommendations in this process will help you navigate a wide variety of situations and circumstances, simultaneously decoding the inter-linking of these ghostly cogs and providing insights that you will use on your very next sales call.
This process, more than any other, will help you find the best solutions for that problem. Let’s get started.