I was watching a DVD yesterday between client calls. It was
by a marketing guru that has produced some good stuff.
He was writing on the flip chart that...
Thought causes Emotion
and
Emotion Causes Behavior
T > E
E > B
Big letters.
I started laughing.
And then it hit me just why people fail in life.
They are given faulty core information by their guru.
You aren't going to make any money trying to get
thoughts to trigger emotions and emotions to cause
behavior.
The Behavior Sequence
Here's your first take-home for today:
KEYPOINT: Thoughts very rarely cause emotions and
emotions rarely cause behaviors.
In reality, behaviors cause emotions and emotions trigger
thought processes.
The difference will mean the difference of failure and success
for many, especially those in marketing.
Watching this DVD triggered my desire to grab some of the
more interesting research that's been done in the last couple
of years in persuasion.
So today, some cool research for you and perhaps one story
to put it all in context.....
Agent of Influence
I did direct sales for years. Worked on "straight commission."
In retrospect, it was a good thing. It was challenging at times.
One of the things I did was, very little selling. I always felt,
though I never studied scientifically, the amount of time
with a customer spent on "selling" vs. "talking" about other
stuff made a huge difference in success.
If you've read my book, Talk Your Way to the Top
(1998 Pelican), you know some of my favorite stories of
stuff we talked about when I was out selling.
For me after the first few weeks, selling was very tedious.
And I "sold" for years and years and years.
But people's stories always interested me.
I'd ask people, almost everyone, "How did you go from
basically nothing to having a small business?"
Now the fact is not everyone came from nothing, but a lot
of people in business that were my customers for advertising
and similar, were indeed from humble backgrounds.
If a police officer's filter of the world is seeing a lot of bad
guys in the world, mine was seeing a lot of people who
had the kind of success I wanted to achieve...and did it
with not many more resources than I had at the time.
The education I got while I was "selling" was remarkable...
because I rarely talked, I said very little, and I asked a lot
of questions.
I would ask people about everything from where they spent
their vacation to the kinds of fish they caught to the profit
margins they made on the gasoline they sold.
I was fascinated.
...and then I would "make the sale..."
If the total time with customer was say 30 minutes,
20 was in listening to the customer tell stories, 5 was
about me telling a story or two and 5 was the final 5
minutes, transacting business.
Cool?
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He was writing on the flip chart that...
