How do people make choices?
Get up or snooze?
Red or white wine?
What to wear?
Have children or not?
Accept the job or stay?
Invest or save?
Working in sales, your job is to convince prospects to make the big decisions. This involves navigating a complex cognitive maze that even neuroscientists struggle to rationalize.
Daniel Kahneman, a 2002 Nobel Prize winner in economics, lays out the two systems of decision making in his book, Thinking, fast and slow.
System 1 (heart)
This system is our initial reactive decision-making made by our emotions. It's used for snap judgments based on recalling past experiences and acting intuitively.
System 2 (head)
This system kicks in when system 1 fails. It relies heavily on reasoning and logic and is used to develop possible solutions to new, unfamiliar problems.
Humans have been searching for millennia for ways to solve their problems and make better decisions:
Looking to elders in communities with more life experience for advice and counsel
Interpreting signs from the stars
Consulting with moral religious authorities
The modern salesperson doesn't use aggressive "sales" tactics. They act as educators and guides to help people solve their problems.
Traditional sales proposals ignore System 1 thinking. They assume that prospects are approaching their problems rationally and logically. When you understand and apply key cognitive methods to your proposals, you'll be engaging both the emotional and rational sides of the brain.
This guide covers the psychology of:
Visuals
Content
Format