Dr. Brynn Winegard (@DrBrynnWinegard) is a world renowned business brain expert. She is a full-time professional keynote speaker who combines brain and business science to dissect, redevelop, and augment how we work. Dr. Winegard teaches about persuasion and influence from a brain perspective and provides several actionable tips. In this episode, Brynn talks to me about neuro selling and how our brains receive messages on visual and subconscious levels. I ask her how sales and marketing professionals can most effectively communicate and not waste resources in areas where our audiences are inattentive. Brynn provides advice on how we can build new relationships on subconscious levels by acknowledging the SCARE model: Status and social capital, Control and choice, Autonomy and ambiguity, Relationships and connectedness, Equity and fairness. Questions During Episode What exactly can sales people practice in order to dig into the subconscious levels of their audience?What are some things that we can that we can do in a web meeting to grab a hold of some of the subconscious decision criteria and pull those in our favor when selling?What should we do and what should we not do?How can we really make the best use of to go deep into the attention that we are getting at that moment?How can we best build relationships on a subconscious level?What do you believe is the most common connection that you make with someone else when you’re first meeting them? Links and Mentions Scientific proof your brain was designed to be distracted5 Social Threats or Rewards – SCARF (SCARE) ModelStatus and Social CapitalControl and ChoiceAutonomy and AmbiguityRelationshipsEquity and FairnessWhy Your Brain Filters Out Marketing Contact Dr. Winegard Web – DrBrynn.comTwitter – @DrBrynnWinegard Podcast Transcription Dr. Brynn: People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. I think if you really get thinking of the depth of that then what am I in this business for? It’s really because what I discovered from my research and training was that, most people don’t know how to use their own brain. Dr. Brynn: The idea is that with neuro selling, we’re trying to look at the brain-based principles of the brain. What’s true about the neuro functionality of the human brain in general that we either have a misconception about? One of the things of course is or at least I could make sure to mention is how distractible the brain is and the idea that where I usually start without that is that the human brain is 5% conscious, 80% sub-conscious, and 15% completely unconscious. What we typically do in the sales process is we typically sell to the conscious brain with rationality and logic and with facts, and figures, and data, and studies and key studies when in fact, that part of the brain is your study that you sent me and a lot of the studies out there. I mean, it is a very small portion of the brain. It is, by the way, 5% at a maximum, so your conscious brain is much closer. We think just something closer to 1% which basically means that it is highly distractible, it’s not listening, it is highly distracted constantly, highly distractible and distracted. It’s small; it has a very short attention span. It doesn’t actually make decisions anyway, so it doesn’t really matter if you, as a salesperson, when you approach your prospect or when you’re talking to a client. Or even and I, this is how to get away from like the sales aspect of things. Sometimes, they talk about the three B’s; believing, buying and then buying-in the idea that those three B’s, you’re always looking for one of those three B’s from everyone you meet all day long. You want them to either believe in you, buying into your ideas, or buy what you’re selling. Even many times, you might be on the subway, you might be in a library; you want them to believe and buy into social norms as an example. So when we are in the library, you think, “Well, I have no relationship to the person at the corner.” When in fact, you’re hoping that they believe in the social normative structures. That means that they would stay quiet in this environment as an example. We’re always looking for believing, buying and then buying from everyone that we’ve interacted with or in the midst of all day long. Because of that, I think it’s really important then to conceptualize coming away sort of from the sales narrowed edge, “Hey, we are looking for compliance from people all of the day.” If that’s true, then what do we need to know about the human brain in order to be better at actually getting them to comply with us non-coercively right? Because you can’t, the guy in the corner of the library, you can’t go up to and twist his arm. What we do is we apply peer pressure and normative pressure around our cultural understanding of what, how to behave, and how to act in a library. And so all of those decisions about how to act and how to be and how to gain compliance from others, that’s all decided in the subconscious brain. It’s all decided in a push from the brain that you don’t have direct control over. I mean, certainly when it comes to, as an example, how to sell better, we have to really dig deep into the subconscious but then the second piece is the conscious part of the brain which is where most of us try to sell to you is small, not listening, distracted, and distractible. So when you say dig into the subconscious, what exactly do you mean and what exactly can I do about it? Dr. Brynn: Yes, so part of it is that the subconscious we think it’s a neuro and atomically 80% of the brain but probably close to a 99% of your processing power. One-quarter of your entire subconscious is dedicated to visual processing as an example. When we look at the subconscious, we realize that, in fact, the vast majority of those neural networks are for visual processing which means that seeing really is believing. What you show and what you do speaks volumes way louder than words. We often tell our clients, our customers, our children to eat their broccoli, when in fact, our clients and our customers what our product does and our kids eat their broccoli. But we don’t show them what the product does or us eating the broccoli and so, I think that’s a really critical piece. The other thing is that most communication, 93% of communication is non-verbal, it’s visual. It’s what you can see, it’s what you can feel, it’s the aura, the energy a person has. I think a lot of sales process in today’s age has come in through, even if design thinking etcetera. It’s come through technological or digital media. The challenge with that is that it’s hard to activate the human brain or human subconscious with, granted that visual media, it’s hard to activate that brain when they can’t really experience the person on the other end. I would say that email marketing is worse than telephone marketing. And telemarketing worse than video conferencing, and video conferencing, and video conferencing is worse than in-person meeting and so on. That’s the idea there, is that the subconscious is one-quarter visual but the vast majority of it neural network are dedicated to social processing. So if you look at the subconscious, it’s about 80- If the subconscious is 80% of your brain, 80% of your subconscious is dedicated to social networks which we totally underestimate for some reason. And so in neuroscience, we always say that social processing is king. And the idea there is that it dictates more decisions than any other subset of things so more than emotions more than you know physiological needs, safety needs etcetera. Our arch-man say it that the social grain dictates more decisions than survival. I mean, and people think, “What? No, I care more about surviving than what Joe, keeping up with the Joneses, except that if you look at like even Maslow’s hierarchy which has been totally dismantled, you look at the fact that he said, “Physiological safety, social esteem, self-actualization in that order.” Think about the number of times that people will endanger themselves for social purposes, or race their cars, they’ll go snowmobiling, or do really dangerous sports as an example. They’ll starve themselves to fit in. They will go into debt in order to keep up with the Joneses. They will compromise sociological safety, even esteem needs, in order to fit in socially. And so what we see is, in fact, first of all, Maslow didn’t know enough about the actual human brain function. But second is that what we what we need to consider when we want compliance out of somebody believing, buying in or buying the three B’s, we really need to consider their social processing cues. And so what do they, how do they perceive us socially? What are their social needs? How is the social interaction going? And a lot of that can’t be taken how you when in e-mail things can escalate really quickly because you can’t tell tone over text. The whole idea that in order to be able to really communicate with someone, they really need to be able to monitor and you’ll need to be able to monitor their physical cues, their body language, their kinetics, their kinesthetics. The idea that so much of what they’re really communicating to you is coming through visual cues that are not themselves verbal. I think we forget that all the time. The fact of the subconscious is visual, it’s social and then the third portion that I, and I speak about this a lot is that, if you look at, so if the whole brain is 80% subconscious, 80% of that subconscious is social, one-quarter of which some of which are social, but one-quarter which is visual. Then inside the social brain, about 80% of the social brain is regulated by emotion and emotional sub centers and emotional networks. And so the emotional brain, if and so, I almost I usually show
