S. 2 Ep. 2 – Awareness To Action: The Importance Of Understanding Your Buyer’s Psychology

Taylorr: Welcome to this week’s episode of Technically Speaking. We’re your hosts, Taylorr and Austin and today we are talking about buyer psychology and the perfect person for this episode is Chris Gray, an expert with over two decades of experience in buyer psychology, keynote speaker, thought leader and so on. Chris is a very dear friend of ours and he’s taught us an incredible amount about buyer psychology and this episode he shares with us some of the common misconceptions people have, some of the mistakes we make when we’re selling and marketing to the people that we want to serve, and helps us uncover some of the biases we might have before even understanding our actual audience. And my favorite part about the entire episode, Chris breaks down a simple five step process for completely understanding your audience’s needs and how to build their attention, garner their trust, and get them to take action, which is actually just buying more from you and who doesn’t want more of that? So, let’s dive into this week’s episode as always. We hope you enjoy this one and stick around to the end for some awesome resources.

Austin: Boom. All right, we are live. Chris welcome to the show, man. It’s so good to have you.

Chris: Thank you for having me, guys. Really appreciate it.

Taylorr: Oh yeah, it’s our pleasure. It has been a long time in the making.

Chris: Yeah, has been.

Austin: For sure. We’ve been talking about doing this episode for a super long time and we’re going to get into this, but we had a conversation, or a coaching call a couple weeks ago that brought up a couple of points. We were like, oh my gosh, we got to have that conversation so now’s the time.

Chris: That’s great.

Austin: The stars are finally aligned.

Chris: That’s great. Well, I’m excited. This is the stuff that I love to talk about and work with my clients with and all of that so very exciting.

Austin: Yeah, for sure. So, you’re kind of just a fascinating character in my mind started out with this psychology stint. You’ve got out your doctorate, right? [Cross-talk 02:05] Eight years of life, right?

Chris: Yeah, it was a longtime coming.

Taylorr: Psychology stint.

Austin: Well, you know, but it segued. It segued out of the traditional role that you thought you were going go down, right? Can you kind of just unpack a little bit about how that transition happened between psychologist Chris into retail psychologist Chris?

Chris: Yeah, sure. Starting at a very young age, I was always fascinated by psychology. So went to college, Michigan State University, and I studied psychology there decided to go for my doctorate and spent another several long years there studying for that. And about a year before I finished the doctorate, I started having this realization that I didn’t love being a therapist and that was really the focus I was in a clinical program so that was really the focus. And I kind of had one of those moments in life where it was like, wow, what am I going do now? And I was fortunate to have some really great mentors who also did some business consulting and I was able to kind of start dipping my toe in that arena and I led my first focus group and just really fell in love with that process.

And what I realized is that I, I love psychology, but it’s the pathology that’s not as interesting to me. What I really enjoy is understanding how people make decisions, how they make choices in their lives, whether it is major life choices or it’s this cereal versus that cereal, something as mundane as that there’s a lot going on beneath the surface that really directs that. And I’ve spent the last 25 years of my life studying that and applying it with sales and marketing, both in retail and in other scenarios as well, any sales situation really.

Austin: Well, this kind of ties back into your background. Your family owns a furniture store or something, right?

Chris: Right, yeah. And they still do. Grace Furniture and Boutique, very creatively named. When I was four, my parents in their early twenties with no business experience whatsoever started a furniture business so I literally grew up in retail and I saw firsthand what works and what doesn’t work, how to form relationships that last and will sustain you through both the good times and the bad times, I’m happy to say Grace’s Furniture and Boutique is still around and thriving. And it’s really because my family really invested in the community and in forming relationships if they hadn’t done, if they had just focused on making quick sales and not worrying about the relationships, this store would’ve been gone by now. There’s been so many difficulties in the retail space, particularly for mom pop shops, but it has really been those relationships and understanding what people need that has sustain.

Austin: Yeah. 

Taylorr: Wow. So, I’m curious, where do you think the original fascination with how people made decisions came into play? Was that because of the work you saw your parents do and people choosing how to shop? Where did that fascination start?

Chris: It’s interesting. It’s got to be from that. Because like I said, I literally grew up, that’s where I would go after school, it’s where I would go when I didn’t have school. I spent every waking moment that I wasn’t in school pretty much in that store watching my parents in action and, and seeing just the passion that they brought to it and understanding what people need and that really had an effect on me.

Taylorr: Wow. What’s interesting to me about your perspective on the world is so many people view sales and marketing from this super kind of technical angle, like it’s this kind of structured process, a way of doing things, but there’s so much more that has to happen to get someone, to have trust, to capture someone’s attention, to be with them and that honestly, the root of all of that is, seems to be their psychology, how they end up making decision, what, what captures their attention. How do we even discover in the first place, how to even start engaging with our audience? How do we start getting into their minds? What’s the process there?

Chris: Well, I think the first thing is there’re a couple… when you’re studying to be a therapist, there’s so many ways that my schooling and experience as a therapist has affected how I think about the world. And when you are studying to be a therapist, one of the things that you spend a lot of time on is understanding your own process, your own mindset, your own biases so that those you can set aside when you’re engaging with a client or a patient. And I think that is one of the things when I work with clients, one of the first things we talk about is, what is your perspective in the world? And whether it’s, you know, good, bad or indifferent, that’s going affect how you engage with people, how you interpret their and their needs.

So, I teach this approach called bracketing where you identify your own perceptions, your own biases, and you just, in your mind, you kind of bracket them and you set them aside so that you can be open to hearing from the other person. Because those things are really going to get in the way of being effective in developing relationships and ultimately with selling. So, it is really a focus on the other person and understanding their needs, their desires, their aspirations on their own terms. You may or may not agree with those, that’s irrelevant.

Austin: Yeah. 

Taylorr: Right. 

Austin: Kind of got to meet people where they’re at, that’s for sure.

Chris: Yeah. And then from there, then next step is be a great observer of people and that means, again, with everything put aside, having fresh eyes every time you engage with someone, and that includes what you hear coming from them, what you see, all of that. It’s really about being a really great observer and a great listener.

Austin: That totally makes it sense to me, but I feel like it’s also a challenging thing. It’s a mindset that you have to practice, right?

Chris: Yeah.

Austin: Because to your point that you were saying earlier, a lot of this stuff happens sort of under the surface subconsciously, or at least we’re not intentionally making these little decisions I guess, or being aware of other people’s decisions or how our feelings impact how we see those decisions.

Chris:  Exactly.

Austin: Is that kind of the first step is just bringing that awareness to yourself and…

Chris: It is.

Austin: Practicing observation?

Chris: Absolutely. And there’s a a lot of great ways you can practice observation. I actually do a course on harnessing the power of observation because I think it’s that important. If you are not skilled at that, you really putting yourself at a disadvantage and you’re opening yourself up to a lot of blind spots that can have a real negative effect on your ability to connect with people and ultimately your ability to sell.

Taylorr: Right. Yeah, you have to be relevant in the market at any given time so if we have blinders on when you’re having conversations, you can’t adapt your messaging to the context of their world instead of your own world, right?

Chris: Exactly right. Relevance is the golden ticket. It is the gateway to providing value. It’s impossible to provide value to someone you don’t know or don’t understand so really aiming for relevance to another person is really the golden ticket.

Austin: Can we just take a second here? The word relevance gets tossed around a lot and I think we may have like a pseudo understanding for what that actually means but from your perspective, from the psychology angle, what does relevancy actually mean?

Chris: For me in the way that I think about it is I think about it in terms of aspirations. Because everyone has aspirations and every time someone buys something, whether it is a box of cereal, a new car or a program, it is because they are thinking of the future and they have aspirations for a better future. You can’t name something that we buy that isn’t based on an aspiration. And so, for me, it is about understanding those aspirations. What do they want in life? What are they looking for? What do they want to solve? What do they want to improve? And having a good handle on that so that you can talk to that and provide real value. A lot of people try to fake it or they try to short make shortcuts and really is just shooting yourself in the foot Because at the end of the day, it is the other person that’s going to make that decision. They’re going be judge and jury of whether you were relevant to them or not.

Austin: I’m curious, this is, I’m hoping tangential to this, but one of the biggest mistakes that sales people make in, I guess the micro level is focusing too much of their efforts and their communications and things on features and benefits as opposed to outcomes. Do you think that that’s a similar conversation that we’re talking about right now?

Chris: Absolutely. When you’re talking about features and benefits what you’re doing is you’re saying what you want to say versus what the other person needs to hear from you. And so, you see that a lot, I’ve worked in a lot of different categories or a couple of them have been working with computers or electronics or appliances, those types of things. And what you see happening a lot in those categories is a lot of very technical messaging about the features of this product that sound great to someone who knows it very well and is selling it but for someone who is going be a user, it doesn’t necessarily resonate. An example would be working with an appliance company, and they kept talking about the cubic centimeters of their oven and it’s so great and that doesn’t really resonate with the end user. What they want to know is can I make an entire turkey dinner in it? What they want to know is what does this actually mean for me in my life and how is it going to help me achieve my aspirations? Cubic centimeter is not going do it.

Austin: That makes sense. Apple does a really good job at this if I’m thinking of an example of this. There are iPhones, there are amazing, but never a single time if you’re looking at their marketing copy on their website, are they talking about how much Ram that that iPhone because most iPhone… they don’t care. It’s fast. That’s what you need to know. It’s fast. 

Chris: Exactly. 

Austin: So yeah, that makes sense. Another question that I think leads into this relevancy is how we get to the point where somebody’s even interested in hearing about you? I know this is a leading question because we started having this conversation, which is what led to this podcast today, but there’s this first initial step which is capturing somebody’s awareness, such that they care at all about why you’re relevant. How does that handoff happen?

Chris: Well, let me just demonstrate something really quickly so you can kind of go from there. What I’d like you to do just for a second. I just want you to wiggle your toes and someone’s in the audience and listening as well, just take a second to wiggle your toes. And feel if your toes are warm or cold and you feel the inside of your shoe, what does that have to do with anything? Well, 20 seconds ago, you weren’t thinking about your toes and the reason you weren’t thinking about your toes is they just weren’t relevant to what was happening right now. Those same sensations were there. Your toes didn’t suddenly become warm or cold, they were warmer, cold already, but you just weren’t paying attention because it wasn’t relevant. And you have to think of attention as a very limited resourced.

We only have so much of it at any moment to give away. And so, if you are concentrating on one thing, you are not concentrating, or you are eliminating a whole set of other things that you’re not paying attention to just like your toes. And if you are a marketer, if you are a salesperson, if you are a speaker, if you can’t get past that gateway, you may as well not even exist to your audience because you’re not getting through to them. And so, it starts with being relevant in some way to grab that attention and there’s two ways that you can really do this, two avenues to getting attention. And the first is the one we think about most frequently, I think, which is disruption. And disruption simply means that you or your product or your message stands out against its background in some way. 

This is why ambulances have sirens, this is why school buses are bright yellow so they stand out against the environment and we pay attention to them very quickly. We notice them very quickly. And you see that a lot in marketing and products. If you go to the store, you see all kinds of different ways that products are trying to stand out. I use an example frequently of the hair care brand Fructis. When they first entered the market, probably about year 2000, no one had heard of them, but someone there in their product development or marketing department was really smart and they decided to make the packaging that really bright neon green. And this was a time when you went down the haircare aisle, everything was kind of beige or brown so that bright green stood out like a beacon and it got attention right away and they were able to use that to get attention and then really create a brand that people love. 

So that disruptive ability is really great way to get noticed. Now, the problem with disruption is that it only gets you noticed. how many times have you heard a car alarm go off? And you’re just like, eh, and you keep walking. Every time you hear a car alarm go off, you don’t go and run and see what’s going on because you figure, eh, it’s probably not relevant, it’s probably just going off on its own so it doesn’t create that engagement that we’re looking for. So, disruption is great, but it can just get you noticed and if someone doesn’t immediately determine that you’re relevant to them in some way, then they’re just going keep going or they’re going pay attention to something else. That’s why relevant is so important. Relevance not only gets our attention, but it also engages us.

Because something is important to us in some way not only do we notice, but then we want to find out more, we want to engage with that and we go from there. And there’s a great kind of psych 101 example called the cocktail party effect. The cocktail party effect, imagine you’re at a party, you’re surrounded by people, there’s music playing, but you’re having a conversation with someone. And because you’re concentrating on that conversation, everything else becomes kind of background noise to you. It’s just kind of fades into the background and you able to concentrate on that conversation. But if someone nearby says your name instantly, it gets your attention and that’s because your name is very personally relevant to you and when you hear it, it immediately is relevant and immediately gets your attention.

Taylorr: Wow. Okay.

Chris: That was a lot. That was a lot. 

Taylorr: Oh, so I I hope everyone just… okay, so rewind five minutes and just take out your notebook and write all of this down. It’s gold, Chris, and what’s what I love about this way of thinking is it is almost like a step-by-step process if you are in the position as a listener or ourselves creating a new product, wanting to sell more, wanting to market, more wanting to get in front of the right audience, we first have to, okay, how are we going capture their attention? How are we going to be relevant to them? How can we get them to take action? It feels methodical in a way. I feel like I have a box for being able to grab somebody’s attention and potentially be relevant to them. Of course, maybe that’s easier said than done, but it feels like those has a secret sauce right there.

Chris: Well, it’s funny you should mention that. I have a process called engagement engineering. 

Taylorr: Oh, wonderful. 

Chris: We actually walk through that process with my clients and we make a plan and it really is exactly what you said. It is this step-by-step process for creating strategies, for getting engaging attention and then going from there and creating action. Because ultimately, if we want to make a sale, if we want people to pay attention, if we want people to do something, it is very much about behavior as well.

Taylorr: Yeah. I have a question that’s always been in the back of my mind around this subject. In the marketing world, it’s often said that people want to be told what to do and I’ve always felt a little conflicted about this idea because I don’t like being told what to do. Only if I want to take action on it and it’s it presented it in front of me in a way, will I actually kind of take action on it. So, on the subject of taking action, of course we see like call to actions everywhere, because once you have their attention, you’re relevant now we’ve got to do something with it. How do we get into that next phase of actually getting somebody to take action where it’s not so abrasive?

Chris: Right. Well, here’s the thing. Anytime that you’re trying to influence behavior, if you haven’t done the work before to either create or engage with their motivation for doing it, then it’s going to feel coercive and it’s going to create resistance. It’s exactly what you said, Taylorr. I don’t want to be told what to do. Well, you don’t want to be told what to do if you don’t want to do that thing or you don’t care about the outcome of that thing. If you care very much about the outcome, if it’s something that you really want, but there’s many different avenues to do it then suggesting effective ways to do that is very helpful. And that’s why I always say that great marketing, great salesmanship is helping, it’s not coercing. Coercing creates resistance and resentment and eventually it creates avoidance.

And that’s like a death no for, you know, for anyone trying to sell something. If your end user is avoiding you, well, you really lost already. So, you really have to think about two things here and its motivation and means. Motivation is the reason why someone would want to do it. Motivation is all about why would this person want to do the thing that I want influence them to do on their own terms? It’s not why I think they want do it. It’s why would they want do it? And so again, we’re getting by the aspirations. What are their aspirations? What do they care about? What matters to them? And once you understand that, then you have to create the means for them to do it. And the means is simply the steps that they have to take, making it simpler, making it easier, making it faster, more convenient, and really becoming the path of least resistance for them.

So, you have to have both of those things, the motivation and the means for something to happen. If you have one without the other, it simply doesn’t work. Motivation, you want it really badly, but you don’t have the means, you’re frustrated. If I provide you with the means, I make something simple and easy to do, but you’re like, I don’t want to do that, well, you get nothing. You get no action there or you get irritation. And so, thinking about those two things as well, that’s again, part of the engagement engineering process that I use is tapping into motivation, making sure we have the means for them to go about it. And the means really has to be better than they have already. Has to be simpler, faster, easier, et cetera otherwise, there’s really not going to be a lot of effort put in that direction by them.

Austin: Yeah. That makes sense. When it comes to people, making decisions, something that gets talked about in the sales and marketing world a lot is impulse getting people to make quick decisions. And to your point from a couple of seconds ago about sales marketing being about helping, you’re trying to solve problems, impulse almost feels like a little bit of a dirty word because it doesn’t feel like a helpful word. It feels like we’re just trying to get to somebody to make an outcome. So, is there a room for impulse in this process that you’re talking about right now?

Chris: There absolutely is. And impulse can go both ways, so you’re right, impulse can be manipulative and coercive. Here’s the thing. We can get any one to buy something once. The world of marketing, the world of sales, we are sophisticated enough, we have the knowledge, we know how to get anyone to buy something once. That’s not sustainable over time to create an effective strategy that will keep a business going or keep sales growing, because eventually people we’ll start to feel like they’ve been tricked, they’ve been coerced and again, that leads again to that resistance, avoidance, those types of things that really end up shooting you in the foot. So, impulse can be a good thing because it can be just last-minute reminders, it can be something people love and they just don’t think about all the time, it can be a new solution, it can be something like that, but there has to be something in it for the person buying it that is real value. And again, this all comes back to relevance and value. If you’re not providing value, eventually you’re going get found out and it’s going to have pretty negative consequences for you.

Taylorr: Yeah. 

Austin: Yeah. That’s true. People are smart. They catch on. 

Chris: They are smart. It’s true. I think that’s something that sometimes we forget. We think, oh, people will want to do what I want to do. We, we all get myopic, it happens. And that’s again, why it’s always so important to continuously challenge yourself to think from a different point of view.

Taylorr: Yeah. I think first the one really important thing that I think you just touched on is that I think sometimes if I’m being perfectly blunt here, we think the people that we can sell to are dumber than they are. Everyone has a psychology to them. Everyone is making decisions based on what matters to them, what’s priority for them, how it’s going to affect them in their life. And I think sometimes we can get wrapped up in this idea that the perfect phrasing and the right timing and the number of touch points and things can really be the main thing that makes the difference. It’s really not a technical approach to being able to generate revenue, interest, intrigue, the thing that I love about buyer psychology is that it brings that human element into this mix and it kind of levels the playing field. Like, no, we’re here to understand the people we serve so we can help more of them and get more access to them and it feels so much more value oriented than the typical kind of language you hear about sales and marketing performance.

Chris: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s one of the things that I’m very sensitive to because I get that question a lot. Are you just tricking people into buying thins they don’t want? And I think that you can, like I said, we can sell anything to somebody once, but that’s just not smart strategy in the end. Yeah, I want to be a good person, I want to be able to sleep at night, but it’s also smarter to think more long term about building trusting relationships because at the end of the day, trust is the basis for any brand. Whether they at brand as a person or a thing, it is the basis of that brand because the only reason we care about brands is because we trust that that brand works for us. 

Taylorr: That’s right. 

Chris: It irritates me when I hear things like, oh, here’s some tricks for selling. Well, yeah, great, good luck with that, but at the end of the day, it’s just not going work. It’ll work a little bit, but it’s going to end up backfiring in some way.

Taylorr: Well, the reason why it works a little bit is because they’re playing a little bit into some of those elements of psychology, but it’s not maximizing it and you’re not doing the person of service either. You know what I found about… because my background with marketing yours too, Chris, you’ve been the blog with all this language out there. 

Chris: Sure. 

Taylorr: You hear words, like fear, urgency, greed, impulse, those kinds of dirty words. There’s even an acronym called Fuji for it. It’s like the opposite of, I don’t know, it’s the coercive of way of thinking about the actual strategy to build that relationship with somebody. But when we put that effort into really understanding our customers and really thinking and trying to remove our biases about our own offerings, am I positioning this thing that I can do for somebody in the way they want it presented to them that can be in line with their outcomes?

Chris: That’s absolutely right. And the thing about psychology is a lot of people know a little bit about it and that can actually create a lot of challenges, use fear as an example. I was reading the other day an article and they were talking about using fear to get your message across. Here’s the thing, fear does get attention. We are hardwired to notice things that create fear but we also want to get away from those things. That’s why we notice them so we can fight or flee. And so, with a little bit of knowledge in psychology and say, well, yeah, we want to use fear to get their attention, but the problem is there are other aspects of psychology that also kick in that tell us fear is something that we need to resolve quickly and get away from.

There are categories where they use fear, but when they do it successfully, so think about insurance or tires. Tires for your car. They often use fear as a way, but it’s not the fear that motivates people, it is the resolution of fear. So, it’s not just, hey, you could get in a car accident if you don’t have the right tires and your whole family could die, it’s that could happen but we’ve got the tires for you that are going make sure it doesn’t happen. So, fear doesn’t motivate us, it’s the resolution of fear that motivates us so that’s about safety, security, those types of things. If we only have a little bit of knowledge of psychology, we run the risk of being myopic and shortsighted in the way we use it. 

Austin: Yeah. That makes sense. It kind of is about intentionality it sounds like in a lot of ways, because the tools can be used in the right way for the right reasons to genuinely provide solutions to people that have problems but it’s really easy if you don’t have the right intentions to A, screw things up for yourself, make your life harder and not even get what you want but B, not build that trust, not build that brand recognition that’s associated with actual problem solving. It seems like a really good way to just get much of one-off sale. 

Chris: And the thing with trust is it takes a lot of time and effort to build it, it takes a second to blow it. I encourage people to work hard to build that trust and work hard, to protect that trust and that should be one of your filters if you’re in sales and marketing. Is this going to build or hurt the trust with our end user?

Taylorr: Well, there it is folks, golden nugget.

Austin: Those coaches, consultants… 

Chris: Everybody. You have to know that.

Austin: That’s so important.

Chris: Absolutely.

Austin: Because you’re the person. They have to trust you. I know we’re getting close to the end here, but I want ask this last question for you, Chris. a lot of what we’ve talked about has been in regards to maybe like retail sales, like your example of the Fructis shampoo bottles that are bright green so that makes perfect sense. But a lot of the people that are listening to this show, well, first of all, their faces are probably not on store shelves somewhere so that way of getting attention may not be a hundred percent applicable the same way would be if you had a product there, but what are some of the ways that we can use some of these principles we’ve talked about today, both in the online realm, but also for a personal brand?

Chris: Yeah, absolutely. I think again, thinking about relevance is always going to be key. It’s knowing your audience and knowing what they care about and what they aspire to. The idea of bracketing of understanding your own biases, your own point of view and setting that aside and really opening space for you to understand your audience and what they need from you to meet their own aspirations, that is baseline for anytime you are working with an audience or working to build a brand, that’s really the first step. Where you go from there is just a matter of what outlet you’re using. Step one, is that process, and then again, motivation and means. How am I tapping into or creating the motivation that matters to them? And then how am I creating the means for them to achieve that a way? That might be in the case of someone who’s a speaker or someone who’s a consultant is once you’ve got the motivation, the means is how am I taking them? Is it a step-by-step process? Am I providing something for them that they can do and understand how to do once I’m out of the picture? That’s really, I think important as well.

Taylorr: Oh man, I just love how much of a step-by-step process this is. I just see them like the road ahead, attention and relevance and motivation and means and throughout the entire thing, you got to build trust along the way. If you can just break down what you’re doing into those things and really take a granular look at if you’re doing them well or not, you’re going build a better business.

Chris: Absolutely. And some of those little tricks are very useful too, there’s a great story… and I don’t know the veracity of it, but Diana Ross, when she was with The Supremes there’s stories that they would all agree, they were going show up in red dresses, but she would show up in a gold dress so that she would be the one that stood out on stage. Now those things actually work too so I don’t discount those but just know that they just get you notice they don’t necessarily build any kind of lasting relationship or trust down the road so you’d have to have the other part too.

Taylorr: Amazing. Chris, thank you so much for coming on the show today. This has been such a rich episode. I feel like I’m going listen to this a million times in my career. 

Chris: It’s my pleasure.

Taylorr: Chris thank you so much for coming in and teaching us something new. If someone wants to get in touch with you, what’s the best way for them to do that.

Chris: Sure. you can go to my website, thebuycologist.com or you can reach out to me directly at chris.gray and it’s G R A Y @thebuycologist.com. 

Taylorr: All right. Well, as always, that information will definitely be in the show notes. And hey, if you like this episode, don’t forget to rate it like it, subscribe to it and if you want more awesome resources like this head to speaker flow.com/resources. Thank you so much for chiming in. I just wanted to take a second to thank our sponsor Auxbus. Auxbus is the all-in-one suite of tools you need to run your podcast and it’s actually what we run here at Speaker Flow for Technically Speaking. It makes planning podcasts simple; it makes recording podcasts simple; it even makes publishing podcasts to the masses simple and quite honestly, Technically Speaking wouldn’t be up as soon as it is without Auxbus. Thank you so much Auxbus. And if you are interested in checking Auxbus out, whether you’re starting a podcast or you have one currently get our special offer, auxbus.com/speaker flow, or click the link below in our show notes.