The Psychology Behind Selling ANYTHING

You can’t create a product and then launch it, because first of all, you don’t know how to do that.

You might know how to create the product, but you don’t know how to market or sell it or advertise it or communicate about it or ship it. Bu the worst is that you don’t know if people will use it. Companies that roll out new products on a relatively continual basis don’t develop the product and then go sell it. They continually communicate with their customers about what product the customer is willing to buy next and then they develop that. So you must have your market identified and then be in continual communication with the market.

Then, you develop the product. It’s not, “I build a better mousetrap and the world comes marching to my door.” You have to find out if someone wants to buy what you’re selling. But even if you have a great thing, you’re going to go talk to people and they have 50 great things that they might buy, and they’re all great, but they’re not going to buy all 50. They might buy one, and maybe they’ll buy it this week, but they’ll actually probably buy it in 6 months, but really they’re not going to buy any of them no matter how great unless they’re on fire ad you’re selling water because they’re so busy already! They’re so overwhelmed and preoccupied by their jobs that if you come in and you say, this is going to increase your efficiency by 20%, and then the payoff would come in the next year. They’ll say, “I’ll do that as soon as I have time.” “As soon as I have time” is never.

The next problem is you don’t have any customers. You don’t have any customers and you show them the statistics but they can’t understand them and they also have 200 other people selling them things and 50 of them are scammers so they’re just lying about what they’re doing and they can’t tell the difference between the liars and the people who are telling the truth. So they can’t understand the statistics for themselves and they can’t verify them regardless. So what they ask you is, “who else is using it?” If the answer is everybody, then you don’t even have to do the sale because you’re already rich. If the answer is nobody, then they’re going to say, “why is nobody using this?” You say, it’s the hottest thing that’s come along and they think, “well, I’m not going to be the one who gets fired because this failed.” They do not think this might make me succeed. People do not care about whether or not they succeed. They care about whether or not they fail. If you’re marketing something and you can say, “this will stop you from being identified as a failure,” then people might be happy about that. But if you say, “this will really help you succeed,” they’re more like, “I don’t want to succeed, I just don’t want to fail. I just want to be invisible and be left alone,” which is their fundamental motivation.

Humans are like zebras. Zebras have stripes and people say, “that’s for camouflage,” but you think about that for 2 seconds and you think, that’s a really stupid theory, because lions are also camouflaged and are golden like the grass and zebras are black and white. You can see a zebra 5 miles away, so the whole camouflage thing is not working out. So biologists go and decide to look at some zebras. They’re looking at a zebra herd because there’s no zebra. Just like there’s no fish, there’s schools of fish and there are herds of zebras. You’re looking at the zebras trying to study a zebra and you make some notes and you look up and you think, “oh man, which zebra was I looking at?” The answer to that is, you don’t know because the camouflage is against the herd! It’s very difficult to parse out a zebra against the herd, so the camouflage is effective. But you think, I’d better identify a zebra so I can see what he’s doing. So you drive up to the zebras and you paint them red and then you stand back and think, “I’m pretty smart!” You can watch the zebra. But what happens to the zebra? The lions kill it! Because while lions are smart, they still have to identify a zebra before they can organize the hunt, they can’t just hunt the whole herd. But if they can be identified, the lions can pick them out and they do.

The rule for human beings is keep your stripes on so the lions don’t get you. “Trait neuroticism” is a powerful motivator that tends toward negative feelings. The negative emotion system is a killer source of motivation. There are “scales of happiness,” but people aren’t after happiness. They’re after not hurting. They don’t want to be excited and bubbly and full of laughter. They just don’t want to be anxious and full of pain. The key is on emotional stability. You want to avoid suffering, and one way to do this is to make sure the lions don’t get you.

People just don’t want to fail and get hurt.