Your Reptile Brain – Learning Science for Persuasion SkillsInstinctual Actions
The reality is that few sales trainers train your fast, hot, gut-instinct, intuitive part of who you are. And yet, management wants you to perform out in the field like you’re a natural at sales. A lizard in a desert is a natural and an alligator in a swamp is a natural, but their training is nothing that prepares you for the swamp or desert of sales situations.
What does work, however, is the ability to present the product or service as being something you know inside and out. When I walk into a business that has sales people who have designed the experience to educate, entertain, and compare and contrast my personal needs I immediately begin to think positively about the company. Training the reptile brain is not about lengthening your tongue with quick lines. It’s about creating a natural habitat for you to be honing your best instincts to succeed.
The challenge in the fast-paced world of sales, achieving peak performance requires more than just technical skills and product knowledge. It demands a deep understanding of human behavior and the underlying brain mechanisms that drive decision-making and action. Learning science, particularly insights from the reptilian brain, can offer valuable strategies to enhance sales performance. Let’s explore how the basal ganglia, cerebellum, and globus pallidus contribute to improving sales effectiveness.
Understanding the Reptilian Brain
The reptilian brain, also known as the basal ganglia, is the oldest part of the brain in evolutionary terms. It is responsible for basic survival functions, including instinctual behaviors and automatic responses. By understanding how this part of the brain works, sales professionals can tailor their approaches to align with the natural tendencies of their clients and prospects.
- Basal Ganglia: involved in habit formation, procedural learning, and routine behaviors
Sales professionals can leverage the power of habit by creating consistent and repeatable sales processes. By developing and practicing effective sales scripts and routines, they can improve their performance through procedural learning. This consistency helps in building reliable patterns that increase efficiency and reduce cognitive load during sales interactions.
- Cerebellum: responsible for motor control, coordination, and balance.
The cerebellum’s role in motor skills and coordination can be harnessed through physical presence and body language in sales interactions. Practicing confident and assertive body language, such as maintaining eye contact, using open gestures, and adopting a positive posture, can significantly influence client perceptions. Physical training and rehearsal can improve these non-verbal communication skills.
- Globus Pallidus: involved in regulating voluntary movement and influencing the initiation and execution of actions.
Sales professionals can tap into the globus pallidus’s function by setting clear goals and action plans. Structured sales strategies, with defined steps and milestones, can guide voluntary movements and ensure consistent progress towards targets. Regularly reviewing and adjusting these plans based on performance feedback can optimize execution and outcomes.
The solution is to utilize and train that part of your brain. It does not happen from a powerpoint, some spin questions, or reading technical brochures about what you sell. It requires arousal and situational instincts that can only be learned in-situ. Nobody should be leaving a sales training program without personalizing scripts, analyzing scenarios, acting in simulations, and handling tough obstacles in a stand and deliver session.
- Improve sales operations and planning:
Scripts are not schemas. Sales experience is not always a benefit. Teams must be ready to improvise. To do this, they must learn persuasion structures; stories, value chains, and value hypothesis. These can not be memorized. They must be learned real-time and under pressure, though this can be done in simulations.
- Determine the right customer compelling event:
Identifying a customer’s emotional and business drivers takes lower brain regions to develop signal pattern recognition. While upper brain regions have mirror neurons, the lower region have threat and opportunity instincts that must be trained to find openings. This can’t be done via bullet points and multiple choice. By providing scenarios, with frameworks, rubrics, and exemplars real-time training can be have multiple feedback loops to engrain the instinctual brain.
- Optimize the skills to transfer need:
The diagnostic assessment of a trained sales person is their meeting or beating quota. But in any complex sales cycle, measurement prior to the close must be caught. That is why I use the 6 step system of sense-making, scripts, scenarios, stand and deliver and scale modules. By providing a modular system, each stage of reptile brain training can be measured.
The result of incorporating insights from learning science and the reptilian brain can significantly enhance sales performance. By understanding and leveraging the roles of the basal ganglia, cerebellum, and globus pallidus, sales professionals can develop effective habits, manage stress, improve physical presence, and set structured goals. These strategies not only optimize cognitive and motor functions but also create a foundation for sustained success in the competitive world of sales.
Embracing the principles of embodied cognition in sales training and development can lead to a more engaged, confident, and high-performing sales team, ultimately driving better business outcomes and client satisfaction.
- Improve sales linearity:
The teams begin focusing on their furthering their knowledge broker skills and begin to discard their conniving and cajoling end of quarter discounts and special offers. The pipeline becomes more stable and predictable.
- Determine the right performance levels:
With sales agents and teams with varied sales experience and techniques. The sales process and assessment becomes standardized. This enables metrics to be set at each phase of the sales process. In turn, the sales agent regardless of their background will have a solid foundation to measure their skills regardless of the viability of their sales territory.
- Optimize the sales experience:
The diagnostic metrics are now sound. Clients have become collaborators and partners in furthering their goals with sales agents no seen as desperate convincers but rather as trusted advisors. CSAT scores rise as high pressure sales tactics drift away. And the bottom line is that your sales performance rises with each new trusted advisor your customer needs to depend on.
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In my 4 years here, I can say with full confidence that your account Deep Dive technique was the strongest, most effective, and applicable training I’ve received since working here.
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