It is pretty common knowledge that people interpret what you say paying little attention to the actual words that you use.
And while all the scientists don’t agree on how much impact feelings have on interpreting a conversation, they all agree that what you say is significantly less important than how you say it.
The words themselves just aren’t that important.
What is important is how people feel when they hear the words.
This mirrors a lot of what we currently know about how the brain works. You might think your brain is unbiased in how it selects, stores, categorizes, and retrieves memories, but quite the opposite is true.
Your brain actively stores and more quickly retrieves memories that match how you feel about a specific instance. Nobody is lying. It’s how the brain plays tricks on you– hiding memories that don’t match your feelings about the experience.
For example, getting engaged is a powerful memory that most couples never forget.
It’s a feeling that last a life time.
Likely, the story of how things actually went down is a little bit different than how the couple recall the moment.
Being engaged is such a breathtaking event that the brain attempts to forget anything that might make the the experience less amazing.
For example, it might been raining that day. Dinner reservations might have been slow. The meal itself, tasteless. Perhaps it was impossible to catch a cab for a ride home.
All these memories get left out of your story because your brain tries to disassociate them from the amazing feeling and memory of being engaged. Of finding love.
What is important is how people remember their feelings at that time.
Positive emotional memories are less about what is actually going on and more about the feelings that are being created.
Which is where a lot of business strategy goes wrong.
The experts give us a dozen different ideas on how to create and execute a better business plan.
And the plan isn’t the problem. It’s the feelings that are being created when the plan is being executed.
Buyers aren’t inspired. Prospected aren’t wowed. Leads aren’t loved.
It’s what they feel — not the logic you are working so hard to convince them of.
We’ve adopted a business plan that values business at the rank and priority of a number in our demand generation technology platform. And then we wonder why customer loyalty is at an all time low. If we don’t care about other people, why should they care about us.
Why would they want to? And how can you fix this situation?
You need a strategy to create better feelings.
And it means you looking at business a little differently.
- Rethink your value proposition — Most of the time in business our value proposition is nothing but a confusing twist of complicated business jargon and industry insider synonyms. We’re not really even sure what we do and why we do it. You can fix that by tearing apart what you say you do and looking for the reasons why anyone would care if you are no longer around. That’s the value that you provide.
- Focus on the experience — Growing your business isn’t all about gathering leads and generating more revenue. Instead, focus on creating an experience that is memorable. Ask yourself, “How will someone else feel about what we are doing”? By creating better feelings with each person you interact with, you actually create a more willing customer base. It’s sales hypnosis.
- Get better KPI’s — Sure, revenue and profit are important. That’s how you stay in business. But it’s not the only key performance indicator that you should be looking at. How about “delighted customers” or “outrageous customer experiences”? If you want to fix how people feel then you need to measure how well you’re doing at it. And then keep getting better at it.
- Reward awesomeness – What you respect your team respects. If you believe that how people feel is important to you then reward your team when they exceed your expectations. Throw out the old awards system for bigger territories or new inventions. Focus on people who make your customers feel amazing. You’ll find extra profit and market domination not too far behind.
It is all to easy to discount how people feel.
You can always blame an awkward interaction on your customer having a bad day or not “getting what we do over here”.
And the problem is that you’ll be right all the way to the absolutely worst outcomes.
Your customers do have bad days and sometimes they are treating you a little unfairly.
But a bad business strategy tries to ignore the feelings of your customers in place of more logic.
What if doing business with your company was the happiest day of your customer’s life?
How much would that memory be worth to you?
