Are you a consultative salesperson who informs your sales leads with a rational lay-out of the benefits you offer? Do they fully understand what they’re getting and why it will be of value to them?
Or do you sell to the lizard in all of us? The lizard brain is a region of primitive responses, including fear, pleasure, and aggression (it gets its name because this type of mental function is all lizards possess).
The lizard brain is more powerful than most of us realize. It’s what psychologists and behavioral experts use to explain much of the irrationality of human behavior. It’s both aggression lashing out and the voice of fear in the back of our heads, telling us to hesitate. It hates change and avoids risk.
The lizard brain seeks equilibrium in moments of fear or uncertainty. It wants a calm, safe place where predators can’t attack it.
The lizard wants the comfort of a full belly or pleasure of an alcoholic buzz. It’s the reason you eat cheeseburgers when you want to be thin. Or drink beer in the afternoon instead of reading up on material that would make you smarter.
It makes you horny. Not when you want it to. When the lizard wants it.
The lizard brain creates our never-ending human contradictions. Because unlike lizards, we have a massive area of the brain devoted to higher reasoning. Metacognition: we think about the way we think. We know what the lizard is doing even when we can’t do anything about it.
And most top salespeople will tell you that you don’t want a lead meta-cogitating. Thinking to much leads to indecision – a big enemy of closing deals.
Like many successful salesmen, Trump offers an electric appeal to emotion. In neurological terms, he bypasses the prefrontal cortex, where we make deliberate “executive” decisions, to target the amygdala, which controls our instinctive responses to stimuli such as fear and threat. Commonly called “lizard” brain, the amygdala harbors the drive for dominance and survival.
Trump inspires those who are frightened and discouraged, promising aggressive action unencumbered by delay and indecisiveness.
In sales, the appeal to the lizard is usually an appeal to fear. It speaks to dissatisfaction, fear of missing out. Seth Godin describes it aptly:
The lizard brain is on high alert to make sure that everything is okay. The lizard brain can’t rest until it knows that everyone likes us, that no one is offended, that all graphs are ticking up and to the right and the future is assured.
Both of these writers note how in the age of mobile devices and social media, the lizard brain is more alerted and fed than ever. We have more fear of missing out, because we know so much more of what’s happening. Our base instinct to dominate finds a home in the narcissistic, self-promoting world of social media.
Today there is a lot of fear and dissatisfaction. There is an impulse to find a place of emotional comfort. To fit in and not miss out. Fertile ground for salespeople.
Of course, many voter taking the time to consider Trump shudder at what the results of his presidency would actually be. He salves our immediate fears, but disturbs our rational considerations of the long-term.
Seth sums it up best:
The only place joy can be found is right here and right now. Everyone who is selling you dissatisfaction is working for their own selfish ends.