📄 Everything Always Makes Sense In Your Buyer's World

It’s often said that humans are incredibly irrational creatures, but it's not that simple.

People simply have an operating system that’s far more complex than we realise, and that makes things look irrational. But everybody has internal rules and biases and preferences and tendencies and fears and so on, and all of that works together in their mind, all of it invisible to us, and fully logical to them.

All that we see is their behaviour, and we have very little idea of what all else goes on under the hood.

So, you see someone doing something that looks completely irrational, including roundly ignoring your very astute and logical reasoning on why another action would make more sense…?

Then you need to realise that in their world, they’re making perfect sense. "All completely logical, here - sound reasoning, you see?"

And then you go: “Yeah, no, but... hear me out...” and right there, you lose the race and they dig their heels in even deeper.

Or think of a buyer who needs help - but instead of hiring you to improve team performance, they hire a sales team, and that could put them at all kinds of risk, when more buyers show up but team performance isn't up to speed for handling the flux of new buyers. Not a good idea, but for them, in their world, hiring for sales is the sensible thing to do.

Or consider a hot prospect, all engaged and on-board with your coaching programme, to help them write their book - but then they say they need to wait till next year?

They’ve got a reason for that, and it makes sense to them, even if objectively they might be making a mistake.

Client completely borking up the marketing implementation they bought from you, because they keep messing with the copy?

Yep, those edits had to be made. Obviously.

There are a million ways to look at a situation and make a decision about it, and everyone does the best they can with the means they've got.

No matter how illogical something might seem to you, you need to remember that it always makes sense for the other person.

And when you’re dealing with buyers, you need to be careful not to fall into the irrationality trap, and dismiss something as illogical.

Because when you do that, you end up trying to change their mind, reasoning with them, have them see they're not making sense.

And that brings two problems: The more we're told we're not making sense, the harder we will defend our position, and also:

When you reason with people, you speak to the rational part of the mind, but most of the internal sense-making happens on a subconscious level, and you can't reason the subconscious into changing the mind. Just won't happen.

So instead, when you see people do or say something illogical, you need to ask them questions that help them identify the flaws in their logic.

"Tell me how you got to that decision?"

"What's the opportunity cost there?"

"If that hypothesis turns out incorrect, what will break or go wrong?"

"Suppose online advertising was banned, and not an option. What other options would you explore?"

These are just examples - there's a ton of ways to approach and break through illogical things.

The trick is to ask calibrated questions, that shift their perspective, have them explore and reflect, so that you can have a deeper, more helpful conversation with them.

Very possibly, they'll even realise they were missing something, and update their logic, and that might just help you two move closer to a sale.

Either way: the one thing to not do, is try to reason with people in order to have them see they're not being logical.