This episode runs 28 min.

.

Subscribe to PMS Show on iTunes

Mentioned in This Episode 146: Client Feedback

Two Forms of Feedback
Survey – pros/cons
Interview – pros/cons

When to Get Feedback
Most people do it after projects are complete, problems
Most people do it as a stand alone event, problems
Better to start at beginning of project (establish what the client values, baggage)
Better to do a check-in mid-project (course correction)
Build feedback into your client agreements (both accountable)
Common proposal question: describe your client satisfaction process

What Not to Ask
Vague questions – how are we doing on this project?
Vision questions – What should we be doing for you in the future?
It’s not your clients job to do your visionary thinking

What to Ask
Net Promoter Score, developed by Bain & Co.
How likely is it that you would recommend our firm to a friend or colleague? 1-10
9-10 are promoters
0-6 are detractors
7-8 are passives
NPS = % of promoter – (minus) % of detractors

Follow up with an open ended question for elaboration. Why?
What service do you wish we offered to help you today?
Instead of “How did we do on delivering X?”
Rate on a scale from 1–5 how we did on delivering X. Then follow up with why?

Best Practices
Use a non-biased third party for interviews (hire a consultant).
Sample Size: 5–10 interviewees gets you a surprisingly lot of information
Ask same questions to all interviewees, but allow for interviewer to go off script
First ssk clients by email or phone if they would be willing to participate
Ask for a 20 minute interview. This will be about 8–10 questions
Make the interviewee introduction to the interviewer. Let the interviewer schedule the interviews.
Tell clients the information will be presented as a group, no individual attribution.
Thank participants…  

Production of PSM Show is underwritten by:

We Want to Hear From You

Let us know what you think about this episode. Should we do more interviews? Or, would you prefer just Josh and David (no guests)? Or should we get rid of Josh and David altogether? Use the form on our homepage to let us know.

Subscribe to our Podcast

To subscribe to the PSM podcast in iTunes – click here

Read the Episode

Announcer: Welcome to PSM, the Professional Services Marketing podcast. It’s insight applied.

Josh Miles: Hey, David, I hear you want some feedback today.

David Lecours: Well, actually, Josh, I was thinking our audience should get some feedback from their clients. So, today’s topic is client feedback.

Josh Miles: Well, while we’re at it, PSM Show is underwritten by SMPS, whose vision is business transformed through marketing leadership. Visit SMPS.org to learn more.

Announcer: This is PSM, it’s insight applied.

David Lecours: So I was at a presentation last week, Josh, and somebody put up this slide about client experience, and I don’t have a source for this, but let’s just assume it’s true.

Josh Miles: I hear that 87% of statistics are made up on the spot.

David Lecours: That’s right. I like the quote, “If you torture statistics long enough, you can get them to confess to just about anything.” But this one said 80% of firms believe they provide a great client experience. Yet, only eight percent of those clients believe the experience is great.

Josh Miles: Something is amiss.

David Lecours: Something is amiss and we need to close this gap and I think that some form of client feedback is a way to help us close this gap to know where we really stand. So I think this tool for our audience could be very beneficial.

Josh Miles: So, isn’t this like the most uncomfortable thing possible is to look somebody in the eye or look someone in their inbox and ask them what they think about you?

David Lecours: Yeah, it is and it’s hard and I have to say I’m a little bit biased on that question because as a third-party consultant, I always recommend to clients to work with a third-party because of the reason you just described. It’s really hard to ask and it’s really hard for the client to look you in the eye and tell you what they really think and what they believe. I think it’s nice to have some form of intermediary to soften the blow and ask the questions in a way that will elicit a real candid response.

Josh Miles: What would you recommend, like what’s the practical way or the method in which they could go get this feedback?

David Lecours: Yeah. So I’m thinking of there’s kind of two main ones but maybe something else will come to mind. I think a survey is one of those and I think client interviews is the second way to do it. Each kind of has some pros and cons. If we think about survey first, I think one of the pros about survey is that you can get a much larger sample size. Once you spend the time, and I don’t want to underestimate the time and thinking it takes to come up with a great survey, deploying that across a lot of clients is not going to cause you a lot of extra time. The downside of that is that because it’s so easy, we get a little bit inundated with surveys. Every time I go and have my car worked on, I get a survey. Every time I almost do anything and-

Josh Miles: Hotel stays.

David Lecours: Right. So unless I have a very personal connection to the person asking for the survey, I rarely do them. And I think that that’s probably true. So I think there’s a little bit of, not a little bit, there’s a resistance to doing these surveys. There’s things that people do to try to incent you, a chance to win an Amazon gift card. No, thanks. Ten or twenty dollars, no thanks. So I almost think it’s a bit of an insult when they try to bribe you with that. I don’t know. Any other sort of pros and cons that you can think of related to the survey approach?

Josh Miles: Do you feel like the bribery method, as you put it, do you feel like that feels as negative when it’s someone you already have a relationship with? Or does it feel worse if you already have a relationship?

David Lecours: Yeah, I think it almost feels worse and it’s sort of awkward. You’re offering to pay a client, not pay, but give some sort of gift or spiff or something, to somebody who is also paying you for your services. It just gets a little murky and messy. Yeah, it feels awkward to me. Yeah, I think it’s too big of an ask.

Josh Miles: Yeah, I feel like those, the ones I’m most likely to want to fill out are the brands that I already have a really good opinion of.

David Lecours: Yes.

Josh Miles: I suppose if I had a really lousy, like a zero or one experience, then that would be fine. That would drive me to fill it out but anything in the middle I’m kind of indifferent.

David Lecours: Right. And so what surveys are really good at is gathering information to answer the what type of questions. What do you think about this? But they’re not real great about the sort of why. So if somebody rates you a 5 out of 10, okay. But the follow on question of why is so critical and that’s where I think something like an interview really shines because in a personal interview you have this ability to sort of listen for nuance, to ask follow on questions, to drill down, to sort of go off script that you don’t have in a survey. And so that’s one of the reasons I’m more of a fan of interviews.

Josh Miles: I think even part of that could be asking the tell me about your experience question first before you rate it. So what happened and how was it? And describe the good or bad thing that happened and then in the end say, “Overall, how would you rate it?” And then to me that kind of warms up the question a little better.

David Lecours: I like that a lot. Yeah, so it’s key to make sure you have some open-ended questions if you are doing a survey to just let the person flow and not restrict them to sort of very prescribed answers.

Josh Miles: So, what do you think about like timing? When should our clients be reaching out? Is this start of the project, middle of the project, after the project’s been dead for three months?

David Lecours: Right. So usually what happens is someone in marketing gets excited to do this. They go to a presentation like I did recently and it’s like, “We got to do client feedback.” All right. We’re going to do this and we’re going to survey all the clients that we’ve worked with for the last three to five years. And the problem with that is, I don’t know about you, but as I get older it’s really difficult to remember what I did last week versus a project that I worked on two and a half years ago. So, even if you were to get feedback from somebody at the end of a project, the problem is that that project’s already done and if you’ve screwed it up, in a lot of cases it’s damage that can’t be fixed. So I think waiting until the project’s done or waiting ’til a year or two later is a standalone event is problematic.

David Lecours: I would much rather see firms and recommend that they, at the beginning of a project, obviously you can’t ask them how you did. But what you could do is sort of establish these ground rules to determine what the values that you both share on a successful project and project management are because in your mind, as the service provider, you may think you know what’s important to deliver on but … One of the things I always do with clients is ask them about their past baggage. And I say, “The last time you hired a creative consultant, what was that like for you?” Because they may have had an experience where the person, I don’t know, showed up for meetings five minutes late and that just drove the client crazy. “What was it like working with those? And what are some things that the consultant you worked with in the past did well? And what are some things that could be improved upon?” So I think establishing kind of what you’re going to measure in the beginning is a really great way to work with the client.

David Lecours: And then if possible, I think it’s more beneficial to get client feedback in the middle of a project because then it gives you the opportunity, as you could probably imagine, to course correct if something’s not going well and hopefully get you an opportunity to save the project or save the relationship if things aren’t going well. And if things are going well, great, keep doing those. I’m a big fan of positive psychology, not just focus on what’s going wrong, but try to identify the things that are going right and build on those.

Josh Miles: Yeah. And maybe if there are findings from that particular project, most firms would have multiple clients, multiple projects going on in parallel. You don’t wait until one project finishes to take on a new client. So there may be things that you identify from this client’s feedback to go, “Oh, if they think that then I wonder if these other guys are thinking that too.” And something that you can really use to improve the entire client experience.

David Lecours: For sure. That extrapolating, what’s working for one client is a very high chance it’s going to work for others as well. I love that. And I think it’s probably worthwhile to build some sort of client feedback expectation into your client agreement. So in addition to the deliverables and whatever is in your contract, I think you should include something about client feedback. I think it sends a message that you care about it and it then makes both parties accountable. It makes you accountable to deliver on that and then it sets the expectation with the client that you’re going to follow up on that. And so I think it would be great to actually include that from the beginning because what I’m hearing a lot right now is that NRFPs or when perspective clients are looking at different professional service firms, one of the questions is often describe your client satisfaction process. And so if you have a process in place that you can incorporate into your agreement in the beginning, then I think it’s going to make your proposal and you as a potential service provider much more effective.

Josh Miles: Have you seen any sort of client directed processes? Or I’ve seen clients direct just about every other-

David Lecours: Aspect.

Josh Miles: Stage of the process but I haven’t heard of this yet so I’m just curious if you’ve come across this with any of your consulting clients.

David Lecours: I haven’t but it seems like it’s on the future and on the horizon. Like the one real sort of common tool that a lot of people use is Net Promoter Score, which is a little different in that it’s more about would you recommend the firm to a friend or colleague less so much about like project satisfaction or performance. But I imagine on the horizon there’s going to be something that clients ask to be used especially in these long projects that our AEC firm audience is involved in because there’s so many different phases and keeping the project on track is so essential.

Josh Miles: I was always a sort of my … What do you call that? The cringey secret show that I always like to watch back in the day was the What Not to Wear. So I’m curious the parallel to this is what not to ask. What should we avoid when we’re talking to our client about our performance?

David Lecours: So, whether it’s a survey or an interview, I think sort of super vague questions. I think open-ended questions are okay but something as like vague as how are we doing on this project, the answer’s probably going to be fine, okay, good. That just isn’t super effective.

Josh Miles: How’s it going?

David Lecours: Right, yeah. Exactly, right. When somebody says that to you when they come up, it’s like, “I don’t know. Do you want the truth?”

Josh Miles: I’m pretty sure you don’t.

David Lecours: The other type of question that I found not very effective are questions where you’re asking the client to look, or the interviewee to sort of look out into the future and almost like do your work for you. A question like, “What should we be doing for you in the future?” And that one reminds me of this sort of often quoted Henry Ford quote, which was if … Before Henry Ford invented the automobile, if he had done like a focus group and asked everybody, “What do you want in the future?” And keep in mind this was the time when horse-drawn buggies was what Ford was producing. If he had done this focus group, people would’ve said they want faster horses. So the idea is that true innovation requires visionary thinking and it’s not really the client’s job to tell you what to do out into the future. I think you can ask things about what could we do better going forward but in terms of like asking clients for sort of visionary answers is a little bit outside the realm and not appropriate.

Josh Miles: Yeah. That makes sense. What else would they not want to ask?

David Lecours: I don’t know.

Josh Miles: We have exhausted the list-

David Lecours: Exhausted the list of things not to ask. I just think being intentional and meaningful about developing your questions. Don’t ask a standard set of questions for every client. I think definitely customize them to find out the things that you really want to know about that particular engagement.

Josh Miles: Yeah, or maybe one other that I was thinking of is maybe not asking leading questions so that you’re implying the answer that you’re trying to get to. Don’t you think we’re doing a great job?

David Lecours: Right, right. For sure. So maybe it makes sense to sort of think about what we should ask next and I think, I had mentioned the Net Promoter Score as an effective tool. And those of our audience that aren’t familiar with that, it’s one question developed by a guy at Bain & Company, and the question is, “How likely are you to recommend our firm to a friend or client?” And you ask on a scale from 1 to 10. And when people answer either 9 or 10, they’re considered promoters. If they answer anywhere from zero to six, they’re considered detractors. And anywhere seven or eight are passives. And you develop the Net Promoter Score by taking the percentage of those who identified you as a promoter and subtract those who identified you as a detractor and you end up with a score that ends up being on a scale from, I think it’d be from like negative 100 to 100. So, anyway something like that is good. I do think-

Josh Miles: And you know these when you get that email that says please answer this one question about your experience and it’s how likely are you to recommend 1 through 10 that’s the dead give away that they are tracking their Net Promoter Score.

David Lecours: So anytime you can follow up the question, let’s say you ask somebody for a rating like, “How did we do? Judge us from one to five on our ability to communicate be it, well, just communicate about the project or how’s our communication. And then have the ability to ask a follow up so why did you give us a four because that’s when you start to get the really juicy information about what the things that can be improved or not improved. I always love the question of like what service do you wish we offered that could help you with some issue that you’re working on today. So not so much like what should we be doing in the future but more about like today you’ve got a set of challenges, maybe there’s something that we could be doing or do you wished we offered, maybe it’s something you’re getting from somebody else and they’re not doing a great job, what could we do?

Josh Miles: That also reminds me one of the podcasts that I used to listen to frequently that I haven’t checked on in a long time, one of their co-hosts would say he would get the most insights by reading through the iTunes comments of people who had given them a two or three star rating. So the one star ratings were like this is horrible, not worth my time. If you’re feeling sad and you want to cry a little, that might check that box. The ones that give you five star ratings that say this is the most amazing thing ever, it’s those two and three star reviews that give you insights of things that maybe you want to improve or maybe you don’t but at least you know what that middle of the road person who’s like a little bit on the detractor side, you might learn something from that.

David Lecours: Yeah, because you can never sway that sort of one or five person. They’ve already sort of made up their mind, they’re kind of very definitive. But you’re right, the sort of sweet spot is those twos and threes where you can, yeah, potentially sway them or find out how you can be doing a better job.

Josh Miles: Yeah. I like this one I used to ask a variation of this from our clients. We’d do this interview thing which was, “What else do you wish that X, Y, Z firm would do? So if you like them, you appreciate them, is there another step or a parallel or kind of related thing that you’d love to see them offer as well?” Because I think that gives you some interesting insights as well.

David Lecours: Yeah. I have sort of a traditional last question that I often ask when I’m doing the interviewing and that is, “What didn’t I ask you that you’ve been really dying to answer?” Because, typically, people have things that they want to say and when you sort of put them in a box of only being able to answer the questions that you have, you’re kind of restricting them. So I really do like to have that opportunity at the end to really open-end it and some people say, “No, no, that’s it. You’ve captured it,” or some people do say, “Yeah. I’ve been wanting to tell you about this.”

Josh Miles: Yeah, it’s that classic like once your primary care physician puts their hand on the door, you’re like, “Hey, I just wondered-

David Lecours: Yeah, exactly.

Josh Miles: Like, “No, I’m good, I’m good. Oh wait, just one more thing. But no, I don’t have anymore questions but okay just this one question.”

David Lecours: One more thing like the famous Steve Jobs presentations he used to do for Apple.

Josh Miles: Right. One more thing. We miss Steve.

David Lecours: Yeah. Well, so I have some best practices I’d like to share that mostly these relate to more kind of the interview side because, as you’ve probably gathered, I tend to favor the personal interview aspect. One is that you don’t need as big a sample size as you probably think you do like, Josh, you had mentioned earlier typically something that applies to one client will apply to almost all of your clients. And while all your clients think they’re really unique, I think you can get away with interviewing 5 to 10 people and that may sound surprising but it takes a good amount of time to schedule, to interview, to analyze the responses. And so to help, I guess, keep costs down for hiring an outside third-party, I think a smaller sample size will get you what you need without having to do too many more than that. And clients usually find that a little bit surprising but then when they start to see the responses they say, “Yeah, you know there’s some definite patterns that we started to see over and over again here.”

Josh Miles: Yeah, we saw that a lot just from a brand interview standpoint when you’re trying to get a vibe for what that client relationship was. After you did about 10 of those interviews, you could almost complete their sentences for them.

David Lecours: Yeah, exactly. And so I do think having a set of common questions that the interviewer would use, but please allow that interviewer to go off script if something really juicy starts to come up because that’s where you’re going to get really valuable information. Nice to have common sets so you can compare one to the next to the next, but again, don’t be so strict with them that you don’t allow them to vary it a bit.

Josh Miles: So, when you do these do you go out in person and hang out in the office and interview the client? Or what’s that look like?

David Lecours: Yeah, so typically because our clients have clients all over the country it’s just not practical. I certainly love to do interviews in person because you get the nonverbal communication. And you just form a better connection with them but rarely is that an option just from logistics, to sort of fly in a bunch of clients to the same place is going to send the budget way beyond what it should be. So, yeah, usually in terms of like sequencing, let’s say I’m doing the interviewing on behalf of a client, I’ll have the client either email or phone the interviewee to ask them are they willing to be interviewed. And I give them a script, I give them words that they can use and customize, but something to the effect of, “You’re one of our best clients. We really value your opinion. Would you be willing to talk to David for 20 minutes? He’ll follow up with you if you’re willing.” And then if the person says yes, like I said I’ll follow up to schedule the interview and complete it.

David Lecours: But there’s no way that I, as the interviewer, could just reach out to these people cold because they don’t know who I am and they’d be like, “Yeah, whatever.” And so the introduction … And ask for permission has to come from my client.

Josh Miles: Yeah, that’s especially nice to have that warm introduction as the consultant so you’re not, feel like you’re annoying their client without permission.

David Lecours: Exactly, yeah. And so I typically tell them to ask for a 20 minute interview because I feel like that is not too big of an ask, often they’ll go longer but I found that if people agree to a 20 minute, and I do when I’m interviewing keep a real good tabs on the clock and at 20 minutes, I’ll say, “Hey, I promised to get this done in 20 minutes. We can wrap up now. Or I do have a couple other questions.” And I leave it very open-ended. I don’t sort of try to persuade them because yeah, some people just have things to do and I get it. But often, they’ll say, “No, this is very interesting. I’m enjoying talking to you,” and will let me go for another 5 or 10 minutes. I definitely don’t push beyond 30, I think that starts to get uncomfortable.

David Lecours: And so within a 20 minute interview, I can get in about eight good questions typically. If it’s 30, we can probably get in maybe 10 to 12. And so yeah, you really got to think through what these questions are going to be and again I’ll allow for the opportunity to improvise. And the other kind of key thing is to sort of tell the person that you’re interviewing that you’re not quoting them directly. So you may present, I’ll say, “I’m going to be presenting what we talk about as a group with all the other people that I’m interviewing but I’m not asking you to individually attribute what you say.” In other words, I’m not looking for a testimonial. I’m not going to say, “Josh Miles said this and this about you,” because then I think you don’t get as candid of answers as possible. Now sometimes the person I’m interviewing will describe some story or give some like detail that allows the client to pretty quickly figure out who it is but that’s up to them. If they want to be so descriptive that it’s obvious, then that’s up to them.

Josh Miles: And then anything else that you’d include in your best practices list?

David Lecours: Yeah, I think you should be nice and if you’re the client and you’ve worked with a third-party, you should be the one that follows up to thank the participant for allowing themself to be interviewed. And that might be an area where you might send them a small gift or maybe offer to take them to lunch, it might just be another opportunity to sort of gain a touch point, a connection, with that client because hopefully they’ll have a project going forward in the future.

Josh Miles: Yeah, I think at least my perspective is even if a client is not having the best experience, just the fact that they have been asked at this point sometimes the flattery or the thought of that makes them develop a little more affinity towards the firm just by virtue of having been identified as someone that their feedback matters.

David Lecours: Yeah. We all like to be valued. If you’re asking somebody for their feedback, it says we value your opinion.

Josh Miles: Just don’t offer David a free Amazon gift card.

David Lecours: That’s right. That’s right. All right, Josh, I think we’ve exhausted this one. My feedback is we should wrap this up. What do you think?

Josh Miles: I agree. Can I have an Amazon gift card?

David Lecours: Yeah. I’ll send you a survey. All right. Our audience, hey, if you guys have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear it. If you have suggestions for future guests or topics that you want Josh and I to talk about, write to us at PSM Show. We have a really cool little website that’s got all our past episodes and if you want to share this podcast with a friend or a colleague that’s probably the best place to send them. And you can find our episodes on most of the popular audio podcast deliverers, like iTunes and the like. And so that’s it for this episode of PSM Show. Of course, we again want to thank our underwriting sponsor, SMPS. And that’s it for Josh Miles and myself. I’m David Lecours, we’ll see you next time.

This episode runs 39 min. 55 sec.

Why do clients make the decisions they do? Is it logic, emotion, or something deeper? Josh and JonRobert Tartaglione discuss the neuroscience of client behavior.

Subscribe to PMS Show on iTunes

Production of PSM Show is underwritten by:

We Want to Hear From You

Let us know what you think about this episode. Should we do more interviews? Or, would you prefer just Josh and David (no guests)? Or should we get rid of Josh and David altogether? Use the form on our homepage to let us know.

Subscribe to our Podcast

To subscribe to the PSM podcast in iTunes – click here

Read the Episode

Speaker 1: Welcome to PSM, the Professional Services Marketing podcast: It’s Insight Applied.

Josh Miles: Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of PSM Show, the podcast for AEC marketers. My name’s Josh Miles and I’m joined today by the genius behind the latest SMPS foundation white paper, JonRobert Tartaglione. Today we’re talking about behavioral science and how you can use John Robert’s powers for good in your firm, and frankly, whatever else he wants to talk about. So thanks again to our underwriting sponsor, SMPS. Head over to SMPS.org/buildbusiness to see all about Build Business 2019 in Washington, DC from July 31st through August 2nd, 2019. See you there.

Speaker 1: This is PSM: It’s Insight Applied.

Josh Miles: John Robert. Hey man, it’s great to have you on the show. Welcome to PSM.

JonRobert T.: Hey Josh, thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Josh Miles: Well, hey, so I have a few burning questions that I want to ask you about, and maybe this one’s an easy one. So in the Shakespeare category of questions, what’s behind the name of Influence 51?

JonRobert T.: I’ve gotten this question a lot now, so I’ll give you the truthful answer, and then I’ll give you the answer that one day I want to develop. The truthful answer is that I wanted… What I do takes a lot of different shapes depending on the organization, the domain, and so I wanted to come up with something that was at least indicative, to some degree, of what I do. And so influence was just the word that would happen to work for me. The 51 was quite frankly just because I’ve always liked the number 51. There’s nothing special behind it. There’s no personal significance whatsoever.

JonRobert T.: The domain influence.com was taken, and so Influence 51 you want to just happened to work for me. But obviously, that’s not nearly as enticing as people want it to be. I feel like people are always disappointed by the answer. And so I want to cultivate some sort of mystique around it, and so I’m working on developing a much more interesting explanation for the name.

Josh Miles: I appreciate that.

JonRobert T.: Of course.

Josh Miles: Maybe there’s, I don’t know, a baseball player or somebody that you could-

JonRobert T.: There we go. [crosstalk 00:02:42]. My dad was a Yankees fan, Bernie Williams at 51. So I’ve dedicated my entire business to Bernie Williams, is what it comes down to.

Josh Miles: The greatest of all time, Bernie Williams.

JonRobert T.: There we go.

Josh Miles: Well, for our listeners who maybe are not familiar with you or have not yet checked out your white paper that you did for SMPS, give us a little bit of the pitch of what Influence 51 is and what your role is.

JonRobert T.: Sure. So basically, who I am, which will give a nice explanation to what Influence 51 is, as it really is an extension of me and my interests. I’m trained as a psychologist and behavioral scientists, and essentially what I do in that capacity is I work with different organizations, and I teach them… At its core, I teach them about people. I teach them about how human beings make decisions, how their attitudes are shaped and changed and how you can moderate their behavior.

JonRobert T.: So at core, all I do is teach people about people, but more specifically, I teach different organizations how they can apply psychology and behavioral science to be more effective. And so Influence 51 is really all about helping organizations understand how they can use really simple psychological techniques to better market their products, to create more effective sales strategies, to be more consistently effective in business development efforts, et cetera.

Josh Miles: I’ve always been a big fan of the sales psychology stuff for just the human interaction and the, I guess neuroscience, is maybe the right word for it. But my family is less keen that I like to test these things on them first, and my wife is on to me. So when she sees me approaching something differently, she’s like, “Are you testing a technique on me again?” It’s really good. I love the silent response for, “Where do you want to go for dinner?” Because nobody likes silence. So there’s [crosstalk 00:05:04].

JonRobert T.: Yes. That is true.

Josh Miles: They’ll fill it in, so you don’t have to play the game.

JonRobert T.: That’s right.

Josh Miles: Well, you asked me where I want to go, but that’s probably because you have somewhere you want go. So, let’s maybe jump into some of the practical concepts from the white paper.

JonRobert T.: Sure.

Josh Miles: I won’t ask you to recount all of those because obviously it’s all in the research, but one in particular that I thought was interesting was, if I’m using the right word, I think it was anchoring. So you’ve got a high and a low, can you talk a little bit through that concept and how that might be worked into professional services sales or business development situation?

JonRobert T.: Yeah, absolutely. So anchoring is… The human brain operates on these things we call biases and heuristics. And in a sense, what they really are, they are kind of these mental shortcuts our brain uses to try to make decisions that find this equilibrium between being pretty accurate but also pretty efficient. And so anchoring is one of these by biases and heuristics that we use. And essentially, what an anchoring bias is it’s picking a piece of information and using it as a reference point.

JonRobert T.: And so anchoring has this really peculiar feature. The way it manifests itself is really interesting. So there was a study done in one of the first or most interesting studies on anchoring. What they did is back over a decade ago now, they went into classrooms and what they would do is they had the students do something pretty simple. They said, “We want you to take the last two digits of your social security number, and we want you to write it down as a numeric value.” And so I will not make the mistake of saying my social security number here.

JonRobert T.: However, the last two digits of my social security number are 02. And so I would write down $2. Whereas someone whose last two digits were 84 would write $84 on a piece of paper. And so after they had these individuals do this very simple task, they then presented them with items that they were putting up for auction. And they asked them, “How much would you be willing to pay for these items?” And one of the items happened to be this wireless keyboard and mouse. And at this point in time, it was interesting because there wasn’t really an established market for this kind of new technology. And so the price could have been anywhere between $30 all the way up to maybe $100.

JonRobert T.: But they asked these individuals, “How much are you willing to pay for this?” And what they found was that the bottom 20% of the social security numbers were willing to pay like $20 for this keyboard and mouse combo, whereas individuals who had the top 20% of the numeric values for their social security numbers were willing to pay like $57 for the same exact keyboard and mouse. And if obviously you look at it, it became quickly a rational thing or so it seems, and it can manifest… it’s often in an rational way. But really what’s happening is the brain looks for reference points.

JonRobert T.: The brain relies on comparisons. Human beings rely on comparison. And so what was happening is they were basically providing them with an arbitrary reference point, and you get anchored to that particular number, and then to decide on subsequent values, we’re basically tethered to that to some degree. And so people will go… they’ll anchor to something and go a little bit higher, or a little bit lower, but they’ll stay right around that value.

JonRobert T.: And so it’s interesting when you talk about how can you leverage this and use this in an organizational context, I’ll give a really simple example, and then we can talk about AEC specifically. But a really simple example is if you go into a restaurant and you’re looking down a menu, you read a menu from top to bottom. So if you’re looking on a menu and the first wine you see the $20 bottle of wine, that becomes your anchor. That’s the figure that you use to judge all other numbers again.

JonRobert T.: And so if the next bottle of wine is a $50 bottle of wine, it seems expensive. And so a really simple fix. When I work with restaurant clients, for instance, a really simple fix is to have a high anchor at the top so that’s everything that’s evaluated subsequently will look less expensive by comparison. And so you just switch that $20 bottle of wine with $100 bottle of wine, and then that second $50 bottle of wine now all of a sudden looks more reasonable by comparison because you’ve created this higher anchor.

JonRobert T.: And so with AEC firms, a lot of it if you’re creating marketing materials or you’re responding to an RFP, it’s about how you structure your pricing. What are the anchors that you’re providing, these first figures that you’re providing, and are you selecting them strategically?

Josh Miles: In your example, that happened back to back, right? They wrote down the number, and then they were asked the question about what they would value, that wireless keyboard mouse combo, right?

JonRobert T.: That’s correct.

Josh Miles: So maybe different than the menu example, would it be helpful to get clients to talk about big numbers before… Maybe unrelated, is there some value to get them talking about their last $20 million building or their last $50 million bridge or whatever, and then you go-

JonRobert T.: Yeah.

Josh Miles: … through and say, “And here’s our pricing.”

JonRobert T.: Yeah, you’re absolutely correct. And what you’re getting to too is you’re alluding to another phenomenon, which is this phenomenon of priming an [inaudible 00:11:13]. There’s a really famous study that I cite often where it was a study done in Canada, and what they were doing was they were basically going up to individuals and were asking them two questions, but they varied the order in which they asked the questions. So for half of the participants, they would go off and say, “On a scale of one to 10, how happy are you in general?” People would answer, maybe a seven or an eight.

JonRobert T.: The second question I’d ask is, “On a scale of one to 10, how successful have you been romantically in the past month?” And people would answer that question. When they’re asking that order, there’s almost no correlation. Of course, when you reverse the order and say, “Hey, how successful have you been romantically in the past month?” If someone gives a two to that question, they then tend to give a very low response for, how happy are you in general.

JonRobert T.: Now of course, their happiness is not being unilaterally dictated by their romantic success. They could have been very professionally successful that month, they could have had… whatever happened to them, see a lot of friends or family. But what you’re doing is you’re priming them. You’re getting them to think about a very particular thing at that moment in time, and that ends up having a very large influence on their subsequent judgments.

JonRobert T.: And so what you’re getting at talking to these individuals and having them bring up high priced projects that they’ve worked on, you’re priming them, you’re creating an anchor for them about what they have done in the past and by doing so, something that you’re about to propose that might be otherwise seen as a little bit pricey might not seem so pricey by comparison.

Josh Miles: I’m not under the expectation that you’re going to have an answer for this, but I know a lot of our members at SMPS have the problem of they’re in a competitive pitch situation or they are part of some RFP shortlist, so they have to go in and present and… Let’s pretend just for the sake of argument that these firms have not had a really deep relationship with a client in the past, and there’s not a previous working situation. And it frequently feels like either it comes down to the dollar number or it comes down to just being able to get some know, like and trust factor across. Is there anything that you would recommend from your research that might help for what sometimes feels like either just a hard quantitative question or… frequently is probably a strong qualitative thing too. Is the vibe right? Do they feel right? Anything in your research that you think would aid in those kinds of situations?

JonRobert T.: Yeah. If it comes down to these hard quantitative calculation… because I think you’re naive if you believe that money doesn’t matter at all. There are some psychologists who will make arguments that it’s really not about that, it’s about how they feel about you. And I think that’s a bit extreme. What I will say is when comes down to the figures that you’re presenting, it’s not a simple… $10,000 as we’ve kind of gone over in the anchoring example, $10,000 is not $10,000 is not $10,000. What I mean by that is these numbers are not context independent.

JonRobert T.: $10,000 can seem much more or much less desirable depending on the choice environment that you place it in. And so understanding, first and foremost, that if it is going to come down to a purely financial decision, you can still influence that decision based upon how you structure your choices and ultimately, how you frame that amount of money. Do you frame this as this is an investment, and if you work with us, you’re going to be saving $300 a month, or do you frame it as this is an investment, and if you didn’t go with us, you went with our competitor, ultimately you’d be losing $300 a month.

JonRobert T.: Because we also know that those two things are not the same. People respond very differently depending on whether something’s framed as a loss or a gain. In terms of the other side of this coin, where is it more of this intangible likability or trust factor or just this gut feeling-

Josh Miles: Is it like a charisma thing?

JonRobert T.: Charisma. And honestly, that’s… This is a bit disheartening, I suppose. When I work with trial lawyers, some of the work we do is helping them understand how moral decision making works, how people arrive at moral decisions, how empathy operates and how you can maximize empathy, etc. Etc. But truthfully, one of the things that we concentrate on most is helping them understand how they can maximize their perceptions of likeability and competence. So there are these two dimensions, they usually call them warmth and competence in the literature.

JonRobert T.: Warmth and competence are things that are automatically and instantaneously evaluated by every individual that you come into contact with. And so it’s just this natural process where whenever we see someone, we make these very quick judgments about how warm or cold they are and how competent or incompetent they are. And basically, this has evolutionary roots because with the warmth portion of it, you’re trying to decide, is this person a friend or foe? And the competence is, if they are a friend, how useful of a friend will they be? And if they are a foe, how dangerous of a foe will they be?

JonRobert T.: And so these two dimensions really make sense from an evolutionary standpoint. But what we find, which again and this gets back to the more disheartening portion of it, is we find that people like trial lawyers, even though we’d like to believe that should be the content of their arguments that plays the major role and these jury decisions, we find that things like warmth and likeability and competence, these things that are independent of the actual of the arguments themselves play massively influential role in their ultimate success.

JonRobert T.: And it’s very, very similar when you’re making a pitch in front of a group that’s deciding, for instance, on an RFP, making an RFP decision. It gets down to one of those things where when I explain to people this difference or this dichotomy between emotion and reason, if you will, it’s not that one is necessarily greater than the other. But if someone finds your pitch compelling from a rational standpoint, but doesn’t like you, they might not go with you.

JonRobert T.: But if someone happens to like you very much, the human brain is fantastic at figuring out ways to rationalize that liking. And so-

Josh Miles: Isn’t that interesting?

JonRobert T.: … if someone emotionally resonates with you, if you can tell a story that really works for them, something that really evokes something in them, they will figure out ways to justify that good feeling, and that makes their job a lot easier.

Josh Miles: I’m just thinking back to every time I’ve ever bought software as a service online, they always have… or frequently we’ll have this good, better, best framing on their pricing. So you want half a Gig a month, it’s $20, you want a Gig a month, it’s $30, and if you want unlimited, it’s a hundred or something like that. So in your research, should that be the other way around? Should they lead with that $100 thing on the left hand side?

JonRobert T.: There’s a few things to consider there. Number one is… You’re hitting at this idea of should they anchor with the best, because it would make the other ones look better by comparison?

Josh Miles: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

JonRobert T.: I think there’s certainly an argument that could be made that, that they should lead with the best. I think people who create these websites are more just going with the societal idea of you start with number three, then two, then one. But from a psychological standpoint, if we look at things like anchoring, then it would probably make more sense for them to lead with the highest one because then the second highest one would look better by comparison.

JonRobert T.: But another thing to consider when you look at these good, better, best type options is understanding that really savvy organizations, what they’re doing is they’re including options that they don’t actually think people will buy. They’re doing it because it makes other options look better by comparison. And so for instance, with what you just described, those companies might not want or might not anticipate you buying the best option, but they know that you’ll be more likely to buy the third best option if they only had good and better.

JonRobert T.: So if they only had good and better available, you’re more likely to buy good than you would be if they have good, better, best. Because now all of a sudden, even though it’s the same price for the better one, it looks more reasonable because the best one is there as well. And so what we would do is we would call that best option a decoy option. It’s not designed to sell, it’s designed to make the second best option look more reasonable.

Josh Miles: Is there a law of diminishing returns for a number of options? At some point is it just analysis paralysis or would four or five options make it better?

JonRobert T.: That’s a great question. So as a general rule, more is not always better, and that’s something that people have to come to terms with. I think that a lot of people are under the misguided impression that the more options I present someone with, the happier they’re going to be because there’ll be able to find just the right one. And while that sounds nice and perhaps even a little romantic, it’s simply not that easy. And what we find in psychology is that there’s not really this linear relationship where the more options you add happiness increases in step with it.

JonRobert T.: What we find is that it’s much more of this kind of parabolic relationship where you get to a certain point where adding more choices actually makes people less happy and less likely to engage. And you hit on this idea of analysis paralysis, and the way I’ll describe it to people is like if you ever go into… If your a partner tells you, “Hey, go in the grocery store and just buy me some cereal. I’m in the mood for cereal.” You go into the cereal aisle, and there are 9 million options for cereal. Your [inaudible 00:22:50] is absolutely overwhelming.

JonRobert T.: And so a lot of us will just say, “You know what? Forget about it. I’m going to just go and grab some chips or a candy bar. They can pick up the cereal later.” And they won’t even engage in that decision making. And a lot of people when they hear this, they’re like, “Yeah, but that’s such a trivial decision.” If it was more important, people would take the time. But in a study that was done with over 800,000 employees, what they found was they actually found giving people options for these kinds of mutual funds that they could invest in, many of which the company would kind of match their investment, for every 10 fund options that were added, every 10 additional funds, actually decreased overall participation by 2%.

Josh Miles: That’s crazy.

JonRobert T.: People were quite literally leaving money on the table because they felt overwhelmed by how many choices there were. And and so a good rule of thumb for individuals who are creating these kind of choice environments is you want to keep every choice set between about five to seven items that the most, because that’s what we can process and hold in our short term memory.

Josh Miles: Is there anything similar to that when you have maybe a more customizable solution? Like, is this something where a firm might say, “Well, we can do whatever you want. So everything’s in play here, but here are the two things that we’d recommend,” or do you go into it and say, “It’s custom. What do you want?”

JonRobert T.: That’s a really great question. There’s nothing wrong with customizability. I loved being able to customize something. I think a lot of people really like to be able to customize something to a degree. And what I mean when I say to a degree is there’s this phenomenon, I guess you would say, or theory called the optimal distinctiveness theory where people want to be different up to a point. So they want to be able to distinguish themselves from people, but they don’t want to be so different they become an outcast.

JonRobert T.: And so a great example of this, if you look at something like when people buy iPhone or when iPods just came out, they allowed people to do things like customize the color of the iPod they got, or you can customize the case and you can… There are certain things that allowed them an opportunity to show off their individuality, to show off their creativity and allow these individuals to make their choices. But they’re not letting them build the entire phone by scratch. They’re not letting them build the entire iPod by scratch.

JonRobert T.: What’s important to understand is that people want the ability to customize. But if you just say, “Hey, we can do whatever you want,” that’s not really helpful for a lot of people. What’s often more helpful is to say, “Hey, here are a few designs that you can work off of. A few examples designs, but know that we can change the color, we can change the layout, we can change all these different things.” But you want to be able to give them some sort of blueprint to begin with. Otherwise, the thought of just getting started from square one is too daunting for some.

Josh Miles: Switching gears a little bit, I was checking out your website, and I saw that you have the five principles that your company is based on. And I wanted to maybe explore two of those with you if you don’t mind.

JonRobert T.: Yeah.

Josh Miles: Your principle one is, the human brain is not a computer. And while that is a very straightforward statement, I’m just curious what that principle really implies and how that impacts your research.

JonRobert T.: Yeah. That’s a really important one to understand because I think a lot of people when they’re starting off and they’re creating an influence strategy… now what that strategy might be will vary. Whether again, that’s a different marketing campaign, or a sales strategy, or a business development effort. Ultimately, the goal is to influence the way someone chooses or the way someone thinks. And so the problem is, is when people are trying to anticipate the effectiveness of their strategies, oftentimes, they have this folk believe that the human brain acts like a computer.

JonRobert T.: And what I mean by that is that it processes information as a computer does. And so if you provided with enough logic, enough undeniable facts and figures and statistics, it will inevitably come back with a favorable outcome. In reality, the human brain doesn’t really operate like that. So if the human brain operated like a computer, you can kind of think of it like a scientist, meaning that it would take every single piece of information, it would evaluate every piece of information impartially and objectively as possible, and come to a decision based on nothing but the facts that were presented to it.

JonRobert T.: In reality, the human brain operates much more like a trial lawyer. And what I mean by that is we’re getting back to the primacy of emotions too where the human brain has a particular feeling about certain things, a good feeling or a bad feeling. And once they get that feeling, they try to justify it by selectively choosing data and choosing evidence that will allow them to justify that intuitive feeling rather than going with the thing that is most logically compelling. And so it’s really important to understand something like the primacy of emotion and decision making and how much of a role that has.

JonRobert T.: One of the ways that Jonathan Haidt has described, and other psychologists have described it in different ways, the duality of the brain, but Jonathan Haidt is really compelling. He describes it like an elephant and a rider. And what he means by that is if you’ve ever ridden on an elephant, they tell you, “Oh, you’re in control, you can turn left, turn right.” You’re not in control of that animal. No matter what they tell you, you are not in control of that animal.

JonRobert T.: Well, it’s interesting what ends up happening is you’ll be riding along and the elephant will start veering left, and you’ll look to the left and say, “You know what? I probably want to go that way anyway.” And then the later on, the elephant starts meandering to the right and you’re like, “You know what actually, this is the better direction.” And the way Jonathan Haidt describes it is in this scenario, the elephant is emotion and you as the rider are rationality.

JonRobert T.: And so the rationality, our rationality is very often subservient to our emotions. We use our rationality as a way to justify our emotional reactions. And this happens a lot when we make decisions. We have a good feeling about someone or a bad feeling about someone. From a metaphorical standpoint, our elephant leans one way or leans the other, and we go about figuring out ways we can justify that good or bad feelings using the facts at hand.

Josh Miles: So that’s really similar to this concept I heard Seth Goden recently on a podcast talking about this rational act or concept. When people refer to, well, Washington has decided or Moscow has decided, it’s not that literally the entire country was in concert over the decision, there were lots of things that went into this that factored into it and ultimately, this was the decision, and that frequently, people are the same way. Like logically, that you shouldn’t do this, but sometimes in the moment, fear or pain or something else causes you to respond entirely differently. So-

JonRobert T.: Absolutely.

Josh Miles: … I think it’s an interesting parallel.

JonRobert T.: Yeah, absolutely.

Josh Miles: So, one of the other principals that I thought was interesting… Again, this is straight forward to say out loud, but I’m just curious, your perspective on this is your principle number four, is state of mind matters. So how does that come into play?

JonRobert T.: Yeah. So state of mind is… it’s a really important thing. I’ll stop for a moment just… These five principles, really what these five principles is… influence is a complex, multifaceted topic that I wanted to figure out a way to synthesize what are the most important things to understand about how influence works, which is just these five principles. Principle number four is the idea that state of mind matters. It’s getting to this idea that it’s not always about the content that you’re delivering, but when you happen to be delivering that content.

JonRobert T.: So the way I describe it to people to get an intuitive appreciation of how this works is I’ll say, imagine that you wake up on Friday morning, you’re late, you hit the snooze a few too many times. So you rush out to work, you grab a Granola bar on your way, and you get into work. Your first meeting has already started. That meeting’s supposed to end at 10:30 but it stretched into 11:15. And then all of a sudden, right before you’re about to go out to lunch, you’ve got a few fires that you have to put out, so you work through lunch. And then all of a sudden, the client comes back to you and says, “Hey, that thing we needed on Monday, now we need it by the end of the day today.”

JonRobert T.: So all of a sudden, it’s six o’clock at night on a Friday, you’ve been in nothing but a Granola bar all day, you are a little pissed off, and all of a sudden someone walks into your office and says, “Hey, would you like a piece of pie?” What’s your response to that? And your response that, and everyone’s response to that’s is, “Of course. Of course I want that piece of pie. That sounds amazing. Thank you so much.”

Josh Miles: Yeah, I deserve it. Think of all the things I’ve been through.

JonRobert T.: Exactly. I deserve it, I earned it, I don’t care about calories right now. It’s been a stressful day. I haven’t eaten since 9:00 AM. Whatever it may be, people are going to eat that pie. Okay? It’s a very compelling offer. But then I say, imagine that morale has been low for the past few weeks. You guys lost a few bids that you really thought you were going to secure, someone left the company who was really a linchpin of the team from a cohesion standpoint, people are just in a bad place. You’re trying to figure out ways you can boost morale.

JonRobert T.: The county fair reach out and says, “Let me take them all to the county fair. We’ll take a half day on Friday, we’ll take them to the county fair.” You go to the county fair, you guys are playing all the fair games, people having a pretty good time and all of a sudden, they start goading you into entering the pie eating contest. And you resist, and you say, “No, no, no. I’m not going to do that.” But eventually, you’re like, “You know what, you should just acquiesce. It’ll make them happy, you’ll eat some free pie.”

JonRobert T.: So you enter the pie eating contest. To your surprise, come in third place, you eat like two and a half pies in like 10 minutes. You won the respect of your colleagues through your gluttony, everyone’s very excited for you and right as you’re walking off the stage, someone comes up to you with is, “Hey, would you like a piece of pie?” What do you say? Of course the answer at this point is a very indignant, no, I do not want a piece of pie.

JonRobert T.: But what’s interesting about this is when we take a step back is we realized it’s the same exact offer, it’s the same content, the same piece of pie in both situations. But depending on when that offer is made makes a very big difference in how it is received, whether it’s received favorably or unfavorably. And so principal four, this idea of state of mind matters, it talks about two things. One is timing, and the other is priming, which I alluded to. We spoke a little bit about earlier with the questions about your dating life and then your happiness.

JonRobert T.: Really the crux of priming is to understand that you can bring about, intentionally, emotional states or different concepts or feelings or beliefs into people’s minds that can influence the way they make decisions later on in the conversation. And that’s really what priming is. Priming is about bringing concepts to the forefront of people’s minds, and therefore temporarily altering their state of mind to do something that’s more receptive or less receptive at the time.

Josh Miles: Very interesting. So this is not a setup, I don’t know the answer to this question. I’m just curious. But if say a firm is listening and they think, is that guy for hire? Like, will he consult, will he come coach us? Is that a thing? And what does that look like if it is?

JonRobert T.: So I am for hire. Schedule per meeting, I will have them work with my colleagues to understand my schedule because they’re better than I. As I’m sure it’s probably evident at this point, I’m fortunate enough to be making a living doing something that I find really fascinating, which is just teaching people about these concepts that I just personally love talking about. They just all so happen to have immense value and utility in a business setting.

JonRobert T.: If you understand something that’s incredibly, incredibly simple from a psychologist point of view, like loss aversion, a firm that doesn’t understand loss aversion and how it works, going from no understanding to an understanding of loss of aversion, even though from a psychological standpoint, it’s quite a simple concept, is a massive return on investment when you understand from a strategy standpoint what you can do and how you can tweak your messaging.

JonRobert T.: And so, yeah. The way I work with firms is… There is a variety of different things that I’ve done in the past. There’s things like presentations and keynotes, and those are fantastic ways to familiarize your firm in one [inaudible 00:37:18] swoop with these concepts. But what I really love is the strategy. I really love sitting down and helping them understand like, hey, who or what is our target? Who are our competitors? Let’s analyze the competitive landscape, and let’s bring all that we know about human beings and human nature to bear, to optimize our chances of creating a strategy that’s going to win us this work. And the strategy is really building that strategy and working collaboratively with an organization, with a team, that’s something that I find fascinating.

Josh Miles: Well, hey, I find lots of this fascinating. And I’m really tempted to ask you to unpack what loss aversion is at this point, but I think maybe that’s the good tease for somebody who’s interested in reaching out to you to learn more. So we’ll just leave that there. We’ll leave everyone’s appetite whetted, if that’s even a word. And maybe you can tell us a little bit more about how to track you down online and to connect with you later.

JonRobert T.: Yeah. Absolutely. If you’re interested, any questions, especially about partnership opportunities, you can contact us at partnerships@influence51, that’s just 51.com. That’s partnerships@influence51.com. And Josh, as a special treat to your listeners, I’ll also give my personal email, but I’ll ask you guys not to distribute it to widely. It’s just ceo@influence51.com. And so if you guys have any quick questions about some of the content discussed or any ways that I can provide a little bit of brief help to your firm, just reach out, and I’m happy to do what I can.

Josh Miles: Awesome. Well, this has been a pleasure, and I think… Thank you so much for joining us today, JonRobert.

JonRobert T.: Absolutely. Happy to be there.

Josh Miles: So guys, that brings us to the end of another episode of PSM Show. Thanks again to our underwriting sponsor, SMPS. Head over to smps.org/buildbusiness to see all about Build Business 2019 in Washington, DC from July 31st through August 2nd, 2019. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for future guests, please head over to psm.show and drop us a line. That’s all from myself, Josh Miles, for this episode of PSM Show. So this is Josh and JonRobert, and of course, David Lecours is back in the corner saying goodbye. We’ll see you guys next time.