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.
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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.