TSP038 | Roger Dooley – Transcription

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TSP039 | Mark Asquith – Transcription
TSP037 | Geri Stengel – Transcription

John Livesay:
Today’s guest on The Successful Pitch is Roger Dooley, the author of Brainfluence. Roger has so much expertise in neuroscience and how our brains work and how to persuade people that he shares in our episode today he talks about the importance of social proof and being likable and that our brains have literally evolved to pay attention to stories. So, if you want to get investor’s brains to literally light up like it does on a brain scan, tell them a story.

And instead of just thinking of our brains as left brains about numbers and right brain about emotional storytelling, he has a whole concept about system one is the gut reaction we have, we don’t have to think about it, we just do it and then system two is a more in-depth analysis that we have to do like due diligence in an investor, but it’s important to realize our brains want to conserve energy, so you want to make things as easy to understand as possible. He talks about that if something is too difficult to process, even using the wrong font in your pitch deck can cause someone to say no. So, listen to find out all the ways to get people to say yes to your pitch in today’s episode.

Hi and welcome to The Successful Pitch podcast. Today’s guest is Roger Dooley, the author of several books on the importance of our brain and how that influences our ability to persuade and convince people with neuromarketing. He is a contributor to Forbes, an author and keynote speaker and big demand for learning this neuroscience behavior research so that people can attract new customers. Roger, welcome to the show.

Roger Dooley:
Well, thanks. So glad to be here John.

John:
I’m really curious if you wouldn’t mind taking our listeners back on your background a little bit about what made you interested in how our brains work and how did you become such an expert in it.

Roger:
Well, it’s kind of a strange story. It really dates back to my college days. I studied as an engineer a long time ago, back in the days of slide rulers if you can believe that.

John:
I love it.

Roger:
Yes and if your listeners don’t know what they are, they can check an antique store.

John:
Pre-calculators, people!

Roger:
In any case, I was studying as an engineer, but in school I was really pulled in a couple of directions. One was psychology and I minored in psychology, which was sort of an odd thing. I was the only engineer that I knew that was minoring in psychology and the other was advertising and that was really just a strange interest that I had. When I was in the library suppose to be studying differential equations and organic chemistry, instead I’d go over the periodical department to read advertising age, but then I put those aside, had a pretty conventional engineering career to start.

Work my way up to product management that had more of a marketing emphasis and finally at a pretty young age my corporate career finally seemed to be taking off and I was in charge of strategic planning for a fortune 1000 company and I picked that moment to bail out of the corporate world completely and become an entrepreneur and this is something that may resonate with some of our listeners, but this was in the early days of home computerizing and my partner and I started a direct mail business geared to owners of home computers and via PO of this kind of marketing.

We were using a catalog format primarily was that at the time, it was the most quantitative kind of marketing available. It was, we could do things like square inch analysis. We could do A/B testing. Now, these tools really pale by comparison by what you can do in today’s digital world, but at the time, we actually had a pretty good idea of which elements of our marketing were working and that really contrasted with most marketers particularly at that time who pretty much guessing at whether their marketing was driving traffic, driving sales or not.

So, that, that was my entrepreneurial start and it morphed into over time several businesses and became much more digital. I got involved in both e-commerce and digital marketing, SEO, online community building. Built a very large community in the college space and sold that business a few years ago. While this was going on, about 11 years ago now, I saw the confluence of two areas coming together, neuroscience and marketing.

People were starting to not only talk about but actually try and start applying the tools of neuroscience to improve marketing and this would be doing things like using brain scans or brain wave measurements while people were watching an advertisement, TV commercial or perhaps looking at a product to evaluate their true response to it. I did what any good digital marketer would do, I register a domain, NeuroscienceMarketing.com and then started writing there. That was ten years ago.

So, I’ve been writing about it ever since. That site alone, I’m up to well over a 1,000 posts. I’ve got a blog at Forbes on pretty much the same topic and four years ago, Wiley published my book Braininfluence, which is 100 ideas that let entrepreneurs and businesses of any size apply some of the findings of brain science and behavior research to improve their marketing and the reason I created that book and really a lot of what my writing is and my online writing are techniques that don’t require you to have an expensive brain scan machine or to engage in an agency that’s going to cost tens of thousands of dollars to run a simple test, because most businesses simply don’t have that kind of money in their marketing budgets. Certainly big consumer brands do.

If you’re going to run a super old commercial, putting $50,00 to $100,000 into some brain type of analysis of it, some neuromarketing studies makes a huge amount of sense, but most entrepreneurs and even in large businesses most projects simply can’t justify that. So, what I’ve tried to do is translate some of the findings of brain and behavior research into actionable strategies.

John;
I love it because when the founders are pitching investors, they want to be intriguing, they want to be enchnting. I know you got an amazing quote from Guy Kawasaki saying, you know, we all need to be enchanting and that your book is one of the best ways to do it. So, kudos to that, because he certainy knows about the startup world.

Roger:
I’ve known Guy for quite a few years and he’s really great. He’s an inspiration as any mentor to entrepreneurs and I loved his book Enchantment and I think he wrote that blurb around the time of that book coming out, which was really a great book because so often entrepreneurs ignore that aspect of what they’re doing. In other words, they’re pushing facts and figures and so on where Guy would say, hey, it’s necessary to be enchanting, which isn’t a word that gets that much use these days, but it’s clear what he means.

John:
Yes, I had another guest, Ben Larson talk about the need to be enchanting to your investors. So, if those are the only two people I have ever heard use that word, but since you’re such an expert on how our brain works and neuroscience I really want to dive into this. You know, obviously, your book is great about 100 ways to persuade people, can you give us the top three or four that come to mind as it involves pitching something that is probably very technical if you’re a tech CEO and how do you get people into the right brain world of storytelling so it’s memorable and easy to understand.

Roger:
Wow. There are certainly a lot of ways and a lot of it depends on the context, but I think that for starters the divide that I would make, there are a lot of ways to divvy up how our brains works hence the right brain, left brain where right brain is typically been associated with creativity and emotion where left brain is facts and figures. That division has some validity, but as with most divisions, it’s a lot more complicated if you really look at what’s going on.

The split that I tend to use is conscious and non-conscious and it’s loosely maps to a split that was purposed by Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman, where he talks about system one thinking and system two thinking and system one is, he describes this very well in his book, Thinking Fast and Slow and system one is fast, intuitive, emotional. It’s rule-based and it’s no energy. It doesn’t cost the brain a lot of energy to do system one thinking and make decisions using system one processes.

John:
Is that like a gut reaction?

Roger:
Yes, it would include your gut. It would include doing something because when you go into buy a brand of detergent, you pick it off the shelf because that’s the brain you always buy. Okay, you have paused to consider the different merits of the different brands or products. You look at the shelf, you recognize the brand package that you normally get. You grab it and you move on. That would be heuristic based or rule based, but there can also be an emotional base. If you’re trying to decide between a couple of items and you just look at one and say, eh, I like the way that one looks and grab it. That’s system one thinking.

When you start creating a mental spreadsheet and listing pros and cons of different alternatives and really sort of forcing yourself to grind through the thought process, that’s system two. One of Kahneman’s insights is that system two is very energy intensive. Our brains use an inordinate portion of the body’s energy already and as a result they’re always in conservation mode. They’re trying to find shortcuts and ways to make decisions in a simple and energy efficient way.

John:
Everyone is looking for the hack, aren’t they?

Roger:
Right, our brains are doing that subconsciously. So, our brain can make a decision using system one it’ll do that. Sometimes you have to force it into using system to thinking. If you’re buying a product that has to work with your existing – buying a piece of software that you’re going to implement in your company. You’ve got to look at it in some of the criteria. You can’t just say, wow, I like their logo or the sales person is really charming. You really got to look at say, okay, do we have the hardware and software to support this. Will this be compatible with those elements of our systems that it has to interface with and so on. So, certain kinds of decisions do have to use system two, but in general our brains will try to get out of that mode as quickly as possible.

John:
So, what I love about this so far. First of all, I’ve never heard anybody describe it like that, so that’s huge. I love learning something new and I’m sure our listeners do too, but if you think of yourself as someone pitching an investor, your pitch has to be so enchanting and compelling and giving them goose bumps that it is system one. You know, I like that. I want to know and then they get you another meeting and the due diligence starts. That’s going to be system two where it’s a deep dive of sometimes 50 to 70 hours of looking at everything you’re asking and saying to make sure it’s true before they give you a million dollars. Would that be an accurate breakdown?

Roger:
I would say that would be somewhat accurate. Although certainly when you get into due diligence, that’s definitely system to thinking where you’re grinding through numbers and being sure things add up and check out and assumptions are in fact correct and are based on market realities and so on and so on.

So, that’s definitely is however I’m sure we’ve all been part of decision processes where the decision maker has made an emotional decision and the facts are then somewhat shaped to support that decision. Not that an investor is going to take a horrible deal. You know, if the numbers don’t add up and they find that they, hey, there’s all kinds of flaws in your calculations, but I think there’s an emotional decision that I trust these people.

I believe their story about their product in the market that the due diligence phase will go a lot better than if there is less of a commitment from the emotional side of things and actually that’s probably an important thing from the investor side, because it’s easy to get carried away. One of the worst ways to choose employees for most jobs is the in-person interview and that sounds counter-intuitive because we feel, okay, that’s the only way to really pick the right person, but there’s a lot of evidence to show that we are influenced by various cognitive biases when we’re doing an in-person interview.

We are influenced by how much that person might be like us, for example. We are probably over weigh physical appearance, which in most jobs isn’t particularly relevant. We probably overweigh their facility for speaking and so on. You know, there’s a whole host of things that may not be relevant. If you’re going to choose somebody for an in-person salesperson, then an in-person interview is probably not too bad, but if you’re going to hire a project manager or a coder or an accountant or even perhaps a phone rep, you know, that is not the best way to do it.

John:
It’s interesting because the founders work so hard to get these in-face meetings so that they can have an emotional connection with the investor so they have a sense of who they are, but I think what you said is so valuable for the founders to realize is that the investors are human and they’re probably going to be a little biased in how they’re just judging. So, if they’re going to judge you on your appearance, you want to look your best. If they’re going to judge you on how well you speak, you want to practice your pitch. All of that stuff might get a little more weight than it should, but that’s human nature, so we can certainty make sure we look our best and practice our pitch so that we come across as confident and persuasive speakers, right?

Roger:
Well, I think there are a lot of other things too that sort of go beyond the sort of obvious things and one of them, backing up just a second. Probably 30+ years ago, Robert Cialdini purposed his six principles of persuasion and those are still very valid. They’re things that are like reciprocity. If I do something for you, you’re more likely to do something for me. Social proof. If you see other people doing something, you’re more likely to do that yourself.

So, if you see two restaurants and one’s got a line going out the door, you’re likely to get in the line rather than go to the one that has plenty of empty of tables and it would be more convenient and so these principles and certainty many others. There are many other techniques, but these principles I think it apply in the pitch process very well.

Well, one of these, of course, I just mentioned social proof. If there are any indications of adoption of a product or a service or whatever, this is something that you see. Like, whenever you go to a software as a service site, you’ll see, you know, join our 13,000 users or 28 million users or whatever and they’re evoking social proof and that’s something that can be effective with anybody. One of his other principles is authority.

So, if you can get, we were talking about Guy Kawasaki. If you can get guy to say he likes your product, then when you show up at the VCs office or the angel investor’s office, that will be persuasive. They’ll say, hmm, okay, Kawasaki likes this and it doesn’t have to be, you know, it could be anybody who would be perceived as having some expertise and knowledge. It could even be a college professor. It could be a local business leader or somebody, but that will help.

Another one of his principles is liking and what that means is if, it’s simpler than just well, gee, I like this person because they have a pleasing personality. What you need to try and do is establish attributes that you have in common with the person that you’re dealing with and it can be anything and so what I would always recommend is if you’re going to pitch somebody, do your homework before hand. Look at their social media profiles, find out what you have in common. Maybe, it would be awesome if you went to the same school or perhaps lived in the same city for a period of time. If you both own dogs, there could be any number of things, similar hobbies, interests.

Whenever you can point that out, that is a powerful tool to establish liking and I recall reading a story about a car salesperson. I don’t recommend that our listeners actually do this, but what he would do as part of his sales processes when someone said, oh yeah, I’m original from Brooklyn, he would immediately find or invent some tie there. So, you know, if he didn’t have any actual relationship to Brooklyn, he would say, oh yeah, my uncle lived there and the person was to create this like, I don’t recommend doing that, but it’s an illustration of how that can work.

I think another way that liking can be used is also in marketing a product or service. Often times the person creating the product or selling the product has something in common with the particular customers for that product. If I’m creating let’s say a new pet product or if I’m selling pet supplies or something of that nature, as a pet owner have something in common with all of my customers and by bringing that to the front, in other words if I put myself on the home page or the landing page with a picture of my dog, then all my customers are going to immediately see that I have something in common with them and that will create liking. So, liking is really the most powerful tools whether it’s marketing or pitching or anything else.

John:
Well, I really love what you just described. I mean, this whole concept of social proof, you know, we’re always talking about your pitch deck has to have some traction with either users and certainty what I find really interesting about this is if you watch Shark Tank, if one shark says yes and then they start competing with each other.

If you want in, then I want in and I don’t want you to have something that I don’t have and you get that momentum going where they’re bidding against each other or much like somebody having multiple bids on a home. All that social proof is people will bid over what it might be even worth in the case of a home, because it’s in such demand and this concept of obviously having other people who are authorities endorse your product is key.

The whole likability factor is completely fascinating to me that, you know, the more we have in common with someone and sometimes it’s something as simple as well, I think we’re on the same page here, because you and I both believe XYZ, right. That kind of mindset that you’re telling someone allows them to connect with you and say, oh, this is someone I want to be in business with, because sometimes these investment relationships can last longer than marriages. They can be ten years. So, they have to like you and see that they’re going to have some things in common and want to work with you and that’s really helpful and interesting, Roger.

Do you have any insights that you can share with the readers about persuasion in general over and above these six principles? Is there anything else that jumps out at you that really gets people to have an emotional connection. I know that you’re real area of expertise with brands, is there come kind of, either through system one or system two or right brain, left brain lenses that you can share with us?

Roger:
Well, let me, earlier on you mentioned stories and stories are incredibly powerful persuasion tools and there’s a reason for that. Our brains evolved to pay attention to stories. Back in our hunter gather days, our early ancestors didn’t have to go out and find out where danger was or where food was on their own, one person could come back to the group and explain where he or she ha been that day, where had they found danger, where they found food, and then the entire group would know that and as a result, that was an evolutionary advantage and we sort of evolved to pay attention to that kind of information and even today, when you put a person in an MRI machine that measures their brain activity in essentially real time and tell them a story, you will see their brain lighting up as if they were performing those same acts.

The motor areas of their brain will be lighting up even tho their immobilized in this noisy tube, their brain is acting out the story and one of the more startling things is n experiment that put two people in MRI machines, in separate MRI machines with one of them telling the other a story and what the scientists were really shocked to find was within just a few seconds of a first person starting the story, the second person’s brain started flickering in essence in unison with the first person’s brain.

So, if you want to exercise mind control over somebody, telling them a story is about as close as you’re going to get to that, because their brain will start mirroring yours as you tell that story, so I think that when you are communicating with investors, potential investors, certainty facts and figures are important, but making certain elements into a story or a narrative will be particularly powerful.

John:
Is there any research that shows that people remember your stories more than they do your numbers?

Roger:
There is research that shows stories are memorable, but I don’t think I’ve actually seen a sort of like a side-by-side comparison of the two. The other thing I think is the ease of processing. I talk about our brains are always trying to conserve energy, well, there’s a concept called cognitive fluency and what that means is how easy or difficult something is for our brain to process. If you give somebody, throw slide up that’s a spreadsheet that’s got 20 columns and 50 rows and lots of fine print, that is not easy for our brains to process and it will look difficult and there’s some fascinating research that shows that when something is difficult for us to process, that difficult translates into the follow on action even tho it may be unrelated.

So, for instance, if you read a description of something in a type font that is somewhat harder to read than another type font, okay, it’s the same description, but you, it’s presented in a little bit harder to read fashion. I’m not talking about where a person has to decoded, just you know, it’s just not quite as easy. Like, sort of a fancy font versus a simple San Sera font that people estimate that it takes longer to perform the action you’re describing. In one case, involving simple exercise. The difference between an Ariel font and a brushy-font for two sentences describing the exercise meant a difference in the amount of time people thought it would take to do that to eight minutes to 15 minutes. So, that’s eight versus 15. It’s almost as twice as long.

John:
Twice as long.

Roger:
And the sole difference was the font that they wrote it in. So, when you’re communicating with potential investors or anybody else for that matter, your customers as well, you really want to present things in a simple and easy to process way as possible, because even if something is in fact easy to do, it will seem harder if your explanation looks a little bit harder, so like, if you want somebody to fill out a form on your website, which is pretty common action that you ask people to take, you don’t want to let your desire choose this really cool font that looks like with the design. You want to be sure it is as simple as possible, because you don’t want that extra effort to be on whatever you want your customer, your potential customer to do. So, I think in terms of pitching, that means being really careful how you present your data.

John:
I love it. So, if you want someone to really follow your pitch, make it as easy as possible for them to understand and really pay attention to the details like what font you’re using on your pitch deck.

Roger:
Right, so tabular data maybe can be expressed as a visually graph, maybe some kind of data visualization could be use to make it seem simpler and then even that might be simplified. In other words instead of including a lot of lines and shapes and so on that you think will really be cool, perhaps there’s a simpler way to present that data so that the person losing at it can immediately grasp what’s going on without a whole lot of thought process.

John:
I like to say that the confused mind always says no and what you said, if it seems too difficult to process, it’s going to double the amount of time somebody’s going to decide whether they want to invest in that and it goes back to the system one and system two. If it’s going to require a lot of energy for me to figure this out or read this or squint or try to figure out what that is, then I’m just probably not going to do it. I’m not going to spend time on your pitch deck. Fascinating. Well, before I let you go, I really want to ask you about this wonderful blog you wrote on Forbes about Disney knows your brain and wants your emotions based on that great movie Inside Out. I just love how you dissected Disney’s ability to combine facial coding and neuromarketing. Would you just take a minute and expound on what you wrote there?

Roger:
Sure. Well, first of all, I hope many of our listeners have seen Inside Out. I don’t go to a lot of animated movies, but I did go to this one and it was really interesting the, without any spoilers, the movies involves this young girl who is going through a difficult move and the characters mostly are her emotions. Five emotions in her brain that are having these conversations and all this stuff going on inside her brain and these emotions have been translated into animated characters with different personalities and appearances and it’s really cute, but the amazing thing is that the science underlining this, obviously there aren’t little-animated characters in your head, but the science underlining it is relatively sound.

I mean, it’s not meant to be a documentary by any means, but the emotions are actually based on the work of doctor Paul Ekman who is a technical consultant for the film and years ago, probably 30+ years ago, Ekman more or less invented the concept of facial coding. What he found was through studying people’s expressions that we have just some 50 odd expressions that our faces form and then these in turn could be grouped into a smaller category of emotions, which he has six, but they eliminated one of his for simplicity. There were two emotions, I think surprise and fear were a little bit too similar. They eliminated one of them for the purpose of the movie, but the implications of his facial coding work have been pretty powerful in the neuromarketing space.

There are companies that will analyze people’s expressions as they watch your advertisement or view your product and determine what these people really think about the product, because most people can’t or won’t express their exact feeling about a product. They may say, oh, I like it, when in fact they really don’t like it. Maybe they’re trying to please you, maybe they just don’t know and that’s the first thing that pops into their head. Maybe they like some aspect of it, but some part of their brain is saying, oh, this looks really complicated and a skilled facial coding analysis may be able to pick up those micro expressions as they’re called those sort of fleeting expressions and so there’s a whole basis of neuromarketing that uses facial coding techniques.

First it was done with expert analysis where trained coding experts would look at video, even slow motion video, of people’s responses, but now there are some automated tools that can use cameras and some even webcams or phone cams to perform that same kind of analysis. So, that’s, as far as the movie goes, Disney has a great history of really understanding people’s emotion.

I mean, first of all, you look at Pixar and Disney’s success. They know how to tell a story and they really know how to plan people’s emotions and when you think about it. Who knows more about facial coding than a skill animation artist? Because they have to with just a few lines of their pen, although I guess they probably don’t use pens too much these days, they have to convey an emotion for an animated character that’s going to resonate with the audience. The audience is immediately going to say, oh, that person is sad or worried or well, they seem happy, but there’s a little bit of concern there and so on.

So, they know that for more than five years here in Austin. I’m based in Austin, Texas. Disney had a somewhat secret, not really secret, but they didn’t publicize it in a neuromarketing lab and it was a neuromarketing firm that was under exclusive contract with Disney. Now they are not, so they have other clients, but for a while it was only Disney doing tests to see for instance how people reacted to their entertainment content and other things that they had going on, so Disney is really into this aspect of it and I think that Inside Out is sort of a great combination of this where they’ve actually produced a movie that’s very entertaining and a lot of fun. Kids love it, adults love it, but actually has some pretty good brain science about foundations.

John:
Well, I have a client at Fido Labs that works in artificial intelligence and we were talking about it, because you know, artificial intelligence is all about predicting people’s emotions and trying to understand not just if somebody’s happy or not but why they’re happy or not and another client of mine Mogeeapp.com makes animated emojis and they’re always talking about how do we get the animated emojis to have real life expressions.

So, it’s so relevant on so many different levels so thank you for taking us on that and you know, you have so much great information. I also really loved your article about writing headlines that surprise our brain really grab, because if we want to grab an investor’s attention, just something that you really have proven it with your article of, you know, when you give your brain something unexpected that is grabs their attention so that’s whether, you know, the tag line for your startup or something that makes people remember you, there’s so much great information that you have on your website.

So, you’ve mentioned so many books, the six principles of persuasion, of course yours. We want to encourage everyone to get Brainfluence. Are there any other books that you would recommend that the readers take a look at?

Roger:
Well, I think I could go on and on about that and certainly I would leave some good off. I think Cialdini’s Influence is a classic that people need to have on their shelf. If you have folks that are in the software website space, Nir Eyal’s Hooked is excellent. It’s sort of a blueprint to create products that keep people engaged and turn them into habits, which is really what predicts success in the apps space or in the website’s space. You know, if you can get people, you know, to habitually use your products, those are what I’d suggest.

John:
Thank you Roger. That sticky factor that everyone is looking for that have people keep coming back to reuse them. Fantastic. Roger….

Roger:
My other author friends are going to be mad at me.

John:
I know it’s like Sophie’s choice a little bit. So, how can people follow you on social media? Your neuromarketing website and somebody wants to hire you for speaking, tell people how they can keep track of what you’re doing and follow you and all that good stuff, buy your book.

Roger:
Sure, well, the best place to start would be RogerDooley.com. That’s sort of jumping off point where you can reach my neuromarketing blog, my Forbes blog, and my social profiles and so on, see my speaking stuff. On Twitter I’m @RogerDooley. So that’s fairly logical and I hope to connect with some of your listeners.

John:
Fantastic. Well, you’ve been a source of fascinating information about how our brain works and how we stay motivated and how to influence people. I really have found it very compelling. You grabbed my attention and I’m sure the listeners as well. We’ll be sure to put your book and the other ones you’ve recommended in the show notes Roger. Thanks again for joining us today.

Roger:
My pleasure John. Happy to be here.

TSP039 | Mark Asquith – Transcription
TSP037 | Geri Stengel – Transcription