CHAPTER 13
The Power of the First Perception
If you want to energize your sales efforts and increase your ability to move a customer to a decision more quickly, you need to focus on making a powerful first impression. And responsiveness, more than any other tool at your disposal, is the most effective method for making that impression.
Your ability to win any order hinges in large measure on the customer’s initial perception of the value you’re able to provide. And this perception is formed within the first few seconds of your initial interaction. The very first actions you take to shape the buyer’s perception of you—their primary point of contact for learning about the products and services you sell—will often spell the difference between winning and losing.
Often, the words “impression” and “perception” are used interchangeably. However, for your purposes, they have distinct meanings that you should understand and integrate into your sales planning.
An impression is something that you give the customer. If you have a new lead that requires follow-up, you’re going to plan to take actions that you believe will make a positive first impression. But you don’t want to leave this to chance. You have to define in advance specifically what you want that impression to be.
A perception is what a customer senses about your actions. It’s an instantaneous and intuitive recognition of the value, or lack thereof, that the customer feels you bring to the buying process. We’ve all heard the phrase, popularized in the 1980s by the late Lee Atwater, the campaign manager for President George H. W. Bush: “Perception is reality.” It’s true in sales, where the customer’s perception of you is based on the first few moments of your initial interaction. This perception will influence whether you have a fighting chance to win the customer’s business.
This first perception in sales is a very close relative to love at first sight. Don’t laugh. It’s similar to what happens when prospective romantic partners first meet. In a study released in 2010, a team of researchers from the United States and Europe, investigating the neurophysiology of love, used data from brain scans performed on volunteers to develop new insights about what happens during the first few moments of an initial encounter, when impressions are made and perceptions about another individual are formed. In an article published by Syracuse University, the lead researcher, Stephanie Ortigue, PhD, described the speed at which the brain filters sensory input to decide whether someone is desirable:
It’s as if you have an unconscious checklist in your mind: Does this [person] fit my checklist or not? If there is one point that doesn’t match, the [person] is rejected. But if he or she passes the first point, then you check the next one and the next one. The thing that’s fantastic about the desiring mind is that it all happens so quickly. Within 200 milliseconds our brain knows whether we desire some-one—before we know it consciously!
This idea that our brain can make a decision in less than a fifth of a second, before we are consciously aware of it, is called “unconscious perception.” This is the intuitive part of the equation. The gut feeling. The customer senses something about you, and makes a decision about your desirability as a supplier of a product or service, before he or she is even consciously aware of it. It’s a downright sobering thought. Two hundred milliseconds is about half the time it takes to blink your eyes. Try it. Blink now. Yeah, that’s how long it takes the customer to form a perception, positively or negatively, of you and the value you offer.
What do you want his first perception of you, your product or service, and your company to be? Do you want it to be as Shakespeare’s contemporary, Christopher Marlowe, asked: “Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?” Or perhaps it will be as described by Herman Melville: “Contempt is as frequently produced at first sight as love.” Personally, I vote for Marlowe.
By now you’re probably wondering, “Okay, what is this first perception I need to create?” The Power of the First Perception means that a seller causes the customer to extrapolate from their initial positive experience what the experience of working with that individual would be over the long term (i.e., as a paying customer.) As you’ll see, this initial perception is extremely hard to change, so you have to consciously maximize the value and impact of your first impression.
The key is to think about the impression you want to make in terms of what the customer wants. In earlier chapters, you learned how technology and the Internet have changed buying behaviors. You also learned that most customers move a substantial way through their buying process on their own, without the help of a salesperson. But when they reach the point when they have to engage with a seller to move toward a decision, their need and their timing are urgent. So if customers initiate an inquiry, what do they want to happen? They want someone to pick up the phone and call them right now.
Responsiveness is your key to making a good first impression and creating a positive first perception. Customers are acutely aware of responsiveness in sales. They just don’t experience it very often. But what happens when you condition customers to expect complete responsiveness from you? As the English poet William Hazlitt said, “We generally make up our minds beforehand to the sort of person we should like … and when we meet with a complete example of the qualities we admire, the bargain is soon struck.” When your customers perceive that your sales values are in alignment with their own, then you increase your chances of winning their business.
Responsiveness is a distinct competitive advantage in the current commodity-oriented markets. If you value it, your prospects will quickly perceive this, and it will set you apart from your competitors. In Chapter 9, I pointed out the importance of winning the early sale. Using responsiveness to shape the customer’s positive first perception of you and your company is a way not only to win the sale but also to do it on the very first sales call.
I once helped a client restructure and refine his sales process to the point where 100 percent of the leads received a follow-up phone call within 30 minutes. Their sales blew up. Their customers just couldn’t believe that (1) a seller was responding to their inquiries and (2) they were being called so quickly. As a result, my client’s salespeople were winning the sale on a substantial fraction of their initial follow-up calls. Just as important, they learned how little effort was required to use responsiveness to make a compelling first impression.
The same applies to you. Take the actions that are under your control to influence the perception of the customer. Being responsive is the easiest. You don’t need approval. You don’t need support. You don’t need permission. It simply requires some thought about the impression you want to convey and then doing what it takes to make that happen. Like picking up a phone and making a call. Think about this from the customer’s perspective:
(1) Responsive presale = Responsive postsale support
(2) Unresponsive presale = Unresponsive postsale support
Two more quick but important points about responsiveness and the Power of the First Perception.
First, perceptions are extremely sticky. That’s both good and bad. It’s good if your actions create a compellingly positive first perception. On the other hand, if you’re nonchalant about the first impression you make, you’ve got a serious problem.
Research has shown that first perceptions are very difficult to change. According to a 2010 study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, your first impression of another person, a place, or an idea is automatically locked in as your brain’s default perception. Any information that you subsequently receive that runs counter to that perception will not change it. Instead, this contradictory information is treated by your brain as an exception and set aside.
The persistence of a first perception demonstrates the distinct competitive advantage that comes from being extremely prepared to make a good first impression. As long as your actions continue to support the customer’s initial perception, your competitors will find that any negative selling on their part will have little impact on the customer’s decision making.
This also means that if a customer forms a negative first perception of you, your product, or company, it will be extremely difficult to change. Even if you provide evidence to contradict that perception, it likely will not change. At that point, you will have to consider whether the customer is still worth pursuing.
Second, leading with responsiveness to shape a first perception opens the door to quickly building a trust-based relationship with a customer. Any company that has a website advertising its products or services and publishes contact information or has a Contact Us button is making an implied promise that it will respond to customer inquiries or requests for information. Salespersons who promptly honor that promise and live up to that commitment by responsively following up will win the perception battle and gain the inside track to the customer’s business.