Selling using the Black Swan

I've been reading The Black Swan recently, an exciting book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. In its essence, it reminds us how fooled we may be in the way we describe reality, history and future, and possibly it may assist us to make much better decisions and being ready for the unexpected.

Taleb sums this down as being due to two primary ways of assessing things in the human mind:

• System 1 - the experiential. Rapid decisions according to experience and habit, the "gut feeling" and prejudice (in the true sense of the word)


• System 2 - the cogitative. Thinking rationally and logically about things, involving experience but also assessing the influence of abstracts such as statistics
  

The problem is of course that the experiental system can frequently be wildly inaccurate but you don't notice it unless you knowingly bring in the cogitative system to actually assess things. Using the cogitative system is both energy consuming and tricky as you don't always know when it would make a difference. I myself experience that I everyday think a certain way about things, but when you stop to think about how you actually should act, sometimes it seems that your direction has drifted way off target.

Anyway, the book also recently taught me a little clever thing about sales, especially if you're selling something obscure. Essentially if consider the probability of a generic situation A, compared to a more specific situation B whichas a consequence will result in A happening. Even if mathematically the likelyhood of A must be greater than that of B (and thus A) since other situations than B may also cause A, if B feels rational and A more complicated, people will generally think experientally and inaccurately think that B feels much more probable than the complex situation A.

So how to use this in sales? Well, describing the situations you want your customers to use your product for will make them seem more likely. Maybe this is very basic to anyone in sales, but for me it was a realization. I'll make an example below, and as a hint, A as described above is someone stealing and your email password and abusing it because you don't use SSL and B is computer wiz-kid stealing your password while you're working in the same café:

Rather than just talking about the importance of using encrypted POP and SMTP email (that's just a matter of ticking a box in the email program) tell the story of the university computer security student who has a hobby to run a network sniffer and log anything interesting when he's working from cafés. Your email program is checking the email every few minutes and the young student captures your username and password every time. Every now and then he takes a look in the logs and checks out the people of which he's got the accounts of, emptying his nets so to say.

In a couple of months, he's soon gathered some thousand accounts and realizes that besides playing pranks on his clueless victims (they had really given him their passwords!), he can make a little bit of extra money from monitoring the gossip or business pages and matching them to his secret lists. It is easy for the guy to be very safe from getting caught, every now and then he will get his hands on some very valuable information, and the people he sells it to can create a world of trouble for the victims. And all this because they didn't use secure email connections. Please use secure email connections and don't become a victim yourself. Tick that one box, check it now.