Jones Why Women Buy

How to Sell to the World's Largest Market, how to sell,
1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61339-860-9
Verlag: Made For Success Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 100 Seiten

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jones, Dawn

Leseproben

Chapter 1 Recognize How Women Differ from Men Consumer trend expert, Faith Popcorn, says, “Companies think they’re marketing to women, but they’re not. They’re not talking to women. They don’t know how to talk to women. They really don’t realize that women have a separate language and a separate way of being.”4 This is a departure from the recent tendency to try and gender-neutralize everything. So, to be clear, my goal here is to recognize gender-specific tendencies, not stereotypes. A TIME Magazine cover article from January of 1992 said, “It has been proven scientifically that men and women are different.”5 If you grew up before 1992, you already knew this, but now it is official. I discovered those sales differences on a beautiful Pacific Northwest day one summer when my husband and I decided to make a major purchase. A boat. Not just a little boat, but one big enough for us to live aboard. While many people dream of buying their first home, my lifelong dream had been to buy and live on a boat. For me, it was an adventure to have a season in my life that romantic songs are written about and wanderlust artists put to canvas. Whether walking through a marina at sunrise and watching the boats make ready to embark on their journeys or winding down in the cool of the evening after a day at sea, with the gentle lapping of water alongside a resting boat; life on the water called to me. Though I dreamed about this for years, it wasn’t until I had written it down as one of my goals in my success journal, and then shared that dream with my husband, that this goal turned into a reality. Based on the direction we were going in our lives at that time, this was a practical decision as well as an adventure. There was one slight problem. Due to our current circumstances, my husband would not be present when I looked for and purchased the boat. For several weeks, I called and visited numerous yacht brokers. Every time a salesperson found out I was married and my husband would not be present in the decision-making process, they immediately stopped taking me seriously as a prospective buyer. I mean, after all, who would take a 20-something married woman serious about a major purchase like a big boat without her husband being present? Thankfully, I was determined (and naïve enough) to not let that deter me. Determined in the sense that this decision was a done deal—we just needed to find the right boat. Naïve in the sense that I didn’t notice I was being brushed aside in the sales process. Until I met Chet. Chet looked as though he had spent many years enjoying a lifestyle of boating. He was well-dressed, yet casual. He was rugged but had gentle eyes. I still remember the sweet smell that wafted from his tobacco pipe—it reminded me of a faint, yet comforting, childhood memory. It must have been a slow sales day because Chet took the time to show me a few boats. In the process, he listened to what I told him my husband and I were looking for and accepted me not disclosing the reasons for the lack of his presence. I think he was intrigued because he continued to work with me—and in a very professional manner. After many weeks, and several trips to different marinas, I asked Chet why he took me seriously while the other yacht brokers I had visited hadn’t. This was when I was enlightened. Chet let me in on a little-known secret in the yacht world. He told me that while women were definitely influential on the buying decision of a boat, it was usually about the interior and the comfort—how it looked and felt—but ultimately the final buying decision rested on the man. Single men bought boats. Married men bought boats (even without their wives being present). On rare occasion single women bought boats. But it was unheard of for a married woman to buy a big boat without her husband! Chet was always professional, never condescending, and had a high degree of integrity. He asked great questions that he wove naturally into our conversations. He listened to my answers then went about looking for, and ultimately finding, our perfect boat. Though I purchased alone, Chet got our business. My husband and I lived in our boat on Seattle’s Lake Union for two and one-half years. The following chapters reveal the techniques— the art and science—that great salespeople like Chet apply to their work and lives beginning with the real differences between men and women. There are quite a few physical differences between male and female brains that explain how women process information. An actual look at the process of how the electrical neurons fire back and forth in the brain brings some interesting conclusions. First of all, men form a linear point from the back of their brains to the front of their brains. Anything that interferes with them taking that thought, process or action from the back of their brain to the front is treated as an obstacle. Men will push that obstacle out of their way whether it’s from the back to the front or the front to the back. New concepts run on a linear line, kind of like a football field. This is a perfect analogy of how a man’s brain works; they run back and forth until they score points to win the game. While there are a lot of women who are sports fans, for a woman, her thought process is more than just running a linear path. Using the same football analogy, it’s more of a zig-zag that includes a very different pre-game, game, and post-game. It’s making sure life is in place before the game begins; food is purchased and prepared, interruptions are minimized, and TV commercials are optimized. Then, once the game is over women are generally not talking about the instant replays or statistics of the players or even about winning and conquest and scoring points. What do you think they’re more likely talking about? Relationships. Women tend to talk and think more about the fairness of a sports play, the dynamics of the players, or even how the win or loss will affect their family, friends, and co-workers. On a side-note, apparently Super Bowl fans on the winning team have more babies nine months after the win—now how’s that for relational! So how do these brain differences impact relationships in the workplace? While women are thinking “How can we advance in the workplace?” It’s totally different. They are also thinking “How do we get along?” They are thinking about their advancement and the impact on their relationships as they advance. While men’s thoughts move between the front and back of their brains, women’s thoughts tend to go side—to-side from one hemisphere to the other, from the right brain to left brain, left brain to right brain. What is the difference between the right and left sides of the brain? There’s an easy way I can help you remember. The left side of the brain tends to be logical, sequential, and linear. I put lots of L’s in there to help you remember. This is the most logical path. This is the infrastructure. This is the scaffolding. You want to use this side of the brain when you’re talking to people who are direct personality types, or thinker-analyzer personality types (we’ll cover more on how to talk with differing personalities in a later chapter). Bottom line—the left brain is logical, sequential, and linear. The right side of the brain is relational, random, responsive, and reactive; it is more creative. You want to use this side of the brain when you’re talking to social extroverts and relational personality types. Women are said to be more right-brained and more relational. When I read the popular book Men Are from Mars; Women Are from Venus I felt like the author, John Gray, described the difference between males and females in a way I recognized as whether the right or left brain was dominant—which is an oversimplification. The reality is that women have a greater ability to jump back and forth between logical computations or processing facts in the left hemisphere, and emotional processing of visual imagery or interpreting context in the right. Here’s a bit of the science to support that. According to a study conducted at the University of California, Irvine, men’s brains have approximately 6.5 times more gray matter than women’s, and women’s brains have nearly 10 times more white matter than men’s. Because gray matter characterizes information processing centers and white matter facilitates the connections among those centers, scientists theorize that those differences might explain why men tend to excel in tasks that depend on sheer processing while women show relative strength in tasks that call for assimilating and integrating disparate pieces of information. What’s more, the corpus callosum, which is the bridge of nerve tissue that connects the left and right lobes, is 10% thicker, on average, in female brains.6 So, basically, women use both sides of their brains to solve problems, while men predominantly use the left side of their brains. This explains why women and men can get frustrated when talking to each other. Sally and Bennett Shaywitz of Yale University gave men and women a rhyming task while taking an MRI. The results showed that in men, a small center of the brain lit up only on the left side. When women performed the same activity, the brain looked more like a pinball machine, with multiple sites lighting up on both sides. Perhaps this drives males to think females are “all over...