0:28 Katherine Ong
So today we are joined by Ben Bressington. So Ben is the CEO of Behavior Sales.
It's a leading personality intelligence company. He's actually an expert on using AI to hack influence and persuasion. He's got a book called People Ignorant Unlocking Success, Confidence and Influence.

He actually got a background in law and criminology, and has spent the last ten years helping Fortune 100 companies apply gamification principles to their sales and communication processes. So, now he's helping folks improve their communications with others, specifically helping people close deals faster, but also finding the hidden opportunities in our daily communication.

I think you're going to find this episode to be exciting, and you're particularly going to be interested because we're going to learn how to read the room, how to pivot your message so that it's heard on the other end, how to get to that, yes, for your digital strategy recommendation or sales pitch, what kind of body language you would need to look out for on Zoom as a signal that maybe somebody has an objection and you might need to address it during the call and other sales techniques that you should be aware of in order to be a persuasive digital marketer or making sure that you're talking to clients that are a good fit for your agency.

So, without further Ado, here's our interview with Ben Bressington.

Ben, thanks for agreeing to be on our podcast.

1: 52 Ben Bressington
Hey, super excited to be here.

1:54 Katherine Ong
So can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and your marketing background?

2:00 Ben Bressington
Yeah. So, my marketing has always been focused around eCommerce because I started in that field. So, that Holy grail of an introvert's goal to make a sale online, never having to communicate with the person, which is always a lofty goal and kind of something that's kind of like, always kind of just out of reach. Because the more I learned about personality. And the more I learn about selling online, the real money is made when you have a conversation with somebody.

The real money is when you connect with them after support and really dive into the conversation. And for someone who was super shy, like myself. Talking to people. Honestly scared the Jesus out of me, like, my hands would get all clammy and sweaty and just like, it was uncomfortable.

And the thought of what I would call a cold call, like calling somebody I had no reference, no influence, no connection with… I would rather go to the dentist and get a root canal. So it's just like. There's a whole lot of that you have to get through. And it was only until I started sharing those stories of people. People are like, Hell. Yeah, that's me too.

I get that. I struggle with that. And we find a lot of people are chasing that magic thing online that's going to bring them customers in. And instead of doing the work and the more we get into understanding personality and influence, you can actually remove that mental blockage from those conversations. Like, have you ever experienced anything like that?

3:36 Katherine Ong
Yeah. I mean, so I'm on the opposite end. My dad was an extreme extrovert. I think I'm probably in the extroverted camp.

I also had public speaking early. I want to say I was eight in the Forage program. So I'm the opposite of you. But that's a lot of training and coaching over the years. So, I mean, but in our original exchange, tell me a little bit more because you started with this law and criminology degree, and I can see actually why you would be intrigued by personality stuff coming out of that degree.

How did you go from there? What was your first job in marketing and how did you go from marketing to what you're doing now?

4:15 Ben Bressington
Yeah, well, I always started I pretty much worked for myself most of my life. And through that, I've been consulting two companies and things like that.

So, I started running ecommerce stores. I started an internet cafe, and I was applying criminology back then to human profiling and marketing. And when I was looking at all these marketing texts and kind of learning the school of sales and marketing and things like that, they kind of spoke of buyer personas and your target market. But I'd literally just come from three years of schooling where I was literally taught to profile the same way the FBI profile.

So, it gets in a whole different dynamic. Does that make sense? And even back then, I can remember that I did in brace personality assessment or analysis and things like that. And, I always found that in the marketing and sales team that was missing. And they talked about a persona to a person like, hey, you're selling to housewives who have got three kids in a white picket fence and go to yoga and this type of stuff.

But it would stop in that parameter. It wouldn't really go much deeper. It's very surface level. And I'm like, well, what personality type are those people you're selling to, what are their likes? What are their dislikes from an intrinsic level? And because I found that in a lot of my research now is showing that a lot of the sales process we use with people is usually looking for external motivators, extrinsic motivators.
And that's why it's usually a sale or some external pressure to force push somebody into a transaction rather than going on an emotional level and using internal connectivity and connecting to those people.

And that's where we really start to help a lot of people reframe their language now to actually unlock and remove what we call the sales resistance, because we don't realize that there's a lot of things we've been taught in sales and communication and in marketing that actually creates resistance.

A lot of the sales scripts you've been taught actually make people step back rather than step towards. And we all know when we're getting pitched. Like, they've heard the question before. What are the three things that keep you awake at night? And you know, that like, they're just baiting that hook just to hear kind of one thing that you've got a problem with and then they kind of bounce to their pitch. Right.

That actually from all the data we're seeing now with behavioral intelligence is that it's actually creating resistance and preventing people from wanting to engage, preventing people from seeing you as an influencer, it eats away at your trust and authority.

In everything I've done. Like, I've worked with Fortune 100, I've worked with people who have launched movies, and I did some stuff, even with the Wolf of Wall Street. And then he said he made over 500 grand in less than 24 hours from applying some of the stuff I did.

And that was back when I was applying Gamification. It was teaching people all about the science of points, badges, leaderboards engagement. How do you make things fun and enjoyable for people and build this community that attracts people to you? If that makes sense, rather than like always pushing, pushing, pushing and being at a level where people really don't care. Does that make sense?

7:34 Katherine Ong
Yes, it does. So you've talked a little bit about this personality type. Can you tell me a little bit more about what personality trait process you're using? What's the process that particularly your business uses to identify people in the different personality groups?

7:51 Ben Bressington
Yeah, of course. So we use multiple personality systems, but at the end of the day, we simplified it down to what we call the bird behavior model. And it's really four birds because every time we ask somebody if you've done a personality assessment, they're like, yes. I'm like, what did you do? I can't really remember. What was your result? I can't really remember. Right. So the thing is, what's the point of doing a personality assessment when you don't remember how to use it or how to implement it?

Or you're like, well, this information was great, is what most people would tell me. Like, man, the information was great and the assessment, but I got no clue on how to apply it in a conversation. I got no clue how to apply to work. And we can talk about what I call personality labeling laws. Like in some of the biggest mistakes. People make when they. Do these assessments or when companies use these assessments because it just gets chaotic and it becomes an excuse justification as to why not to do something right.

But what we did is we simplified it to the bird model, and it's from a Guy Des Hunt in Australia.
So there's four birds, and I'll give you a crash. Course on them right now. So that way you'll understand them and you'll literally be able to apply this in a conversation you're having with somebody later today.

So the first one is what I call Vegas, the Peacock. All right. And this person wants to be famous. I call them Vegas to give you the visualization that this person is just like Las Vegas, right? Las Vegas, Nevada. Glitz glamor. Lights show attention. They want to be famous. They hate being bored. It's kind of like Vegas.

If you're bored in Vegas, you have a problem, right? The thing is, there is so much stimulation going on. They want achievement. They want recognition. They take any form of criticism personally. They hate bureaucracies. And they're always trying to be the celebrity, the star.

And they've usually always got a story. And I'll interrupt you to tell you their story, even when you're telling your story. Right. Do you know anybody like that?

9:50 Katherine Ong
I might be a Vegas, maybe.

9:55 Ben Bressington
So what was the bird? Just out of curiosity.

9:50 Katherine Ong
Peacock.

10:01 Ben Bressington
See, you're already mastering this, right?

10:02 Katherine Ong
Yeah. There you go.

10:05 Ben Bressington
And there's things you need to be aware of when you're talking to us. But in a nutshell, they're all about status, Fame and status. Then we're on the other side of that. We've got the pigeon or the Dove. And I call this one tank, because they are like a tanker in the ocean.

They are steady as she goes. And it takes a long time to turn around and make any change. But the thing with the pigeon is when you think about pigeons in a park. They're a pack animal. Right. They're easy flight. They scare easy. Right. So this is the type of person who avoids risk at all costs. And even a little bit of risk makes them nervous. It's also the person they want to be your friend. They hate taking risks. And they're the person you can't take to the Cheesecake Factory because there's 500 items on the menu. And the thing is, you've said, let's go to lunch. And they're still debating where they're going to be eating lunch as they're walking into the door.
When they get into the restaurant, you sit down at the table. And what does this person do?

11:05 Katherine Ong
Totally obsesses over the menu. They can't make a decision

11:08 Ben Bressington
100%. See, you're already mastering this. So the thing is they're the person that's the waiter comes to them, they'll go, come back to me. Right. And they still can't decide because as everyone orders a meal, they're looking around smelling what's going past them. So the things it's. Because it's completely indecisive. And you have to be aware of that and understand how to have the conversation with this person that's not scaring them, but making them. Feel at peace and. Harmony the whole time. So that's. That one. And obviously, you know, a few people like that.

Next, we. Have the Eagle. And I call this Liberty because just like any Eagle, they're all about power and strength. They're all task orientated, very ROI focused. And they want to be the boss. They hate losing at all costs.

Right? So they're usually in leadership roles or they're usually like. That person who. Always wants to know, what do I do now? And they race off. And do that task and. Get it done and show you the results. And even if they're doing it wrong, they don't care. They're pushing forward. They love. Momentum. So that person. When you're talking to them. They want to know what's the ROI from this, what do I have. To do to get this task. Done?

And if you're talking and communicating with a lot of people, you may make the mistake of not telling them. The ROI, Now not telling them the task, or you might be telling the wrong person the wrong details. Does that make sense? So what was the name of that one?

12:32 Katherine Ong
That was Liberty. The Eagle.

12:36 Ben Bressington
Very good. And then they'll last one we have is what I call the thinker, which is the owl. And this person would rather be right than rich. They want security at all costs. They're the only person that when they say they want to think about it, they literally need to think about it. And they hate change. They hate salespeople. They hate being sold to. And if they're going to buy anything, they're going to research everything.

They're going to read the white papers. They're going to read the research studies. They're going to look at the testimonials. They're going to look at the case studies. They're going to digest everything and tell you where all the spelling mistakes are in every page that you've ever published. Right.

So the thing is, that person is fascinating to engage with. And what most people don't realize is that they can actually be doing things that piss off the other personality types without even realizing it. Because the biggest mistake people make is they communicate their personality type, not understanding that. Hold on. Who am I communicating to and how do I have to evolve my communication to connect with them? Because we all actually need to hear things differently and go through that. So does that make sense?

13:46 Katherine Ong
It does. So I have two questions. One. So when I did a personality test, okay, I've done a few. The only one I remember was color oriented one, I don't remember the name of it, but I do remember that I was half blue and then evenly divided amongst the rest. So is it possible that you have, like a predominant bird and then you have some sub birds behind you?

14:08 Ben Bressington
Yeah. So you've always got a primary and a secondary, which is what's interesting. But context is really important because what most people fail to factor in is when you do an assessment, it's taking your assumed perspective of how you think. The world precedes you, but it's failing, a lot of time, to take in context how are you within financial matters, like financial matters at work, versus financial matters in the house or situations with your children or when you're in the meeting and your boss is there. Maybe you're a different personality type because you're. Dealing with an Alpha or something like that. Right.

And one of the things we have to be aware of is there's always a bird fight. It's just understanding what's going on in that bird fight and how the birds are playing well together and sometimes they don't. And this is why we see a lot of communication breakdowns. A lot of projects will stall. Just because of communication issues. And one of the best things anyone can do is understand, like, well, hey, who is this person? And maybe how do I have to just. Slightly vary my follow up, my engagement, my interactions with these persons to get the outcome where it all got sold on. Does that make sense?

15:19 Katherine Ong
Yes, it does, because I think I've had interactions where say, you're working with somebody, maybe more junior, and you create whatever recommendation and then you have a conversation that includes their boss. And suddenly the things you sort of agreed on started to shift a little because the boss was around.

15:40 Ben Bressington
The boss has got a different personality style. Right. And one of the things is when we go to an emotional level, most people fail to actually probe deep enough to the emotional level to find out what the real problem actually is because that junior person has got a problem that they want to solve. They want to look good on this project. Possibly they want to meet the boss's guidelines. They haven't really dived into kind of the real problems. They're just kind of maybe following orders, maybe. Right. We've all been in that situation.

Then the boss has got different objectives because they've got problems they're trying to meet. They've got a quota they have to fulfill. They may be connected to their personal bonuses, which is keeping them sleepless nights because what you may not be aware of is they haven't met that quote for the last three months.

So now, as a result, his bonus, which he was having a family vacation for, is now hanging in the wind. Right. And the thing is, that's a whole other emotional perspective that that person is expressing. But they're not expressing it because you never really got that information. So, they're doing things and you're like, why the hell are they doing that, if that makes sense.

16:50 Katherine Ong
Yeah. So, one, I find that's very fascinating. But two, I'm starting to get to the point where I'm like, wow, this communication thing is so complicated. How would I ever sort out, like, you know, when I did personality tests, it was in a workplace. So great. I know mine and I know Bob's personality type and I know Jim's and whatever, but currently I'm a consultant, and so I work with a variety of teams and clients and whatever.

Obviously, we're not all sitting down and being forced to do the same personality test. So, how do you give us a sort of a roadmap?

I think you've got one like, how do you figure this out? How do you get the intel? How do you apply the intel in conversations where maybe you're not all on the same team.

17:35 Ben Bressington
You're 100% right. This can be complicated. And you can't send everyone you're ever going to work with a personality assessment, even though every kind of personality assessment trainer would love you to do that, because that's how they make money. And I looked at that problem, I'm like, that's just not realistic.

So, we actually made some software, some AI that will literally convert an email or a LinkedIn profile into a full personality assessment. And what we're doing is we're analyzing the linguistics of how people are communicating, what they're saying, what they're doing, and turning that into a personality assessment.

And so that's what we call our behavior insights. We can literally create a report. So you can do this on absolutely anybody because it's using public domain information, and you can have a snapshot into who you believe they are and allow you to iterate on that because then we give you the communication blueprint to how to communicate to that person. So you can do that for your entire team. Right?

So now you can make those team conversations more effective. And then one of the things we took that a step further because I'm like, all right, that kind of gives me a snapshot of their social profile. So it kind of allows me to do the approach. But how do I keep a pulse on what's going?

How do I know if I just finished a call and I think it went great? But to them, they left unhappy, they left dissatisfied. And what's really important about that is people only remember the start and end of anything they do. They don't remember the hard work or the grunt work and everything you did in the middle.

So the thing is, you could have done a fantastic job, but you left them feeling uncertain, unconfident, unhappy, dissatisfied, and you didn't even notice. You think it's awesome, but something in some communication. Something got connected. And as a result, they're in a negative emotion.

So what we call that is that we call that our Sales Insights. And what it does is analyzes all your communication in real-time and analyzes your emails, your teams chat or your Slack chats, and literally shows you in real-time based off the email or the conversation you just had. If it was a Zoom call or an audio call from a call, it shows you the emotions everybody was going through in that moment. It shows you how they changed on the call. It shows you and gives you the insights on how to take those next engagement of steps and to kind of be aware of that emotional intelligence.

They call it like that EQ factor. So now you don't have to have the EQ used against you because maybe if you're an Eagle, right. The fluffy personal style stuff pisses you off. And you're like, I'm just trying to get the task done. I shouldn't have to say hello and ask you about your kids every time I want to have a conversation with you like, I don't care, right? That is literally what the Eagles do. But if the Dove or the Peacock, they want that, they need that communication to feel validated. Does that make sense?

20:39 Katherine Ong
Sorry, I'm stepping back on this personality conversation. Have you seen that these personality types change by location or culture? Only because I saw a conversation on Twitter the other day where I want to say this woman was part of a Latino culture and she was saying that she had an interaction where somebody got upset because she was interrupting during the conversation.

They thought that was rude, but in her culture people do it all the time. And I was listening to a podcast similar cause I'm obsessed about this topic obviously where it was a New Yorker who's written a bunch of books and she is a New Yorker. New Yorkers do they kind of like talk over each other. And that's definitely not what happens in the south, since I now sit in the south, but I'm from Maine originally.

I've seen this challenge. So does that impact personality types or is that like an additional layer on top? Like, I'm assuming you could be a pigeon in New York, but then you have the New Yorker style of talking, maybe.

21:42 Ben Bressington
So you're 100% right. These cultural factors are going to become this layer on top on how communication norms occur. It doesn't change the personality type. The personality type is the personality type, and it's fixed. You don't really change unless you go through a massive amount of transformers, which the average person doesn't do, right?

They don't rebuild their personality from their intrinsic beliefs upwards. You can do that. There's processes for that. But most of the time, the cultural thing is consistency. And one of the things you have to understand is we're actually just talking. There's a large company we're talking to. We do a lot of business internationally. Our teams are all over the world. They're like, could you help us understand the cultural differences?

Like, for example, I'll give you one simple example. I've done a lot of work in India. When your project managing in India, they do this thing that you may not be aware of, it's called the head wobble. Right. And the thing is, they will be saying yes, sir. Right. But the head wobble is saying no, sir. Impossible, sir. And the thing is, in their communication, linguistically, they're saying it. They're saying yes, but their body is saying no. Right.

22:57 Katherine Ong
Which do they mean? Yes or no?

23:00 Ben Bressington
Yes. So they're actually saying no. And I was talking to this lady, and she's worked for Apple and all this type of stuff, right. It's the big, big companies. And she never realized that. And as soon as I explained that to her, she's like, oh, that's what happened with those projects. That's what happened there. That's why we missed that. There was this cultural clash. Right? And the thing is, linguistically, if we were analyzing those conversations, we could literally show you at that point in time, there was a loss of confidence.

So if I'm communicating and there's a complete loss of confidence in what I'm saying over the next minute, for example, wouldn't you want to know that? And wouldn't you want to be able to come back and go, hey, Dan, when you're talking about that deadline, you may have to phrase the question again. Is there anything that's preventing us from achieving that deadline? Right. And then they'll say, oh, well, we don't know how to do this. Then they'll go into the problems which are their blockages. Does that make sense?

So, cultural factors do apply. But body language is body language and linguistics are still linguistics. And the thing is, our body language is from our primal being. It's like in our core DNA. It's how we're programmed and it's how we respond to stuff. If you're walking down the street and the bush starts to shake a little bit, I can promise you you're going to start paying attention and your sense is going to tune right up to what the hell is in that bush and is it going to jump out and kill me?

And one of the things we have to tell people all the time who have anxiety or stress out a lot is you have to say: there's no tigers in this room. And it sounds silly, but the reality is you're constantly in a fear mode and you can't make good decisions if you're living in that fear anxiety basis, you have to like, hey, calm down. Take a breath. There is no tigers here right now. There's no Tigers going to pounce out from your wardrobe. There's no Tigers going to pounce out on the subway unless you're the Tiger King. That's a whole different conversation. Right. But the thing is, right now you're safe and you can tell your body that. And you have to keep telling your body that because your body is constantly looking for threats. Does that make sense?

25:18 Katherine Ong
It does. So it sounds like you've got my last thought about that, actually. You just talked about body language. But the previous conversation, when you were talking about how you could track how conversations are going, you were talking about Slack and email. So do you have a way to track Zoom conversations where you've got video?

25:37 Ben Bressington
100%. So one of the things what we do is we actually created a layer that can go over your Zoom video and does an analysis either in real-time or after Zoom conversation. And one of the things that we did is we wanted to show people and I wanted to train my sales reps at the time. I'm like, hey, when you're on video right now, there's six core things you want to be aware of.

For example, core three, if there's a withheld objection, if there's a withheld opinion, or if they need reassurance. And so literally what we created was the ability to be able to have the screen go red, for example, on the person you're talking to. And it says reassurance is required because you might be talking about something and not realizing that their body language is communicating something. And that's why I called the book people ignorant because we've kind of become ignorant to this communication, the little things, the little details in our communication styles.

We've become ignorant of body language. And we've kind of forgotten it, because our heads are down in the cell phone, we now send emojis rather than actually having a conversation. And there's entire generations of people that don't want to have an audio call. They literally want to avoid it at all costs. And as a result, without them practicing how to talk, they kind of create bad habits. And it gets very interesting. Does that make sense?

27:00 Katherine Ong
Yes, it does. It's fascinating because I go back to I had sales training and did sales. So I always get stuck with the sales face to face, two chairs. But that's not the world we're in. That's why I was asking about Zoom video, not even doing live training to the people, necessarily. We might be soon, but in general, for the last two years, we haven't been. 

27:21 Ben Bressington
Well with what we've doing. We've actually created questions you can ask for the entire sales process that extract the emotion and really help you define the real problem. Because most of the people are selling to the wrong problem. And the selling style has actually changed from what it was several years ago. And a lot of people still use the AIBA model, the Ada model of sales, and they don't realize that that was actually created in 1846 for consumers back then, and as a result, I'm pretty certain consumer behavior has changed since 1846. 1846 is back with horse and buggy, boys and girls.

So the thing is even a lot of the sales trainers out there, they're selling you stuff, high pressure, anxiety type closing techniques which work at a time, but they also have a cost, if that makes sense. And they no longer work with the Internet and how I can read reviews and adapt. It's like we have to be aware of how just our communication style needs to advance and change. And that's one of the big things we help people with is, like, optimizing their script because you can two X, five X, your sales conversion rates when you connect with people faster and actually connect and really address this real cool problem.

And that's where we find a lot of companies who are pitching and closing. They're pitching too quickly. They're really just pitching too fast. They're not really connecting with anyone. And as a result, there's a lot of, like, people who get ghosted all the time. The reason you're getting ghosted is because the message you delivered didn't connect to the problem they wanted solved.

29:01  Katherine Ong
Yeah, that last bit is exactly the problem that even when you've landed the client, that's something that digital marketers have to do all the time. So you're trying to pitch a new idea, a new strategy, or maybe even your existing strategy, maybe to a client, and maybe you've got to go up the chain. So it's more than one person you're talking to in order to get approval. And I'm assuming you can use that in the same process for that., right, to figure out if there's objections to a Pivot or you want to use the rest of the budget for YouTube ads or whatever.

29:37 Ben Bressington
Hundred percent. Yeah. It's identifying the problems and the priorities for everybody. And one of the things any digital marketer or anyone selling marketing services or consulting services doesn't realize is that they've got to be constantly reselling the process. And you have to resell more if your motivation for people to buy was caused extrinsically, where if I've caused it intrinsically, I've bought into the process and I am going to become a champion for what we're doing. Does that make sense?

So there's a massive difference. Like a lot of digital marketers will use urgency or exclusivity or some type of external factor which has no buy-in from me. And so next week, I forgot about it, because I've got a new mess of stuff I've got to deal with, right?.

So it comes back to the project and we're working on and we're like, why the hell are we doing this? Why hasn't this been done yet? Why is it taking so long? You're constantly dealing with a massive churn impact. Have you ever dealt with that?

30:45 Katherine Ong
Yeah, certainly. I always just keep coming back to the project I had years ago when I was at Ketchum where I had to resell pay per click strategy with the Feds five times over, even though it was approved in the original strategy anyway. Yes. So, do you have any… I get stuck on this remote idea. Do you have any specific tips around how people, in general, can be more persuasive with both remote conversations, whether it's Phone now or Zoom. Or whatever it is me or if it's asynchronous. So Slack, like how do you change your behavior? If it's Slack.

31:31 Ben Bressington
You can keep it the same. It comes down to the ability. There's a three-step process we use. So it's the connect solution awareness and problem awareness and then connecting with those people and asking the right phrasing questions with those. One of the things we want to be aware of is it's easy to use Slack as an excuse to communicate and respond quickly to everything every time. And like those instant communication things can actually cause more problems and there can be a lack of interpretation. And that's where, what we call social dynamics or company culture dynamics, where we created, where we analyze Slack, for example, and we can actually see every interaction you've had with everybody.

And is it happy? Is it positive? One of the emotions, if people are interested, that we actually track a lot is called disgust. And what's interesting about disgust is. Like if you've triggered disgust based on something you've said which could have been a joke that got interpreted wrong, it could have been something that just what have you could be myriad of reasons.

It actually causes people to react negatively and take positive action in the opposite direction. So you've pissed them off enough to want to take action, to leave, to cancel. To want to kill this project, to want to put you down. And most people don't realize that you could have said something which has someone teetering on this emotion. And the problem with emotions is if they aren't addressed or dealt with, they fester. So I'm sure the people listening have been in a situation where something tiny got blown out of all proportion and you're like, what the hell just happened? And it's all because this thing fested. And previously there's been no feedback loop to the conversations we're having.

So, the thing is, I highly recommend. If you're talking to people on Slack, check in with them on a regular basis and have a real face-to-face conversation if you can on video. Ask them some questions. How are they going? What's going on with them? Just curious, how is this Project Object impacting you personally understand the tonality, right? Because I can go, what's going on? So what is it you like about what we're doing? What is it you dislike about what's going on right now?

That simple question can help you identify issues and resolve them. But most people don't do that. Like you get stuck in the slack trap, right. And you don't communicate with people and you think Slack is good enough. And if we're talking to different personality styles, remember, the pigeon wants to be around people, wants the connectivity. Wants the conversation, the Peacock craves it, needs it. The owl is okay. But the owl is going to read in to the meaning of everything you send, right. And if you aren't checking in with people. You can unintentionally cause conflict. And we've all been there. It's happened to me many of times.

And it's like you learn from those experiences and you're like, crap. And that's one of the reasons why we created the sales insights, because we wanted that feedback loop on what is going on. So, I can identify an issue and address it rather than have it kill my projects, have it kill a deal, or have it just a relationship turn sour. That's never a fun thing.

34:51 Katherine Ong
So have you seen these personality types line up with job titles at all, like, our most developers, a particular personality type?

35:03 Ben Bressington
Well, it's not that the most, but there is a preference for the type and the way they work. For example, like, every personality style has a different logic, thinking process, different action style. The Peacock is a great starter, poor finisher, right. So the problem with that is, well, if you got them on coding, it's… They'll start it, but it won't finish or it won't get tested where the owl will see every detail all the way through. And we'll double-check everything. They've got a checklist one through seven.

One of the things you always want to ask people is like what are the steps to make this decision process for you, right?. And you can understand based on their answer, are they a task-based person or are they kind of just a fiber to see the pants? And we'll kind of work it out type person.

For example, do you want an accountant who doesn't focus on the details, right?. Do you want a lawyer who doesn't focus on the details? Do you want a marketing person that doesn't connect well with people?

So, we've actually got an assessment that you can use which actually recommends job or categories or types of people based on the personality preference. So you can be happier in what you're doing, which is what's exciting.

36:24 Katherine Ong
So when you're analyzing these communications, got the developer thing stuck in my head. Do you also analyze your tickets conversations on Asana.

36:37 Ben Bressington
At the end of the day? At the end of the day, we can actually analyze anything. It really doesn't matter. Like, we've got clients who were analyzing text messages or WhatsApp or Telegram. At the end of the day, we need 50 characters to determine over 100 different linguistics. And I need about 350 characters to create a confident personality assessment. So we build that up for companies. We're reading resumes for people. We're transcribing videos from their Zoom calls and interpreting them. For some companies, they want us doing their board meeting notes and understanding what's going on. And they're using that to make financial decisions to understand, well, when the CEO is talking about this, is he really confident with this or is he kind of just hyping myself with no authenticity. One of the cool things we can track is when multiple people. And this is a challenge for a lot of people pitching marketing services most of the time is who's the real person with authority. So we can actually track who has influence over who. And that's critical because it's like, hey, is it Catherine, Jimmy or Sally I have to be talking to?

And who has influence over who? Because you've always been in that meeting where there's that one negative person, and it's their sole job to be like the deal killer. They're the one bringing every objection, and you're like, “God damn it”. The thing is, how do you deal with that person? And how do you convert that person? But who is that person influenced by? Right. And so the thing is, if you focus on the wrong person, you lose the deal because they've got no influence to go to the actual decision-maker or when the decision gets made. Does that make sense?

38:19 Katherine Ong
It does. And I know based on my sales experience. Sometimes it surprises you who the influencer is when you figure it out. I was figuring it out without software, but yeah, it can be surprising sometimes. So you talk a lot about the software, but do you also, for people that are completely new about how to figure this out, do you offer any training or coaching or, I don't know, some other support? 

38:45 Ben Bressington
Yeah, 100%. A lot of this comes through. Like we actually provide real-time training and coaching. So, yeah, we've got the software that analyzes the stuff, but then we role play with people trying to be questioning and they're scripting or it's just like. Hey, when you said this. You may want to say was this, and you may want to change your tonality a little bit because it comes down to a lot of interaction and that's where we provide. Yeah, the software is just a feedback loop, but it's in the interpretation of that. And that's where our coaching and consulting comes in. And either helping the solo sales rep to helping an entire company understand cultural dynamics of what's going on. Is extremely powerful.

So, our motto is to never leave anybody alone. If you need help, you're going to get it anywhere you need it through online training, through courses, through live coaching, through role-playing, whatever it is we're trying to help you empower because it's our goal to make you a more effective communicator and connect with people. And that means we have to deliver the content the way you need it delivered. We can't be talking about personality and not frame our offering to actually meet the needs of who we're dealing with.

39:53 Katherine Ong
True. I think that would be really effective. I can think of all these pitch rehearsals in my agency days. I think it would be really effective if you had some coaching there related to that. 

See, so I saw on LinkedIn that your app can predict churn, which you've mentioned a little bit in relation to people losing interest in a product or service before they actually take action. So, tell me a little bit more about that. That's intriguing for me from a marketing perspective.

40:27 Ben Bressington
So the technical terms for that is latent style matching. And at the end of the day, there's the subtleties in the linguistics that we can use for someone's losing interest in this. And therefore coming at a churn trigger. Because a lot of the time when we deal with churn, it's like we get a cancellation email or we get something just like, what the hell? Like, we get hit out of the blue. Right. And the thing is, what they didn't realize is there was a conversation three weeks ago, or there was a customer support ticket, or there was a Jira ticket, for example. And that whole chain of stuff caused me to lose interest, become disenchanted, become experience an emotional rollercoaster, which caused me to start doing.

And the thing is, it never just happens out of the blue. Like there's something triggering. It doesn't make sense.

So we can track, for example, internally, we can track if your team members are losing interests. For example, if you've got a sales rep who's having conversations and they maybe had four bad conversations in a row, they start losing interest. You can go, hold on. Should we set up a trigger there to have them take a walk for 15 minutes, come back, watch a testimonial video, do something that kind of realigns them with the purpose.

With external clients, we can see all of the variables on understanding the timeline and the change, if that makes sense. So, like, hey, are they still happy? Are they going through? Is the emotion the same or is the emotion starting to change? And that's what we have to look into. It's like, what's the cause of that? Why is that? What's the now dominant emotion?

One of the cool things we do is we can actually show you every lead in your system, every client in your system, and we can show you their personality style and compared to the sales reps personality style that's talking to them. So you can see if there's a match or a conflict to begin with, you can actually then see their last, more emotional state. What is it? And we just use the emojis like it's either red, yellow or green. If it's green, it's good, right?. But the thing is, if it's going yellow, that means our last interaction with them wasn't happy. It wasn't sad, but it wasn't happy.

That's something we have to be aware of, because if we start seeing everything and one of the things we've started to notice is, for example, there could be little things like there's something going on in your customer support process or you're onboarding the process, or maybe the developer you're dealing with is a strong owl. So when they come on, it's just bang, bang, bang. And you get this thing off, the feeling of piss off, right?. We've all been there like that person, we respect them because they're the Ninja style skills, but like their social skills, not so much, right?. So the thing is then it's that interaction which kind of like, and if I'm the Peacock, I'm not getting the famous feeling, I'm not getting the social approval from my interactions from this company. So what does that leave me then? Craving? Does that make sense?

43:30 Katherine Ong
How much have you scaled this? So I'm thinking about sort of like plugging it into B2B is obvious and B2B with big sales numbers and salespeople is obvious. But have you also plugged it into I don't know, something that's more B2C, that's larger numbers like T Mobile. I get sold with some sales rep, but then I've got customer service that's centralized, that kind of thing.

43:56 Ben Bressington
We haven't gone, we've been focusing on B2B right now. We're very focused on that. At some point it will go B2C because the people were selling with go B2C. But the thing is we've just reengineered everything to allow scale, even to allow for multiple languages. So we can understand the different language styles. We've got 19 different languages we can deal with.

So we're actually looking to scale quite intensely. And use it as a system in the back-end operation because internally, like 16% of any workforce right now is looking to leave, right?. So that's a massive cost. They're calling it the great resignation, right. People are changing to be happier in offers and that's a huge financial impact on companies.

And we're seeing a whole lot of stuff right now with displacements, which is also going to impact companies. So wouldn't you like to know which one of your team members is not happy? Need a break, maybe just need some type of pat on the back from you to not lose interest in what you're doing, because the cost of replacing people is quite significant right now.

So there's some massive applications and a lot of people are using that on the B2C side of just understanding the sentiment of those clients and understanding where they feel and where they fit, and there's huge applications for that. We've got some people who it's talking to us. And they want to use it for the political assessment.

So, they literally want us to do stuff. So in real-time, being able to analyze the politicians presentations and being able to pull it apart not just from a logical thing, but like it's almost complete lie detection in real-time, right. And it's just like, all right, well, that's some interesting stuff, but.

45:44 Katherine Ong
Yeah. So sort of a social sentiment analysis, except maybe more accurate.

45:50 Ben Bressington
Exactly.

45:53 Katherine Ong
Yeah. Because I was fans of certain software. But I remember I did an analysis of various software and one of them was doing offshore analysis of sentiment, which I don't know if that would work very well for U.S. people. But anyway. Do you have any plans for leveraging your current software where I guess this is sort of a similar question where marketers could use it in their social media campaigns, because that's the other way my brain is going. One is B2C, but the other one is this sentiment analysis or social media engagement or finding influencers.

46:27 Ben Bressington
Yeah. So one of the big things we're working on, it's literally working people to take LinkedIn is the perfect example. You generate a list of 1000 people on LinkedIn that you're then going to set your automation to reach out to those people. And what we're helping people do is literally segment that list into the four personality types for multiple reasons. One, you may not want to deal with a certain personality type because I don't like working with that person.

So if, for example, I'll tell you you don't like dealing with those people because they're just too slow, they're too tedious, they cause too much customer support for you, whatever it is. Or it could be the peacock, it doesn't really matter. But you can actually remove them from your outreach to begin with. So there's that segmentation thing that allows you to target to the person you want to engage with, not just your… Yes, just because they got the title of CTO doesn't mean all CTOs are who you want to engage with, if that makes sense. So then it allows you to personalize that. We can also do that same analysis for your customer list. To help you understand how is that impacting?

The customers are actually onboarding, which are the ones at the best, and we're dealing with some people and literally analyzing people's social media to find real influences. So who has influence over who? So, for example, you've got a million followers. That's great. But do you have any influence over those million followers?

What percentage of those followers don't really give a crap about who you are. And when you do tweet something, they don't care if that makes sense.

47:53 Katherine Ong
Yeah, definitely. Well, this has been fascinating. I think it's sort of the end of my questions. But I do have three standard questions that I ask everybody on the show. So one I think you've actually answered, but we always think about our audience and what makes them tick. For any of the folks you're working with, was there anything about their target audience that they thought was really surprising or that you thought was surprising?

48:18 Ben Bressington
The biggest thing was not understanding who wrote their copy, the personality type that wrote the copy. The personality type. That was selling that copy and then the personality of the client that was actually onboarded. And then they have customer support. Who's got a different personality type. So then they start to. See incongruencies. Right? And once they start to align that. A little bit more. And just give us some polish. The whole operation. The whole culture becomes more positive because you're speaking the same language, if that makes sense.

48:53 Katherine Ong
I'm going to ask you that, because I know there are plenty of folks that have poorly structured brand voice. So whether or not your software picks up on the fact that I don't know the real person's behind one handle and not the other.

49:09 Ben Bressington
Yeah. So we're. Looking into doing a. Lot more of that cover stuff, identifying. There's a lot of people who've outsourced their social media, but they've outsourced it to someone. Right. And it's in a completely different personality style, a different persona because that's one of the big things we get from some people.
They're like, oh, my assistant wrote my LinkedIn stuff and she does all that stuff. I'm like, well, your assistant is an owl and you're an Eagle. And as a result, like, there's a complete mismatch on the alignment of your messaging because they are not realizing that they should be framing it differently. And as a result, you start attracting this population of Owls and these people. And you're like, why am I dealing with these people?

49:50 Katherine Ong
Right? Because you were attracting them inadvertently. Fascinating. You have a bit that talks about you have resources to help people figure out brand voice, or at least brand voice in relation to their personality types. Or do you help brands with it?

50:07 Ben Bressington
Some of the tools we’re literally creating right now to help you analyze. Your website. Or social media, your marketing presentations and go like. Hey, here's. Kind of where everything. Is at, how does it fit together? And where is the congruency. What do we just tweak? Because it's kind of like creating like, the people writing your content need to understand the personality, persona to step into.

And as soon as they do, that content can take off. Like your community, your tribe. You start connecting with the right people. It's like it's having a message that lands or flops. There's a huge difference.

50:42 Katherine Ong
Yeah. Fascinating. So then the other standard question I asked folks is what is the win or the resource that you want to share with our listeners today?

50:51 Ben Bressington
Yeah. So if people reach out to our team, we'll give them a copy of the book. People ignorant. They'll get the book with some bonus videos and some training online for free. Or you can go to Amazon and pay the $24 for it. We will support you for that and love you a long time.

But if you want the digital ebook for free, just email our support help@behaviorsales.com and just mention the podcast. And we'll give you all these resources to help you get moving forward.

51:16 Katherine Ong
That's amazing. All right. So how can people learn more about you?

51:21 Ben Bressington
Real easy BehaviorSales.com, you can actually spell it the English way or the American way, you will end up in the same spot. And if you want to reach out to our team, it's just help@behaviorSales.com. I'm more than happy to answer any of your questions and help you kind of start to master this and improve your sales effectiveness.

51:38 Katherine Ong
Fabulous. This is awesome. I learned a ton, and I know our listeners are going to be very interested in the entire episode. So thank you.

51:45 Ben Bressington
My pleasure.