Hey everyone! Scott Austin here and I love bringing to the podcast experts about topics that I'm not an expert on. And today is one of those days where really, Matt Sukha, who owns an agency and he's even written a book about a topic that I really enjoy talking about, and that is understanding how customers are making decisions and getting the psychology of their decision making product.

Welcome, Matt.

Scott, thank you so much for having me.

Can you tell us a little bit about your street cred and why we should listen to you about this topic?

Well, absolutely. Gladly. You know, my journey with consumer psychology started 15, 16 years ago, something like that. At the time, I was studying to become an actuary. So to do with mathematics, nothing to do with psychology. But I came across a book and it changed my life. It was a book called Predictably Irrational. First book in my life on the topic of consumer psychology.

And from that moment on, I dedicated all my time to learning, all about all I could about this stuff. And a dozen years ago, I quit my corporate job, founded Mind Works. That's the name of our company. And since we've, managed to train people all across the globe to work for some of the biggest brands in finance, insurance, and as you mentioned, last November, my book called The Hidden, the Yes on Decoding Consumer Psychology to Boost Sales came out and it became the Amazon bestseller.

So, yeah, that's, my story in a nutshell. And I'll leave it to your listeners to evaluate with the whether this podcast and my wisdom was worth listening to.

Excellent. I like the humility there, and I love the whole, you know, I read a book and I really liked this topic and I got engaged in it. To me, it's amazing how we as humans are all different and like what you're passionate about and what I'm passionate about and what everybody else part about is different. And the beauty is, with so many people on the planet, there's going to be an expert in every topic or there's going to be something you you're really going to get your fire lit up for, for whatever reason.

But I can totally see, like, you know what you're talking about. Like, I really enjoyed this, so I really dug into it. So are you a formal psychiatrist, psychologist? Or is this just your personal passion and then spending years in professional development to understand how consumers think?

I'm actually funny enough, my background is not at all in psychology. So it's I told you I was, studying to become a mathematician at an insurance company, but my entire team is composed of psychologists, so I'm the only one not with not a psychological background. I just spend years and years digging into the human subconscious about how consumerism make decisions.

And that's why, you know, also my insights and everything we do in mind works is not some theoretical stuff, but it's something that we have seen to work in the real life. That's. Yeah, what I think is, is making things we do particularly effective, that it's not just helping for the theory to work, but actually doing things that we have seen to work.

In my experiences, you know, what people say they're going to do and what they actually do are usually quite different. Right? You know, I worked at MSN and Microsoft for, you know, 12 years. And, you know, people would always say, oh, I want the news or I want to, you know, get smarter and be educated about things. And this will take me a little bit.

But on the Emerson homepage, the number one thing clicked was always Dennis Rodman gets drunk and causes a ruckus kind of thing. We all have our idealized, you know, vision of ourselves. But in reality we're much different than who we think we are sometimes. So why don't you start off like on that type of topic? Why don't you give us an example of here's what people think, but here's what people actually do and the disparity between the two of us.

Yeah, but do you have like a good example to drive that concept home?

Oh, man. Don, let me tell you an example. It's actually a small experiment I love to do with people life in my keynotes, you know, workshops. Ask them, so do you, do you know, what's your last the last digit of your Social Security number? Well, everybody says, yeah, yeah, sure, I know. So those of you who last digit is between 0 and 4 scan this QR code the Rest, scan this QR code and basically are all taken to a simple exercise and their job is still tell me how much they would be willing to pay for a wireless blender, leather gloves, wireless keyboard, hand blender, and leather gloves.

Okay, the same question to everybody. So they fill out their their responses and then I show them the results. And very consistently, it turns out that those with a smaller last digit are willing to pay roughly 60% less than those with the higher last digit. How the hell is that possible? What could that have anything to do with your Social Security number?

And they're like, no, it should not. And of course it doesn't. The only difference in those two groups was that in the first group, I first asked them, would you be willing to pay $19 for each of these three items? And for the second group, I asked them, would you be willing to pay $97 for each of those three items?

I didn't care what they said. Yes or no, but this seemingly innocent question that I didn't care about usually influenced their final estimates, and this is psychology in action, you know, because we are clueless when it comes to prices. We cannot evaluate what something is worth. We have to compare it to something. And that's what if I told you or you if you were in the first group who first saw this digit 19, so you would start thinking, well, probably $19 for electric go offs is wow, that's quite cheap.

But how much more than 19 a.m. I willing to pay? And the second group, you know, if you were in the second group saw 97, you would start thinking, well, 97. That's quite expensive, but how much less the 90 7 a.m. I willing to pay? And the first group is kind of drawn toward 19. The second group is drawn toward 97, and those two estimates never meet.

So this is just one example of of a million about human psychology in action, where, you know, you ask people, so how would you evaluate how much you're willing to pay for a pair of electrical offs that would tell you, well, you know, I would first look at quality. I would look at the color, the style and things like that.

Well, sure. But then there's the the entire bar that I call context, you know, when and where you make the decision and they say just told you, you know, it can have a huge impact just to begin with. The, this example.

I love the idea of context. They're like one of the examples I remember hearing long ago was, you know, when you go to Home Depot and they got the gas grills lined up for your backyard barbecue, and there's the $500 one and then there's the $5,000 one. The reason they make the $5,000 one is not to sell it, but so that the $2,000 one doesn't look that expensive because you only really need the $500 one, then you see the 5000 and that's that that context you're talking about, and you're like, oh, I'm not going to spend that.

But 2000, that's a deal, right? When you if you'd walked in the vision of that 502,000, you'd only buy the 501 kind of thing.

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

Yeah. So how how do you take that kind of knowledge and apply that to an e-commerce situation? How do you create context as a store owner?

In every project we do, we don't start by looking at the context. And let me take a step back and kind of explain where people usually make mistakes when thinking of selling, of improving sales, improving conversions. We tend to think of sales as a game, of making something appear attractive enough. So whenever I'm thinking, well, I should, I want to persuade Scotts to buy from me.

I'll start thinking and coming up with ideas on, well, how can I motivate Scott to buy fruit? But the truth is that more often than not, when people don't buy, it's not the problem of a lack of motivation. The true problem are barriers. They're standing in their way. And very often those are psychological barriers. And so this is the very first fundamental mistake that people make when trying to sell.

They overly focus on making their products seem attractive and motivating. Customers usually with discounts and benefits. And they totally neglect the the power of those psychological barriers. And let me give you an example. So it's quite clear for the listeners of, of this show, quite some time ago, we worked on a project. It was for a telco company.

Our job was to help them redesign their job ads because they were struggling with finding, people for your call center. So call center agents, you know, their job ad wasn't bad at all. It was kind of average. I would I would even say it was quite good, but they still struggled. So they came to us and they were like, well, but you know what?

We cannot increase the salary. We cannot do bonuses. We're not sure if you can do anything with our job. And that's when my colleagues kind of reverse the way they were thinking about it. They told, well, look, let's try to figure out not how we can make the job more attractive, but what is currently discouraging people from applying and they came up with five key psychological barriers.

And I think I won't remember all of them. But I'll just tell you a couple, the first 1 or 1 of one of the first ones was in the requirements, job requirements. It said, you know, you can have a university. And thirdly, you can have a PhD. Degree. You can have, you know, a just high school, whatever.

Everybody could apply. But just imagine that you have someone with no, no university degree at all, which is, I mean, useless for a call center agent. But at the same time, in the job ad, you see that the job is suitable for everybody, including those with no PhDs. What does it create in you? Why, you would be like, oh, man, I mean, this might be, a requiring the job if it's also suitable for people with PhDs, but this was the first thing.

So we shouldn't be kind of discouraging people and showing some, some seeds of doubt in them with stupid requirements, because research shows that men tend to apply for jobs, even if they fulfill just 60% of requirements. Women, on the other hand, they need to fulfill everything before they did they apply. So if you put in some requirements, it might be no, not so important, but no, nice to have.

It might discourage a huge portion of people. Let's go on the next barrier was that people were afraid if they were to handle the job, they were afraid if there would be sufficient training. And then, most importantly, they were afraid if they would be paid already during their training because they couldn't afford to go without pay for, let's say, three weeks of or a month while they're being trained and on the board.

And so we explicitly said in the job, don't worry, there is a training program that will be tailored to your needs and you will be paid also during the training program, another barrier was removed. There were several other barriers, five altogether, and step by step we managed to address those barriers as we transformed the job ad. And then when it was AB tested, there was threefold increase in applicants, not by making the job more attractive.

Not at all. Just by understanding what's standing in my applicants way would might be discouraging them, then removing those barriers, and suddenly people started applying. And this is exactly what people have to do. Also in sales. So you have your product page, you have your issue and you want to sell your product. Well, of course you can put up discounts and of course you can create beautiful product pages where you describe all the features of your product and how beautiful and wonderful it is.

But first and foremost, you have to ask yourself the question why not? Why wouldn't Scott, who clicked on the the ad and who was brought to the product detail? Why wouldn't called buy what might be discouraging him from buying? Understand those barriers and address them in your product description and you'll see you might see a much bigger uplift than a discount while keeping your margins.

While you know all the benefits of not giving a discount. So this is the the first and probably the most important thing is to to understand, uncover and to remove the barriers that are discouraging people.

Yeah, I love that, because, you know, what you're saying is there's a there's a fence people have to get over. And that fence in my mind is the barriers. And too many people are like increasing the space above the fence but not addressing the fence.

Absolutely.

And in, in your, your barrier concept there, I would imagine there's some barriers that are just common across all e-commerce. And then there's going to be barriers that are specific to your product or your brand kind of thing. What would be some of those common ones that apply to everybody that they should be thinking about?

It's, I would say, the obvious stuff. I think the more specific ones are, the more important ones. But let's let's talk about what what applies to everybody. Well, it's of course all the, the uncertainties and doubts related to shipping payments, money back product returns and things like that. You know, the usual suspects, of course, then you have to make the process as easy as possible.

But that was the case ten years ago and that will be the case in ten years. But I think what's what's more important because usually, especially if, people use, you know, things like, like Shopify and those kind of hurdles are addressed in in many cases because the, the systems are good enough. But let's come back to this grill example that you gave at the very beginning.

Let's say you have any idea what might be some barriers, what might be some uncertainties you have when considering buying. Once you get the product page, probably you're motivated enough, aren't you? Because you're probably looking for a grill. If I have a grill at home and that it's brand new, I won't click on the ad. So my motivation is already high enough.

If I land on the product page. But now what might be some of the barriers? Why might I be, you know, in don't hesitate to, to buy to go on. And I don't know because I'm not a grill owner and I live in an apartment, not in the house, but I imagine it could be. Well, how heavy is it?

Will my wife be able to handle it? How can I store it? Is it possible to transport it? Because maybe I would like to use it at home, but use it in my summer house too, so I don't have to buy two grills. I don't know what those barriers are and this exactly is the job of the shop owner.

They have to understand those barriers, you know, and it doesn't need to be a huge research where tens of thousands, it's not at all. It's perfectly fine to just reach out to three, 4 or 5 customers who even bought from you. That's that might be even better stored. I, I know one of you recently purchased this grill. I want to ask you what nearly discouraged you from buying it?

The grill. Were you hesitating? What was going through your mind? You know, and then people will start telling you, you know, I really wanted the grill and and the price was okay, but I wasn't quite sure about XYZ. And if you just do this with a few people, you know, it doesn't need to be a 31 hour long interviews.

It can be 4 or 5 people, a 15 minute call, they will suddenly reveal, you know, things you never, ever even even consider. So. So this is what everybody can do. And the one thing that people shouldn't do when I see this so often in marketing your marketing to people and so often marketers, business owners never talk to their customers, you know, they just guess from behind the desk, from behind the screen.

They're afraid to roll out their sleeves and to go out and talk to them. A few conversations will reveal so many things, and it might just change how you market things, how you describe your products and just might be so much more successful.

So, Matt, I love what you're saying there about talking to customers. I totally agree that it's so valuable and it is surprising to me how many small store owners or large store owners even don't know their customers or don't talk to them. You know, I've always been impressed when I talk to people. Small, large companies, the successful ones.

One of these it makes them successful is they understand their customers really, really well, and they understand the thought process that they're going through, you know, so for a Shopify store owners that are listening, you know, some of things I recommend my clients to do this kind of stuff is when you're first starting out, sell your product face to face, go to a farmer's market, get a table or a booth at whatever event, and start talking to people and trying your pitch and and asking them questions afterwards and getting into the psychology, like Matt talking about.

And also call your customers who abandon your cart. You probably have their phone number in the Shopify system. No customer has ever been upset in my experiences. When the brand calls them, they're actually delighted. Most people love sharing their opinion and they love talking to you. The people that are like the on the inside of something, right? Like, oh, these are the people at that store, our shop put on and they feel special and they give you so much information they're totally willing to share.

But like you're saying that most people don't reach out and do those kind of things. Are there other methods or how do you get that store owner over that hump and hurdle of, you know, get out there and talk to your customers?

They can start easy. It doesn't necessarily need to be strangers. They will do what's important is to start getting feedback. And so you should definitely not start talking is showing it and asking questions to your I know spouse who has been with you and and with the business for decades. But go to your brother, go to your cousin, go to your kids and show them your stuff and ask them.

So as you start reading this product description, what's going through your mind? What are you thinking about it? What is evoke in you? And they will tell you and they will be even more honest than the customers. Maybe. And that's a great place. Where to start, because only this can help you uncover many of the the, the hurdles, the uncertainties and so on.

I'll just give you an example. A very recent example from my own experience, because recently we redesigned our training offer. Now we made the training twice as expensive and we restructured. It made all sense on paper. But you know, I wanted feedback from people. So I reached out to six former clients from that space, from the finance space.

Within two weeks, I managed to get them on. On the quick calls each of them, and they confirmed what was fabulous about the new offer. And then they gave me hints on what didn't really make sense and where I wasn't really hitting the nail on the head. Now, within two weeks, we have a really, I mean, rebranded or a completely new offer that's making us so much more money.

It's super well received and it's just thanks to the feedback, honest feedback from customers and really understanding what's important the decision making process and the decision making process. How I decide about buying a grill is very different to how I decide about buying new sneakers, and is, again, a very different from when I'm, deciding about buying a new suit as a business owner, you should understand what is the decision making process of your customers?

How are they going about evaluating your offer? Do they go home and talk through it with their spouses? Well, if so, then you should probably account for it and you shouldn't just leave it up to them to kind of re try to remember exactly what the product features were and what the price was, maybe just help them somehow pass on the important information.

But it all starts with speaking with people.

I love it, love it totally. I think so many people, you know, they hear these best practices of, you know, no, that's not your target audience or you're not statistically relevant with your sample size. And it prevents them from just having simple, you know, the first conversation you have, you got to learn something. You do ten of them, you're gonna start spotting friends, right.

And then, you know, the more you do it, the more it's less anecdotal and more, you know, significant in the data set. You know, I'll use accurate or, you know, particularly relevant data when I have it. When I don't, I'll use whatever I have on the table. You know, my customers opinion is always more important than my opinion about things because they're who I'm servicing.

Right? So, you know, I love what you're saying. And what I'm saying to the audience is just get out there and do it. It's just like Nike says, you know, start talking to customers and feel free to call them. They're never going to be disappointed to hear from a brand they've been talking to. You know, imagine whoever you know, wherever you're shopping for this week, and if all of a sudden the owner of that store called you, you'd be delighted by that.

So just do it and people will love it, and you'll get so much valuable feedback, and you'll have a better product.

And start well, what's the worst that can happen? They will hang up. Yeah, totally.

And and they weren't buying anyways.

Yeah, exactly.

No loss. Right?

Right. I mean there's no laws. I mean there's nothing really bad that can happen. It's just about, you know, you know, truly being comfortable doing it. But who cares? You know, with my friends we have a saying when, you know, we go biking or hiking and someone is is falling behind, we're like, no feelings. And we carry on, you know, one last thing and everything.

And I mean, you should do the same as business or you're uncomfortable doing it. No feelings. Just do it.

I like how you justify you being a dick when you're biking. But that's another story. So on these barriers, you start putting together a list of barriers that are specific to your brand because you're going to cover the base level ones. You know, that everybody has like you talked about, of shipping returns. So now I come up with this, things that are barriers for me or for my customers when making decisions about my products.

How do you take that information and make it actionable?

Well, very often it's just about addressing that barrier. What does it mean to address the barrier, to talk about it in your product description, in your product videos? If I find out that for many people, a barrier with grills might be that they're not quite sure, how heavy there is. And, if it's easy to transport, then it should be something I mentioned in my product description.

A plain and simple, I say. Well, and for those of you who will be carrying the grill around, here's the good news. And you just say it. Once you have understood the barrier, it's very simple to work with it. I'll give you one more example. We worked with this insurance company a few years ago. They came to us and they had a strategically important campaign.

They wanted to rock, but they had their hundreds of thousands of of, customers, existing customers, and they wanted to offer them free travel insurance for one year. The difference would then automatically renew the next year. So they ran an email campaign. There was the response was dismal. I mean, they were you know, it was very they were not very satisfied with it.

So they came to us and they asked us to help them, improve the, the campaign. So the first thing we did was, we told the guys, this is now the problem of motivation because you are giving people something for free, and it's a good product that otherwise people pay for. So let's try to uncover the barriers.

And very quickly we uncovered two very specific barriers. Many people, when they saw the email telling the, well, here's your free travel insurance as a gift. They thought, well, but is this why are they giving me anything for free? Can I actually rely on this, this insurance policy when I when I travel or I'd be better off just buying something separate that, I can be sure it's it's worth my it will cover my, my needs if I'm in trouble.

So this was the first barrier and we thought, well, of course we have to address it. So what we did was that we clearly specified the different coverages with the sums insured, so that it clearly shouted at people. And there is this huge coverage here. You're in good hands and then we also say, well, it covers all the most frequently purchased coverages to show people that, well, look, otherwise people buy it.

And now you get, you know, the most popular coverage is here for free. And the second barrier that was even a more important one was whenever you go for something that's free and then automatically renews, you're afraid that you'll forget about it and you'll be charged for years to come. It was just the nature of the offer, so we couldn't change it because otherwise suddenly it wouldn't make sense for the company anymore.

But what we could do was to address the uncertainty. So we added one simple sentence don't worry, you won't forget about your free year ending because we will send you a notification well in advance. When the old version and the new version were AB tested, there was a 167% increase in conversions. Not by making it the more attractive, but just by understanding what was holding people back, addressing and removing those barriers.

And it is very often this simple.

Fabulous examples right now. I love concrete examples because as you were talking about the subscription one, I'm like.

Well, how do you.

Fix that? When you say we just send an email ahead of time, warning you when you're things coming up like, oh, that's a fabulous solution, I love that, but I hadn't thought of that while you were talking about it on that saying, you know, thing back back to our gas grills just to bring examples to people's minds. Right.

You talked about two possible objections being, you know, how heavy it is it. And can I fit it in my car. You know, solutions I see there are infographics. One of, you know, not a large person carrying it in. And that infographic says it only weighs 22 pounds and, you know, super light and mobile. But you show someone moving it.

You don't just say it, you show it. And the same thing for the fitting in your car kind of thing. You actually show it in a small car. In the infographic, you show the dimensions of the thing like fits in all cars or, you know, that kind of stuff, you know, saying is great. I'm a big fan of, you know, saying it in every, every possible format possible.

Right. So you mentioned video, you mentioned copy and then also infographics or photography showing off. Right. If it's that important because everybody consumes content differently.

Absolutely.

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One of the things you're talking about as we're walking through this process is you're measuring conversion rate. I'm wondering, is that your it seems common sense or just be clear about it. Is that the ultimate measure of success for these efforts that you're looking at is the conversion rate.

Usually, yes, because we're all about numbers and effectivity. You know, consumer psychology in, in our opinion should be used to make things more effective. So it's not always possible to ab test, but whenever it is possible we usually encourage clients to do it. Sometimes it's it's not about the hard metrics like conversions. It can be about softer things like customer satisfaction and things like that, because that's also hugely influenced by psychology and all the subconscious factors.

But yeah, as a rule, we always try to measure and that's what we're happy when we see the results of our work.

Excellent. Now we talk about, you know, the barriers and then knocking them out. Is there a step after that once we start talking about the barriers and addressing them for our customers, what is the next thing we think about?

Once you have understood the barriers? And, it's not just about, you know, because we have talked so far mainly about something I call uncertainty. So what? I'm not quite sure. Will it fit in my car? How heavy is it? These are uncertainties. But then there are other psychological barriers. I talk about them. I mean, there are four altogether that we usually try to uncover and remove.

And then once we have done that, we switch to motivation. You know, I told you that motivation in our experience was by far not as important as removing barriers. But of course, it's also kind of important. But we try to convince our clients not to increase motivation to discounts and and additional benefits, but by working with context. And that's where we started, because talking about these grills, let's say, is, is you gave the example, you know, A5K, A2K in a $500 grill.

Well, you can do the same in your e-shop. The key is to first anchor your prospect, your potential customer on a high number. So in just your description or your video, somewhere before they see the price, you should anchor them high. So it could be about telling them our grills are not those fancy, I don't know, something something that cost €7,000.

You know, just by the way, you mentioned we are not that kind of stuff. You know, that's just so looks good, but it doesn't really serve the, your needs, you know? And what just happened, it was, you know, the sentence was there on purpose to anchor them on 7000. They probably start thinking, oh my gosh, seven K for a grill.

Or they're really grills that expensive. And they will be anchored at seven K. And then when you show them one half thousand, they'll be like oh my God, thanks God, it's so cheap. If you don't do it, you have no idea what their reference point is. They might be anchored at a grill for $150 because they. So it's in, I don't know, somewhere.

So you want to control the context. This is one example. Another example I really, really like. It's when selling accessories do well. Let's say our grill. And again here I love to do another experiment in in my my keynotes. So again I split people into groups. And now their task is to choose their favorite pizza. They're supposed to choose the ingredients that they would like to get on their pizza.

Then I showed them the results and I showed you what a look. I mean, those of you in the first group, you ended up on average with 2.8 ingredients on your pizza, on on your tomato mozzarella base. And the second group, you guys ended up with six point I know, four ingredients on average on your pizza. How is it possible the ingredients were the same?

The prices were the same. So what changed? And the only difference is that the first group I tell them what you're starting with, your mozzarella tomato base and think those ingredients you would like to add on top of this. And the second group, you're starting with a fully loaded pizza. Tell us which ingredients you want to remove from your pizza.

In a rational world, you exactly know if you want to have your pepperoni on the beach or not. But this is not a rational world where we do sales, where your customers make decisions, and this is how you can shape context. So and that's exactly the same in this grill example. Well, I can I can ask people to choose which accessories they want to buy with the grill.

Or I can tell them, well, you know, it comes with this package of six accessories. Tell us which ones you don't want. And I'm quite sure you'll see a sharp increase in sales of accessories. We've actually seen it not with grills but with phone accessories. We have seen the results and it works. And this is the beauty of consumer psychology.

Once you understand how our subconscious works, how usually were influenced by context, then without changing your product, just by changing communication, you can just be much more effective. And it's not about, you know, tricking your customer. You know, they will be happy, you know, if you're successful removing all those barriers, they will be much more happy because the process will be smoother.

They will be thinking, well then I mean, this, these people, they really understand. So yeah, this is the second thing after removing barriers is to work with context to make your products and offers appear more attractive, but by working with context, not with discounts and benefits.

Yeah, that that scenario is ringing so true for me. I bought a drone last year and you know the DJI drone on Amazon and they have the Fly More package, right. You know which you know the drone which saves 500 bucks. Well the Fly More package is $800. But but then they show you every single thing that's added on.

Of course you get four batteries. Who doesn't need four batteries for one drone? Right. And you get this, this. And this and this and this. And all of a sudden you're like, oh, wait a second, I got to get everything. Why not? Right kind of thing. And it's just like your opt out thing. People don't opt out when they see it all put together.

I love that scenario. We we did the barriers. We did the motivation. Is there a next step in this process?

Yeah. Well, the the last thing is probably the most complex one that when we do the things that comes first, try to explain in simple terms. When we, we try to, let's say, increase the conversion of, of on my e-shop specific products, people have the tendency to jump right into ideas and solutions. So change the description from this to that.

What if we added a picture here? What if we change the name somehow? These solutions can be effective, but most of the time they are not. Why not? Because you don't really know what you're trying to achieve with those solutions. Basically, the one thing we have at our disposal is communication. The words that we use, pictures we show them videos we show them.

And with communication you can only change three things. What the person thinks, how they feel and what they do. And this is the starting point. This is where you have to start. What does it need? Well, it should mean that you should be crystal clear about how exactly I want you squad, to feel when you land on my product page.

What do I want you to think, feel, and do in the first two seconds when you just the land on the product page, no one asks this questions, you know. And it's not an easy question when you start brainstorming what how do we want people to think, feel, and do when they land on the product page of this grill?

I don't know, it's it's a hard question. If you really want to be successful, you have to be crystal clear about what is it that you're trying to achieve. And then you go on. So this is the kind of the first step on my customer journey. That's this first impression of the product page. And then the second stage is that the person starts probably reading the description.

So what do I want them to think, feel and do is they read the description. Maybe then they watch a video. What do I want them to think, feel and do what they watch the video? Yes. If we are not clear about and this is called behavioral goals, if we're not clear about their behavioral goals, then it's very hard to come up with the right solutions for the right problem at the right time.

Let's see on the product page. So this is kind of the the most complex part. And this is the first thing you should do. You know, you should first kind of create this I call it a persuasion plan. How are you planning to persuade your customer to buy from you? What is the kind of the the emotional journey on which you want to take them?

And then you start asking the question, why not? So what is holding them back? Why would they're not feel, think and do what I want them to think, feel and do and so on.

Yeah, it makes total sense to me. And you know, I'm an engineer by training. I'm kind of on the spectrum. And it took me a very long time to understand that people feel more than they think, because I tend to think a lot. But I also realized over time that my feelings drive a lot of my behaviors. And what I love that you were saying is, don't think about what your customer's thinking about.

Think about what they should be feeling, because a lot of decisions are made from emotions or subconsciously. And it's not about the spec sheet, right? You know, we go back to the grill example, right? You're not selling a gas grill. What you're selling is fun with friends and family in the backyard setting. So you don't have a table of specs on the grill.

You have a lifestyle photo of me having a great time with all my friends in the backyard kind of stuff. Is that what you're driving towards?

Yeah, the more specific we are, the better. Because also this the question what I want them to feel that changes on your product page. You know, at first when you just the land there, I want you to feel it's a credible place where you arrived. Okay. That's that's for sure. I want you to feel that reading about this grill will be easy.

And what happens just so often is that you land on the product page and you just see it and you're like, oh my God, I don't want to read this, you know, because there's a block of text that's half a meter along. So many people will just leave because and this is called perceived effort, perceived effort is very high.

So it's this amount of granularity that the true decision architect goes into. You know, so at every stage of the product page, I want to be crystal clear about the specific feelings and thoughts I want to evoke in my customer.

So that set of feelings changes over time through the page.

Oh, absolutely.

And move to another and then move to another.

Absolutely. Let me give you an example again. And this is a project where we, redesigned a call script. It was a retention call script for a bank, a little bit of context. So, people with, with, personal loans while they come and go, you know, when they, if they get a better rate, interest rate, another bank.

So they would just refinance, repay their loans early. Of course, the bank was to prevent it. So they try to call you when you ask for an early repayment, and they try to convince you to stay with them. What we did was that we first split the call script or the phone conversation into, I think it was six stages.

The first one was just introduction, then reason for calling, then something, something, something. And for each of those stages, we were crystal clear about the what we wanted to achieve. In this first stage, when I would just call you, what do we want to achieve was that you think that the call is beneficial for you because what do I.

It was a tricky dynamic because once I tell you high score. This is Matt from caldera Bank. I'm calling regarding your early repayment. But what will you start thinking like? Oh my God, they will try to convince me to not to do it and suddenly you are predisposed to fight me. So what we did instead was high school.

This is Matt from Old ERA Bank. I'm calling to help you finish your application form for early repayment. Suddenly everything changes. Suddenly you have the feeling that this call will actually be beneficial for you and you don't experience. It's called psychological reactance. When you feel like I will be trying to convince you of something to push you into something, you fight back just by changing a few words.

In the opening, we managed to remove this psychological barrier. I mean, it took us a lot of effort in thinking and testing to refine the the core script, and there was an increase in conversions, if I'm not mistaken, from 5.6 to 14%, a huge, huge increase. Not by, you know, change in interest rates or bonuses or offers or whatever.

Oh, it was just by freely becoming the the designers of those customer interactions.

Yeah, it makes makes a lot of sense. So we're getting close to the end of our time here. How would you summarize what we've talked about? We've gone through a ton of stuff here. You were to wrap it up in a summary for our customers and how they should think about approaching their product pages and evaluating them. How would you do that for them?

First, realize and admit that most purchase decisions don't happen rationally. So it's great that you have your fact sheets. But anyway, people decide, well, based on different things than facts, and you should account for that. Context is your super weapon. So the very first thing you should do is to ask yourself this, this one crucial question. Why not?

Why will Scott not buy from me? What will discouraging him from buying this grill from? Start really uncovering and digging into those barriers that have removed them, and then start playing around with context so that your offer, your product, is perceived in the context as great as possible. Always start with uncovering the barriers and then move on to working with with context, but with, you know, with these principles, not with discounts and benefits.

That's how I would summarize it. The two magic words are why not? What are the barriers?

I love it, love it. Thank you so much for that. So I believe you have an offer for the audience that you want to give them, correct?

Actually, yes, I do, because by now probably many of the listeners are thinking, well, this consumer psychology thing is quite intriguing. I wonder where I could learn more. You know, we mentioned my book a couple of times and they might be thinking, well, is it worth my time? Is it worth my money to to get this book? And yeah, we understand that it's a decision.

That's why we prepared like a no brainer offer. And if you go to the hidden yes.com/shopify there you will find this offer where you can get the ebook for free. You just gave us, you know where to send it. You choose the format in which you would like to get the ebook, and then in two weeks you will get an email from us.

Scott, did it bring you value? They didn't bring you really what you expected. And there will be two buttons. No thank you. And you don't say anything. Yes, it brought me value and you will be taken to a payment page. The price is the same as if you buy on Amazon. We just want to remove this uncertainty. Is it worth my time?

Is it worth my money? So guys, if you just go to the hidden yes.com/shopify and you can get this book for free and read it and decide only afterwards if you want to pay for it or not.

I love it. A full free trial for a book. We're used to that in the Shopify world with our apps, a lot of free trial for three days or whatever, but doing it on a book that that's that's pretty innovative. So if people want to reach out and reach you directly, how should they go about doing that?

A couple ways we can connect on LinkedIn. It's Matt Sukha. You go to our website, which is Mind Works dot net.

Yeah, I'll put it in the show notes.

It's either through LinkedIn or one of our websites.

Perfect, perfect. I really appreciate you sharing your wisdom with us.

My pleasure Scott, thank you so much for having me.