Getting Through to Your Buyers' Crocodile Brains—An Interview with Oren Klaff

RainToday.com's Podcast: Marketing & Selling Professional Services

Want buyers to pay attention to you? Then you need to change how you communicate with them.

Buyers receive your sales pitch completely differently from how you present it. You cannot give a lengthy, analytical presentation and expect to get through to your buyers' crocodile brains, where defenses are high, thought processes are limited, and patience is inexistent, says Oren Klaff, author of Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal.

"When you make a pitch to someone, you develop that pitch and you communicate it or send it from your neocortex—from the smart part of your brain," says Klaff. "The problem is it isn't received first in the other person's neocortex. You're not communicating from the smart brain to the smart brain. You're communicating from smart brain to the crocodile brain. It has to get through that defensive, keep me alive part of the brain first before it gets up to the other person's neocortex."

That means you have to tune your message to the crocodile brain's inputs, not how you want to pitch it but how that part of the brain receives messages, he says.

Listen as Klaff explains:

• The six rules for communicating with buyers' crocodile brains
• How to take control of meetings
• How to get buyers to want your attention instead of you begging for their attention
• The best way to close deals