Plagued by venomous cobras, the British colonial government offered Indians a bounty for each dead one turned in. At first it worked and the cobra population started to shrink, but then entrepreneurs started breeding cobras to kill to collect the bounty, resulting in more cobras than ever. Creating a solution that inadvertently ends up making the problem worse is now referred to as the “cobra effect.”
We’re all in sales, including me, or I wouldn’t be reaching out to make connections on LinkedIn. And I’m a prospect as well, receiving countless emails every day promising to get me a host of qualified prospects.
When I don’t respond, the follow-up emails suggest there are technical issues on my end, or my inbox isn’t managed, or somehow I just didn’t see the message. The more follow-ups I receive, the more offended and annoyed I become, and the less interested I am in buying.
It’s the cobra effect—outreach intended to engage prospects ends up disengaging them instead.
In most sales situations, the cobra effect operates at an even deeper level. The conventional wisdom holds that humans are rational animals that make decisions by logically weighing the facts. That assumption leads to pitches that are heavy on technical specifications. But neuroscience makes it clear that our decisions, rather than being based on logic alone, are driven largely by emotion. All too many salespeople are speaking the language of reason to prospects motivated by emotion.
It's far more effective to stop thwarting the way the brain naturally works and leverage it instead. Rather than process experience purely logically, the mind tells stories. The right story integrates the technical data with emotion and goes right at the way decisions are actually made. We think and feel the reasons to buy.
It’s only reasonable to start using science to sell and stopclogging up everyone’s inboxes with self-defeating spam.