Using AI To Break The Code To Sell By Buyer Type Using Buy-ology With Susan Younger
A lot of people think of AI as impersonal because they confuse it with automation, but true AI can, in many ways, enhance the humanness of humans themselves. This shows up powerfully in sales in the form of Buy-ology, a way of using AI to help sales professionals sell more effectively by categorizing people into buyer types based on their buying personalities. It is a bit more complicated than it sounds, but it does hold the promise of better productivity in sales. It’s certainly exciting to think about the possibility of accurately lining up the right lead to the right person at the right time. Listen in as Certified BANKCODE Trainer, Susan Younger explains how this works in this conversation with Chad Burmeister. Like Chad, Susan firmly believes in the potential of AI to bring humanity back into the workplace. You’ll shortly find out why.
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Using AI To Break The Code To Sell By Buyer Type Using Buy-ology With Susan Younger
I've got a real live AI expert here with me. Susan Younger is a certified coach with the Codebreaker technology platform. We're going to get into some of this because what you're able to do with AI is uncover the types of personalities of people that you're working with spiritually, emotional intelligence, 6 or 7 different layers, and have better communications with people. Some of our politicians could probably use this technology.
We could use it in a lot of aspects of communication at this point.
Susan, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here.
Thank you. As an independent consultant who's been working with these tools for several years. It's been wonderful and fun to see it start as a training and development group that recognize that AI was a way to take the information. If you did an assessment with a personality profile, most of the time, if you've done DISC, Myers-Briggs, Color Profile or any of those, it'll take you 15, 20, 30, 40 minutes to do one and then you have to wait for the report. With ours, it’s four codes and twelve words. Put them in order that represent who you are, what's important to you in terms of your values and we'll send you a report instantaneously in less than 90 seconds. That's where it was when I got started with it. It was looking at the cards and knowing what it is.
When the AI came out, all of a sudden, we had a one button push that I can copy text into the AI, and it would tell me what code you were speaking. At that moment, it may not be who you are, but based on your values, it's telling me how you're looking at that conversation. That then allows me to understand because of the trainings I've done with the B.A.N.K. Methodology, which identifies not psychology, but what we call Buyology, why they buy. We're not trying to say we're a psychological program about you. It's how you make a buy-in decision. Be that about information, about how you interact in a job.
Think of the times you've been with business teams where those business teams are talking about the same thing, but the sales guys looking at it here, the tech guy who built it is looking at it here and they're missing the connection between them, because the value and perspective of how they use it, how they see it is different, they are not recognizing what the other person sees they can't communicate. When you start to understand that difference in perspective, you start to bridge that gap in the communication. It brings the humanity back into the workplace.
That's what I think is most interesting about AI. A lot of people think that AI is impersonal. They confuse AI with the word “automation” and they think, “I'm going to mail blast. I'm going to do a bunch of social media blasts. It won't be mapped to the right person and personality.” When in fact, well done AI helps you be more human, which is interesting. It’s why I have a shirt says, “Delightful human impact.”
I was reading to one of your other episodes where you were talking about picking up that phrase, “delightfully human.” I loved hearing you have other discussions about the human side of connecting with people through AI. Cheri Tree, who was the Founder and Creator of the B.A.N.K. Methodology was invited to speak at the United Nations AI for Good Conference, simply because our methodology is bringing that humanity and empathy into the connections of AI in a different way than anything else is being done. When we talk about B.A.N.K. as a language, we call it B.A.N.K. the language of people, one world, one language. We may be speaking different tongues in terms of the nationality that we come from and the language that we speak in that specific tone, however, who we are at our core, we still need to eat sleep. We still are looking for love and looking for success, recognition and business. All of those things about life, we all experience from whatever perspective.
I met a guy in Utah named Bill Stierle and he is a coach. He coaches companies on how to better communicate in families. He was talking about similar things. If you have an emotional reaction to something, then you also have a need that's tied to that emotion. Safety was one of the examples. What you've done has taken decades of experience in understanding human to human connection around emotion and need and put it into a software application.
AI brings humanity back into the workplace.
Cheri was somebody who had high action attitude and she wanted to be a success in sales. As she says, her first year in sales only made $700. The only reason they didn't fire is because as an independent sales consultant they didn't have to worry about that. They barely had to give her a thing that said, “You've made $600 that year.” As she'd learned all of these different ways of identifying who she was, she was like, “Nobody teaches me who my customers are and how to approach them.” If the four personalities worked for Hippocrates and it's worked for all these other things, why isn't there one that identifies who your sales prospective client is? She thought, “I guess I'll have to figure this out on my own.”
As she dealt with people, she started asking them questions about themselves. Who doesn't want to be able to identify themselves? As you know and I know, the way you make connection is not to talk about you, but to engage and find out about them. She reverse engineered it. She didn't try to say, “I see you're this.” She asks them, “What's important to you?” The more she did that with customers, she reached a point where she was going, “I think there are four types and here's how I'm going to identify the four types. Let me put those people together and ask them if they feel that is words that describe them.” That's how it started. It was that simple. As Einstein said, anybody can complicate something, but it takes a genius to make it simple. Cheri says, “I'm not a genius.”
She got a degree in river rafting and outdoor recreational sports and stuff. She was looking for fun, but she also wanted to be successful. Once she identified those things and then let people self-identify themselves, she taught it to the team that she was working with and said, “Let's see what we can do.” She went from a month of $8,000 in income and commission, the next month was $265,000 in commission. A 500% plus increase in sales in one month. That month was the shortest month of the year, February. All of a sudden, she saw she had developed something that was working.
As that continued to grow, she started to see she had to innovate and revise how she was doing it. What I've loved most about working with her and Esther, Cheri’s the Founder and Chairman, Esther’s, the CEO, these two gals are always looking at, “What do we need to do to improve? What do we need to do to connect in a better way?” That's where AI came in. They do not look back at where they've been or what they can rest on as their laurels. They are always looking to expand and figure out how to take this to the world and that's a beautiful thing. When you mentioned stability before, that's like blueprint, we always say those are the ones that live inside the box.
Have you heard of the book called The Little Prince?
Yes.
I don't remember this book, but somebody pointed it out. This is the cover. It was from 1943. It's interesting. A friend of mine, her uncle found the airplane of the author that crashed in the ocean off the Mediterranean. She said, “You should read this book because I'm considering writing my 5th book coming out soon.” What was interesting to me is that when the plane crashes in the desert, because he crashed the plane twice. Plane crashed in the desert, The Little Prince comes up to this guy and says, “Can you draw me a sheep?” He draws this sheep, then he draws this other one, then he draws another one. The kid's like, “No. That's not the sheep as I envisioned it.” He draws this box with three holes in it and says, “It's your vision of the sheep, the sheep's in there.” The guy lights up and he's like, “Yes, that's it. You nailed it.” Beauty's in the eye of the beholder. Everybody has their own perspective on everything in life. What you've been able to do is categorize folks into what their predominant trait is, what their other traits are in order. All four quadrants.
What I love is although there are 24 codes, when you look at the spectrum within each code, we still are individual and different. We still bring our life experience that that gets layered on top of them. That's where understanding those things within, not just the personality, but the empathy, the spirituality, the whole, “how do you get in business? How do you interact with other people?” It's not just what I know, but it's what do you bring to the table and how do you recognize that value of the other person and what makes us expand?
I love the way everything's funneling to give us more information that we're looking for. What I wish there was more of, is things that expose me to things I didn't know I was looking for. Part of what I've loved about C-Suite or some of these discussions where you get 80 or 90 people on a happy hour mixer. A discussion starts about something you know nothing about, but something they say about that allows you to relate it to something you've been thinking about and couldn't solve but all of a sudden, you see an a-ha that takes you in a different direction.
It’s because they were maybe coming at it from that knowledge standpoint, that you didn't have a lot of depth in, but you had the humanity behind it. You had the action to take and move forward with, you just didn't know how you were going to do it. You need all those different thought processes to succeed at something. That's to me where you bring in the humanity to everything we're doing so that we can widen our exposure of different things that we wouldn't go looking for, because we didn't even know we were missing them in life.
Selling By Buyer Type: We may speak in different tongues, but at our core, we still need to eat and sleep, we still look for love, success, recognition – all those things that come with being human.
It reminds me of the chapter when he comes across the 5,000 roses and he had originally thought there's one. The rose originally talked to him and said, “I'm the most beautiful rose in the world. I'm the only one. I'm so unique.” He sees a field of 5,000, it's like, “They all have petals. They're all the same color, what is this?” Underneath it, all of those 5,000 roses, the moral of the story is that the 24 different variations, but it's more like 24X. They're all different. We, as humans are all different.
What triggers you to pull in that other code and use it is some experience in your past that has had a positive, negative or unusual outcome that makes you go, “Wait a minute, I need to step back from this. I can jump in and embrace this.” All those different circumstances in life are going to affect us. That's part of that bigger picture.
Help us understand, it started with cards, now it's a Chrome extension that you can deploy this AI powered technology and you can pay a dollar to get started to try it out.
At various times of the year, we have done those $1 options. Typically, $59 a month is a subscription that gives you both the online ability to code crack unlimited coach. Many personality profiles, it's $20, $50, to run that profile. If you have the subscription, you can crack a million codes in a month and it sends them the thing.
The inputs for the code cracking could be you point it at LinkedIn profile, and it'll tell you their code there. I think you said you could capture audio, put it into text and copy and paste, crack the code based on the conversation.
Before I met you, I had heard you speak at a conference that Laura from Romania had you speaking about what your programs were doing in the companies you were working with. I thought, “This is incredible.” I pulled up your company site. I cracked code of some of the statements on the webpage. I pulled up your LinkedIn. I cracked that code there. I looked for anything I could find and you take each one of these pieces, put them in and you start to see a pattern that may say, “This is how he presents himself.” Some of your stuff was presented more from the knowledge side and some of it more from the action side. You are truly more action, but you've got all that knowledge and stuff behind it. You understand why somebody needs a system to put it together. My guess is if we took you through the deeper assessment, we'd find those four pretty run close together.
It's not personality, it would be an incorrect statement.
Your B.A.N.K. code, which we said is your buying personality or I say you're buy-in.
What does that think for me as a seller? Think about once I know that information, then how do I behave differently? How does that improve my ability to sell?
The way you make a connection with someone is not to talk about you, but to engage and find out more about them.
When you crack somebody's code on our site, it sends them a report about them. It sends you a report about how to communicate with him. The triggers that will get you a yes, the tripwires that will get you a no. You and I have both been in those situations where conversations seem to be going fabulously with a prospect. All of a sudden, you see the perspective change and they start to pull back and you're going, “I wonder what I said?” When you know that it is a specific thing that triggers them, you start to learn how to avoid it or how to address that option for a no, in a way that shows them how to get around that issue.
What I love about the AI on when you take and put it into the artificial intelligence piece, the values are listed there. There are buttons on the side that show you where those different things come from. The whole, power scripting behind those twelve values and their importance to make that a powerful statement back plus after you've cracked the code, you can create a response to that in the AI and it'll tell you if you matched the code or not.
As someone who has scale in their name, I'm always thinking about these types of technologies is how can I leverage this an approach at scale, thinking about, if I'm going to send an email to a group of 1000 people, could I say, “This groups in bucket 1, 2, 3, and 4,” and I'm going to be curious as we continue to partner on how that can be applied over time.
We look at it in five ways. One is, do you write something that is heavily scaled to that first code so that would be four different approaches or do you do one that hits all four of them at the same time? You almost are testing to see where that is at, or if you have a profile of customers that you know, as an industry, let's say, accountants tend to be more blueprint. They are very much a, “We're looking at the details. We've got this system. We're going to do it this way.” They typically aren't somebody who thinks outside the box. You might write it to that profile more directly.
If you had four bullets, you got three quarters, one way and one quarter for the odd instance that you have got an accountant that doesn't meet the accountant code.
You mix it up, so you hit all four of them. If that the group you're going to be talking to is more in one code, you maybe level it up in that code. It is surprising sometimes how that 2nd or 3rd code is the one that drives that first one. Yes, they are all about the knowledge and they want the information. As we say about the knowledge profile, you don't sell them. If we say, “How long does it take to sell knowledge?” The answer is forever because they vet it themselves. They make the decision and sell themselves. All you need to do with them is give them enough ammunition for them to review the information that's in front of them and make a decision.
Think about this for a second, because there are four codes and 24 unique variations, all shades of gray in between that stretches out to the billions of people around the globe. One thing I remember Gerhard Gschwandtner, the CEO of Selling Power and Sales 3.0 said to me once is, “What if you could line up the right sales personality or sales type to the right buyer personality,” on an inbound forum for example. Someone comes inbound to a website and imagine adding an AI layer in the middle that says, “Instead of routing it by a geography, it doesn't matter. If I live in New York and you live in California, it's virtual these days.”
Why wouldn't you have a skill based routing tied to if the AI could go look at the LinkedIn profile at the time of the inbound and route it to, “Let's give this to Chad because Chad interacts with this group in a certain way,” rather than teaching that skillset to me to be able to shift across all the different shades of gray? What if you could leverage the technology to route the right lead to the right person at the right time?
If you think about it and this has been documented years ago that 18% of people buy only from the person that matches their personality and does not buy from the others. Truly, if you look at most salespeople, they are more action and results-driven. That is why, in a lot of cases, they've got people go, “I don't ever want to call on that industry. They're not my people.” That does not mean that industry doesn't need salespeople. They need to have the ability to learn to communicate with them, for them. I think you have to figure out how to look at the fact that there are nurturers and knowledge people that can be great salespeople to an action person if they understand what that person's need is and the opposite. It requires a finessing, not a complete transformation of who you are.
Selling By Buyer Type: Although there are 24 codes, when you look at the spectrum within each code, we still are individually different. We still bring our life experience that gets layered on top of them.
Where I think it's going to be interesting to see over the next course of the next many years is that now it still requires some level of human decision-making to say, “I'm talking to this person. Here's what I want to say and how I'm going to say it.” Where I envisioned things in the future is if you're talking to someone, there should be a script on the side that tells me, “This is the person you're talking to. Here are the questions you should ask. If you send an email, maybe I configure it in the way I normally send it, but then it adds the filters on top to make it readable to the audience.” That’s the power of AI.
It's going to shorten that cycle of time. We're doing it in a human four card. Now we've got the AI. Now the AI needs to develop. It's that whole thing of, as something new is figured out, how do you take that and make it work for all? How do you level it up for good?
AI for good is important because AI could as easily be used for bad. I'm excited that the team that you work with are focused on the good side of the coin. If somebody's interested in learning more about how to use AI, to have more meaningful conversations that lead to 500%, or the number you said is more like 500000%.
What we talk about is it can increase your sales by 300%, because if you are one code, then that's the 100% that you're dealing with. Every time you add a new one of those codes that you're talking to, you've gone other 100% up. if you were blueprint and you learn action, you now have 100% more with the actions, with the nurture and with the knowledge. You’ve 300% increased your option of connecting with somebody at their primary code.
In the past, people thought, “Do I learn Spanish or Russian or or Greek or Chinese? What language do I learn?" What I've heard here now is that the most important language is the language that we've been talking about.
The language of humanity and people. Our code cracks are now done in 30 languages, but our AI is done in four, English, Spanish, Russian, and Arabic. If somebody wanted to reach out to me directly, they could crack their code at CodeBreakerTech.com/getresults. They could go and crack their code and it would send them a report. If they wanted to reach out to me directly, it's Susan@SKYounger.com. I would be happy to continue a discussion with them. Give them clues about how to look at this stuff.
Thank you everybody for joining. Susan, it’s a fabulous conversation. A lot of people say they're using AI and a lot of times they're using automation, but what you people have built is AI and it's important AI and AI for good.
I'd love to introduce you to Cheri and asked her because I know you would have a fun conversation with them on your show as well.
I look forward to that. I will catch you on the next one. For now, the show is signing out.
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About Susan K. Younger
Simple has always been a word Susan used to define how she worked and lived life. Working with the B.A.N.K personality profiling methodology she has a simple tool that uses her diverse background to help give businesses the secret, the science, the system, and the solution to improving sales, communication, and team building.
Architectural Consulting
More than 40 years of architectural planning and project manangement. Primarily within the retail industry, commercial and hospitality.
Architectural Goal: To use my many years of commercial architecture and design experience with networking to share team buildings, ideas and tool to manage projects and teams. Specialties: Space Planning, Project Management, Team building and mentoring younger staff to develop their skills and expand their future opportunities.
Massage Therapy
More than a decade as a massage therapist focusing on structural integration and myofascial release combined with hot stones for a unique bodywork experience. Working with clients to maximize their own bodies flexibility and functional potential for wellness.
Combining massage therapy as a career with architecture is not unusual when you think of the body as a structure with many functioning systems to support itself just like a building.
