Picture yourself arriving on your own at a network meeting.
There’s a bunch of suits plus some casually dressed people.
Half are smiling and the other half seem deadly serious.
A few are standing on their own too sipping a cup of coffee.
You eavesdrop in on a conversation, and after a short wait they ‘let’ you in to the group.
You listen for a bit, then an opportunity comes up to speak as one of the group looks you over and asks what you do.
You feel a little self-conscious, but it’s no problem and soon the two of you are chatting away and hitting it off nicely.
As time goes on you start to wonder whether this person is a prospect. You become fixated on the possibility of a new client.
And the pressure starts to build (and in case you don’t realise it, you’ve just broken one of the 16 rules of engagement).
The conversation takes a massive change for the worse. You’re pretty sure it happened when you mentioned your fees (that’s another rule broken).
You did a 180 turn (without knowing it) from trust to distrust. You revealed in a millisecond your inner thoughts and your agenda. And the conversation (and prospective sale) is more or less over.
But it’s not your fault. All you did was break the golden rule of mixing the Social Norm with the Market Norm (as described in Dan Ariely’s exceptional book Predictably Irrational).
And because human intuition is so strong, even the slightest whiff sets off the alarm bells.
We’ve been ‘sold’ to before and we know and recognise it in a flash.