What's The One-Change?

What’s The One-Change You Can Make to Improve Motivation-to Win?

If you want people to take action, be induced and incentivize, do this one thing.
This applies to a physical goal like finishing a game successfully. Most of us quit
in the middle of effort because we get distracted or bored.

This single-change applies to improving the results of sales and marketing people.
It also works to keep folks from deleting (75% quit before the end) while waiting for
a download.

If you are interested in persuasion, influence or convincing (including lawyers
in front of a judge or jury), use this scientific strategy.

Easy to Visualize Progress

Whether you are a bank showing deposits or McDonald’s impressing us with their
sale of billions of burgers, folks have to see progress. Fact: visualizing your steady advance
to a goal triggers your mind to keep on trucking instead of surrendering to laziness or fatigue.

The goal you see mentally brings the success closer. Talk doesn’t cut it, cash bribes are useless,
what your eyes see, your heart is bound to believe. The climbing vertical bar motivates
us to catch our second-wind and end the race as a winner.

Who Says So

The College of Business at Virginia Tech, professor of marketing, Rajesh Bagchi
discovered it. The research appears in the March 2011 issue of the Journal of Marketing.

Common Sense

Most organizations use a number, not a more visual BAR filling up with good results.
The principle is that humans are more energized by the more tangible bar-symbol, than
seeing percentages or dollar amounts. If you want a positive spurt of effort to dive the final
results, show the big-bar filling up.

Imagine a fat piggy-bank filling up with your savings for your vacation to Paris. Seeing the
dollars and cents alone does not get our juices flowing, you need the moving (growing) bar.

Get This

Looking at the Bar or a Graph, when the balance to be filled-in is LESS than what has
already been accomplished, excites and motivates folks to finish successfully. Remember,
fatigue does set in and we quit the goal or we get distracted by others goals. The result is
we cease and desist working for the original objective.

The easier it is to visualize our progress, the hotter we get to win. Physical goals like
winning a race is easier to see in our mind’s eye, than an abstract (the opposite of concrete)
objective like closing more sales. The Big-Bar or Graph makes the abstract objective equal
to a physical goal.

Analogy

Taking a long-trip by car with the kids makes most of us crazy. Signs that show
visual-representations, and not just the number of miles to Florida, boosts our
motivation to continue on, and not strangle the kids.

Is it FUN or Hardwork

The words we use to motivate folks decide the outcome. There are two basic types of
people in the work-force. First, people who really believe in excellence, achievement and
hardwork (15%), and those who want their work-place to be a place of FUN.

Each group (work or fun) respond to a different language. Try to motivate the “excellence
and achievement” people with talk of FUN and you just turned-them-off. Fun-folks want
their job to be a TV game or reality show.

Who Says So

University of Illinois professor Dolores Albarracin did the research; it is published in the
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1.10.2010.

Remind the believers of how “hardwork” brings home the bacon by using tangible
examples of past success, and they hunker-down and run-for-the-gold.
Give them examples of how much Fun they have at the office, and they quit in midstream.

Wait. Are the Fun people purposely trying to ignore company goals and do a lousy job?
No, they just have different goals that motivate them. “Achievement and excellence” is not
part of their vocabulary, they have to experience games with immediate gratification.

So What

Everyone needs to be appreciated (recognized) in a way they find motivating. Some people
get juiced by a smile or a handshake from the manager. Google gives their creative people
one-free-day during the week to do their own research project. They are hyped for the rest
of the week.

Subconscious Priming

There are software programs available that use “cue words” that imprint our mind with
winning, mastery, and achievement. These words appear below the level of conscious
awareness, and are invisible to our eyes. Do they motivate the “hard-work” people?

Absolutely yes. Some of these subliminal perception (affirmation) programs are auditory
and/or visual. The programs work through repetition and by bypassing our conscious
mind with its censor. Check out: www.eldontaylor.com/mindprogramming.html

These ideas of visual bar symbols, and knowing that you have to use different
approaches to motivate “fun” people and “hard work” folks are very powerful.
Successful people are life-long-learners of what works to motivate both the team
to produce and consumers to purchase.

See ya,

Check us for “speed reading”. It will triple your knowledge-skills, and move you
toward career promotions. Knowledge helps you motivate yourself and others.

Copyright © 2011, H. Bernard Wechsler
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