The Hidden Reason Some Customers Never Buy From You with Kylee Ingram

In this episode, I sit down with decision-style researcher and Wizer co-founder Kylee Ingram to talk about why the right offer can still fall flat if it’s not communicated the right way. We unpack what “decision style” means in simple terms and how different people process information, weigh options, and make choices in completely different ways.

We also explore how this shows up in your marketing, sales conversations, and messaging. Kylee shares how to recognize different decision styles and adjust your approach without overcomplicating your content. If you’ve ever felt like you’re saying the right things but still not connecting, this conversation will help you see where the gap might be.

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Transcript

Janice Hostager 0:04

I'm Janice Hostager. I've been three decades in the marketing business and next year with entrepreneurs at least two about marketing. Join me as we talk about marketing, small business, and life in between. Welcome to My Weekly Marketing. Have you ever tried to make a decision with somebody else and your method of just trying to decide was so different than the other person's that you kind of ended up butting heads, not so much on the decision itself, but on how to make it. This happens quite a bit with my husband Todd. I remember when we were first engaged in planning our honeymoon, we ended up going to Jamaica, but while we were planning it, I went to books and did research. And he went to get feedback from other people that he knew that had been there. So from my perspective, getting feedback is good, but that feedback is subjective, right? So you may get feedback from two different people, and what if they disagree? So I'd rather look at the facts and come to my own conclusion. And this is the sort of thing that we're talking about today. The truth is we had completely different decision styles. Of course, in a marriage, that's important to know. But knowing how people make decisions is also really important in marketing. If you have a discovery call, wouldn't it be helpful to know the decision style of the person you're going to be talking to? That way you can provide them with the content they need. And even when creating a sales page, it's important to provide different types of content for different types of decision makers. Some buyers want data, some are goal-focused, some love stories, some are more process-driven. This isn't related to your ideal customer avatar. These are just individual traits that all people have that are really powerful to you to know about so that you can address them. My guest today is Kylee Ingram, and she spent her career studying how people make decisions. She started in international television, producing interactive experiences used by huge brands and recognized at events like South by Southwest and Cannes Film Festival. Today she's a co-founder of Wizer. It's a platform designed to help teams and business owners understand how people think, decide, and communicate more effectively. Today we're going to talk about how understanding decision styles can completely change the way you market and how you sell and how you communicate with your clients and even your team. And stay tuned to the end because I'm going to show you how you can determine your own decision style and get a free tool that will help you determine others' decision style based on their LinkedIn profile. Cool, right? Here's my talk with Kylee. Hey Kylee, welcome to My Weekly Marketing.

Kylee Ingram 2:57

Thank you very much for having me.

Janice Hostager 3:00

So, for people who have never heard the term before, what is decision style?

Kylee Ingram 3:06

Yeah, decision style is a way, a cognitive way people come at decisions. People make decisions based on different reasons. Some people like outcomes, some people like to have a lot of data or analytics, some people are worried about risk when they're making a decision. And our research came out of a book by Dr. Juliet Bourke, who wrote Which Two Heads Are Better Than One. And she did a whole lot of, you know, looked around the world at all the things with, you know, how people make decisions from jury, trials, to the Enron board, all these great stories. And she came up with these different styles as to the way people make decisions. And we spent about two years trying to turn her research into something, and that's how we got the decision styles.

Why Decision Styles Matter In Marketing

Janice Hostager 3:56

So what what makes people decide things differently? Is it just that's how they're wired? Um, is it just how they're trained, or what is it that people look for? What what is the reason for the differentiation?

Kylee Ingram 4:10

Yeah, it's a cognitive diversity. So they're wired differently in their brain. Um some people are looking at outcomes, they want, you know, other people open to perspective gathering with other people. Some people just want evidence. They need a lot of evidence before they make a decision. Juliette found you've got a primary and a secondary trait usually, but you can't go much beyond that. So I know for me, I have a lot of openness and outcomes orientation, but if you tried to put me in a room that needs a lot of process or risk, you know, looking at risk, I I can only imagine that for a short period of time. So you also can't. She also talks a lot about that. Was it Edward De Bono's that different hats, the black hat, this hat? You actually can't change hats for too long in this cognitive diversity stuff. It's too much for you. So you really only have primary and secondary, and understanding the best decisions come from having all those different factors in a room. If you're in an organization, you should really know what's the cognitive diversity you have in the room.

Janice Hostager 5:21

Okay. So what you're saying, so I have to explain this to me like I'm five, is that is that we're all wired differently. And to do something or to read something or or make a decision in a way that's not native to us is kind of exhausting, is really what you're saying.

What Decision Style Means

Kylee Ingram 5:38

And you yeah, and you wouldn't be able to do it. Like if you were going to interrogate a decision across the board, you know, you're in an organization, you're making a big decision. What we find in a lot of these orgs is they've only got two, maybe three of the types in the room. So you're missing a whole lot of cognitive diversity that might see options or it might see risk or whatever it is that's missing. You can't think that way for a long time. So you might be able to imagine, but you can't live and interrogate that from that cognitive perspective.

Janice Hostager 6:12

Okay. So with thinking about my listeners that we're small business owners, we don't necessarily have a big team. We might have, you know, a couple of people that we work with, BAs or such. So what I think about when you talk about decision style is an application to, for example, sales pages or our website. And even if I'm doing a sales page, I will include a lot of detail for the people that are very analytical. I will include stories for people that are emotional. I will include a lot of text for some people and a video for others because they don't like going into details. Is that really kind of the kind of what you're referring to, or is there more to it than that?

Kylee Ingram 6:58

No, it is, it's it's a what they will pick up and hear. And I think you've got to it this is about the way they make decisions. So if you're asking somebody to make a decision, understanding how they come at that decision is super important. And for the marketing piece, you know, we've built out a tool that looks live at who's in the room when you're making decisions. But for the marketing piece, we were asked by one of the charities here in Australia, could they use our decision tools to work out how to talk to people? And we were like, yes. So, you know, you can generate a profile on them. But with your page too, you could go through and tick box and check have you got your outcomes listed? Have you got your risk? You know, you might then hit them all. But if you're sending a message to one person or you're about to meet somebody, understanding how they make a decision will help you in the framing of what you're going to either ask for or talk about with them. Because people just switch off if you're not talking in that cognitive language that they like to receive in. So yeah.

Janice Hostager 8:05

So if I was maybe gonna hop on a call with somebody, a maybe a prospective client, how would I figure out their decision style?

Kylee Ingram 8:14

Yeah, so well, uh on our website, you can go and do your decision profile for free. So learn about yourself. It'll give you, you know, who you're best to work with and what you'll miss when you're making a decision. So, you know, especially people that work by themselves, just understanding yourself from that perspective can be helpful. But what we were told by the charities and the people working with building the Snaps tool, which is on our website, which you can also try for free, they didn't want to ask people to do their profiles. So what you can do is you go in and go, all right, Jenna, is like I know this about them, and it will generate a profile. Or you can go to LinkedIn, put in the LinkedIn Chrome extension, and just press analyze, and it'll analyze what it thinks that person is based on the information you've given. So data in equals data out, the better data you give it, and I've also got a cheat prompt. If anybody just DM me and I'll send you the cheat prompt that you can use to generate a good profile on somebody and just ask them about it, it'll come back and say, look, with this kind of probability, I think they're a deliverer, so they're process oriented. And then it asks you to write in your messaging or what you want to get from them, and it'll give you a feedback. It'll say, hey, that that the strength of that was this, your risks are this, and this is it'll actually give you a rewrite. And so people that are using that for their out campaigns are getting up to a 15% bump by making sure they're taking the time to deliver to the in the right cognitive style.

Janice Hostager 9:45

Gotcha. So can you give me an example of how someone would maybe write an offer that might be communicated differently depending on someone's decision style? So let's say you're selling bookkeeping.

Cognitive Diversity And Decision Limits

Kylee Ingram 9:58

Well, I've we've analyzed hundreds of charity emails now, which I can tell you in a little bit about because we've because the charities asked us, it's kind of been our first port of call, even though there's a really interesting demographic in women using the the tech. We've analyzed hundreds of charity emails now. And they're all very upbeat, even though sometimes talking about, you know, difficult things, but they're completely missing talking to achievers who are outcomes focused, guardians who are about risk, and the analyzers that are about evidence. So they're completely missing that. So instead of just going, hey, you know, we're saving, you know, the possums today or whatever we're doing, which is upbeat, which is great, but an analyzer is gonna want to know your numbers on this, like why is this important, how many numbers, what you know, how many possums are you saving, where are you saving them, or whatever. And then your achiever's gonna know what your outcomes are. So are you trying to do X or Y and get what's your what's your end goal? And what will they see if they give you this money? Whereas a guardian wants to know, well, if you're gonna say you're, you know, you're curing cats, so when are you gonna do it? What's the risk portfolio of that? You know what I mean? That you have to put in a little bit of detail for these people. And the thing we know from Juliet's research, too, is 75% of Western CEOs are achievers or explorers. So outcomes or options, their achievers aren't being spoken to a lot of the time in these emails. So that can be a problem too, because if you're asking that executive branch for money or for this or for that, you're not actually talking to them in the way they'll respond.

Janice Hostager 11:46

That's really interesting because you're right, especially with nonprofits, we tend to want to go into the story and really talk a lot about the emotional part of it because that's I think we're all trained to use stories in our text, our copy. So what are the different like different archetypes that you really are there?

Kylee Ingram 12:06

So we've got seven. So you've got a vision, a visionary that is a big picture person, but their main characteristic is openness, so they can move across the scale a little bit more. You've got an a guardian who's worried about, you know, making decisions and thinking about risk when they make decisions, an explorer is looking for options, the deliverer is about process, an analyzer is about evidence, a collaborator is about perspective gathering, so they're not necessarily a people person, but they understand the perspective as of others when it comes to a decision and the achiever, which is that outcomes-oriented person.

Janice Hostager 12:46

Interesting. Can you take a guess just based on if you say you meet somebody and you think, oh, there's a sign that this person's an achiever? I mean, is there something like that that we can kind of like use off the cuff?

Kylee Ingram 12:58

You could yeah, you know, maybe if they're asking you a lot about the outcomes or yeah, I think you can get better at it, but sometimes I'm completely, I've got no idea. I've been completely thrown by what people are. But you know, as I say, data in, data out, like um, you know, it's an honesty thing as well. You know, I've met I'm I had a colleague that was sure, you know, that he was a deliverer, and I was like, yeah, I don't see much process in anything you're doing. So, but obviously his madness had a he's you know, he he saw the process behind what he was doing. So, you know, it can be, I think it can be a little bit hard to guess, but at the same time, if you start to understand those six, those six ways or seven ways people are coming at things, you can go, oh yeah, I s I see that that person's going to want that, an outcomes focused.

Janice Hostager 13:55

So basically, if let's say I'm hiring somebody to to help me with something in my business, I don't know, maybe copywriting, am I able to look for a particular type of outcome, or should I be looking for a different type of decision maker than I am? Or is it better to have the same ones working together?

Using Decision Styles On Sales Pages

Kylee Ingram 14:17

Depends on the job. Well, the thing is, you know, the way personality profiles have been used in the past, you know, there's not there were not evidence-backed frameworks, you know. The disc came from the guy that wrote Wonder Woman living in a polyamorous relationship that wanted to explain his life, and Myers Briggs was made by a woman that didn't like her daughter's new boyfriend, and she was a school teacher that was into Yummy and theory. Like it's amazing that these tools that people use to hire people, like that's mind-boggling to me. But what you want to think about with the decision profile is it's not focused on who somebody is, it's focused on how they approach decisions. So, yes, with these, there is no bad one to have. But as a business, you'd like them all to be in there and appreciate them. Because what we know is, as I was saying, that 75% of CEOs are one or two types. By the time we get to middle management of a lot of these companies, they've skewed it. You know, these cognitive types like one another. But when it comes to decisions and making the best decisions, you want all of these types in a group if you can, so you can analyze the decisions from all angles, especially if it's a big important decision, you know, a strategy decision or a, you know, a new product decision. You need all of these people in the room, plus a number of other things, plus um outward diversity and also experience. You don't want to be like Boeing that takes all the engineers out of the room but and is making decisions about planes and doors are flying off. Like, don't be Boeing. Or don't be Apple that makes the Apple Watch and it doesn't work on people with darker skin. I mean, like, you know, there's all these examples of when people have made decisions because they can only see their perspective. So the worst thing about decisions is that homogenization because it allows all those biases to to take hold. And the biases are what make us make bad decisions.

Janice Hostager 16:22

Okay. Okay. So this is quite complex. So it's not something you can just like put on and say, oh, it's sort of like an Enneagram where it's like, oh, I'm this type of person and I should be, if I work with this type of person, we know there's going to be conflict, for example. It it's a little deeper than that. It's what I would say.

How To Identify A Prospect Style

Kylee Ingram 16:38

Well, it's another, it's another thing that's probably got a bit disproven. No, it is that easy to do, but I was just I I'm just I'm trying not to anchor too closely to those things that are not scientifically backed in the sense that, you know, this is coming at how you make decisions. And, you know, we built the platform so people make better decisions. But to do that, you need to get rid of your biases. So you do that by ensuring there's a yeah, a lack of homogenization. So you are saying, yeah, if if I could get another person that that compliments me, so as a visionary, a deliverer comes in really handy because they're so process-oriented. So the two of us are going to do better than the sameness in the room. So if you go and do your profile, it has on there who's your most complimentary type that will get you the furthest. So you can go and do your profile and see who might compliment you best. And you know, I know I look around for process-oriented people because I know that that's something I lack or risk. I have no risk tolerance. Like, I don't really care. I'd walk, you know, into anything to give it a go. But you sometimes you need an adult in the room saying, hey, this is likely to go poorly for you, or whatever. So I think understanding the way you make decisions helps you see your blind spots and then, yeah, start to look for the people that can compliment you.

Janice Hostager 18:07

Okay. Okay. So you can kind of pick them out. You don't necessarily need people to take a test. So you are you so you there's some clues or some signals that you can pick up?

Kylee Ingram 18:16

Well, you could also go and use snaps. So you could do the full decision profile, which takes about four minutes, or you could go and profile them yourself, you know, and see whether or not you can work out what they are using snaps that allows you to profile a third party. Okay, tell me what snaps are. So snaps is the one where you do a decision pro like I can say, right, this is what I know about you. I can click on LinkedIn and say analyze. Uh it'll tell you what you are, and then it gives redo does your messaging for you. So that's our communication part of the decision, the decision tool we have.

Janice Hostager 18:52

Interesting. So are some decision styles more common than others?

Kylee Ingram 18:57

Yeah. So a guardian is the least common style, whereas obviously, as a CEO, achievers and explorers are the most prevalent. You definitely see skewing. I think lawyers are one of the most homogenized groups that you'll ever find. So there's different groups of people, you know, scientists can often be analysers. So you can see, you can see different skewings across different jobs and things like that. And with that, you know, I just analyzed a board that made a very poor decision in Australia. And they all got fired and this festival got dumped. And I found eight out of nine of them had a guardian profile, which is the low, as I was saying, it's the least prevalent. And I was like, how did they find one another? The thing is, these, you know, you like to think in the same way, but they were risk-oriented, yet they were also risk-oriented, they just saw the one risk and doubled down on it. Whereas they didn't have an explorer or a visionary going, hey, imagine if this, imagine that. So they all went down this one rabbit hole and blew up, you know, millions of dollars and themselves, they all lost their jobs. They were all fired. And it was really interesting to see. And I I went through and I did some of the worst board decisions, you know, at like at NASA, what happened with the Challenger. And and I, you know, you can analyze these boards and you can see this group of this homogenized group of decision thinkers making the poor decision, can kind of step through what happened, or not listening to engineers again is another big thing that NASA, you know, NASA did at its own peril, unfortunately.

Janice Hostager 20:41

Right, right, yeah. So I'm just trying to apply this to the small business owner who and marketing, because we are about marketing. How can someone make sure that their messaging appeals to multiple types of decision makers without sounding scattered or including it all? And are we able to do that? Or do you feel like you need somebody that that knows that type of decision making? No, no, no.

Kylee Ingram 21:09

You can do you can do snaps make it makes it super easy to do. Why snaps makes. But what you would ideally want to do is rather than try and bulk everything into one email, is get your seven templates out based on each of the things, and then work out who's who's what and send those. All that you need is the seven templates that are talking to them differently. Or you know, Juliet has a really good example too of a woman that gave a speech and she knew who was in the room, and so she spoke to the different decision styles, and they came back. You know, it was about being heard. People can hear it when you explain it in a way that makes sense to them. I think we're very focused on AI making our emails sound better, which it does, or you know, grammatically anyway, but it's still missing the key point, which is about how does that person decide, especially if you're asking them to do something. You need them to make a decision.

Janice Hostager 22:09

Absolutely. And we talk a lot about micro decisions, too, just you know, taking the next best step. But if it's if what you're saying kind of falls on ears that don't pick up what you're saying, if that it won't lead you closer to, for example, a sale, then you're missing the boat, no matter how good it sounds.

Kylee Ingram 22:28

No, exactly. You you these people, we're all cognitively wired in a certain way, and understanding that is super, is super important. And, you know, if you're a small business owner and entrepreneur, you don't have the money to set up a decision framework, nor should you want to, like, seriously, this is, you know, we're be we're beyond the 1990s here. But I think you you should, you know, you can know a lot about your people and make sure you're designing your decision rooms. And, you know, that's what our tech does. It does it live. It'll tell you who you've got in the room, what perspectives you might be missing, you know, and that that's a bunch of demographics. And you can just click on it and it'll say, hey, you do have this or you don't. So really starting to understand your people. And it doesn't, no one ever needs to restructure. You can just pull in somebody from another department and move them across to make sure you've got that perspective in the decision room. So we try and make it super easy for people to be to get we we almost say, we say, we give you a decision scientist to put into your, you know, your organization.

Janice Hostager 23:39

I love that. That would be so, so helpful. I mean, for for just anybody, even in relationships. Is this something that you can apply we can apply to our family relationships as well? Yeah.

Messaging Examples By Decision Type

Kylee Ingram 23:52

I've got a lady that wants to, yeah, that's looking at the tool for a dating app at the moment, actually, which is quite funny. But yes, my my my friend would say the other night she adjusted the way she asked her husband something because she now knew she now knows he's this. And she was like, okay, well, usually I do that and it doesn't work. So she tried that. She's like, it works. And the other thing we see with snaps, which is really interesting because we bought it, we built it for the not-for-profit sector, is now we see client-managed people that are at the pointy end of having a conversation are using it. So if you're about to go into a room with somebody, we see those people analyzing who they're about to step into a room with and what they're like. Then they're writing in what they were going to say. And the tool just helps them rethink that through as to how that might be received from that person and their cognitive load.

Janice Hostager 24:49

This is incredibly powerful. So basically, if I have a if I have maybe a discovery call coming up with somebody, I have their LinkedIn profile. I can just put it into this tool and it will tell me basically how they make decisions, and I can accustom my talk, tailor my talk to that individual.

Kylee Ingram 25:06

Yep.

Janice Hostager 25:07

Very, very cool.

Kylee Ingram 25:08

It's all done for you. You just need to press the button.

Janice Hostager 25:12

Love it. I love it. So, where can people get their hands on that tool and learn more about decision styles?

Kylee Ingram 25:21

Yeah, so we've got a website, Wizer, W-I-Z-E-R dot business. Um, and you can go and take your decision profile there yourself. That's free. And then if you go across to the right, there's WIZE Snaps, which is the comms tool, and you can play around with that for free as well. And that will, yeah, should get you underway and give you a lot more understanding what's there. But there's a lot on our website. There's case studies, there's all the tools that you need to understand decision science a bit more and get rid of the bias when you're doing things. Get rid of your biases.

Janice Hostager 25:54

Hmm. And do you have your website set up for all different decision styles? Yeah.

Kylee Ingram 26:03

Yes.

Janice Hostager 26:03

I love it.

Kylee Ingram 26:05

Well, can be a bit when you get somebody to look at it, they go, Why is this here? And you're like, Oh, just leave it there. It's just for somebody else.

Janice Hostager 26:15

I suppose that is true. Like you're kind of blind to certain parts of it, or you just kind of gloss over certain parts of it if it's not relevant to you, and you pick up on what is in any sort of manuscript or any meeting.

Kylee Ingram 26:28

Yeah, I I was chatting to this lady in Canada and she said, Oh gosh, like you could use this for Wizer. She said, Oh, people must, people that are collaborators must get Wizer immediately. And of course, peep chief of people, officers, HR, heads of HR, just like, oh wow, this is an amazing tool. And she said, Why don't you go through the top, you know, a hundred Australian companies and find out which CEOs are collaborators? And I was like, and so I just started doing that in my spare in the spare downtime because they're hard to find with everybody at the top of the chart being an achiever or an explorer. I found them though, and then I was like, oh, okay, now what do I do with this information? But I've got quite a cheeky little email I can send through to say how rare they are and to find this gem, and this is what we're doing. And you know, I think with chairs of boards too, I've been doing that a bit, and I'm at a 40% response rate. Like I've never had that before. But just taking the time to write that personal email and understand how they're receiving something, I you know, is incredible. Like I obviously it's the perfect target. Don't worry, my numbers aren't like that for everybody I reach out to. But there's, you know, when you know that you've hit if you know what who your target is, and then you can start to see, you might see that they all have the same decision style like I do. And it's it makes it a hell of a lot easier when you go in with your messaging.

Janice Hostager 28:03

Absolutely. Hmm. Well, I cannot wait to try this out, so I'm pretty excited about it. So thank you, Kylie.

Kylee Ingram 28:13

Thanks for having me.

Janice Hostager 28:15

Okay, so right after we finished recording this, I took the assessment and I found out that I'm a deliverer. And as a deliverer, apparently I bring depth and structure to decision making with a knowledge and process-oriented approach. Interesting that I teach marketing strategy, right? I think it fits right right in there. To get the links to your free decision making profile and download the Chrome extension for LinkedIn so that you can find the decision style for others. Visit my show notes today at myweeklymarketing.com forward slash 150. If you know of someone that would be interested in learning more about this, please send the episode to them as well. Thanks so much for joining me today. I'll see you next time. Bye for now.