Taking Customer Relationships to the Next Level with AI and the Perception Formula

Today we discuss how to supercharge your performance with Shira Abel, whose 20-plus years of experience in sales, marketing and behavioral science.  Shira shares her marketing success stories advising startups and introduces the perception formula—a fascinating framework that combines heuristics, hormones, and history to strategically influence perception and emotion. Discover how these elements can transform your marketing efforts and forge stronger customer connections.

Prepare to rethink your approach to marketing and sales relationships as we uncover a transformative framework that emphasizes genuine connection over mere transactions.  This episode promises to equip you with a new mindset for using AI to nurture relationships and expanding strategic accounts. Join us to explore how prioritizing meaningful interactions can elevate your success in the competitive world of sales and marketing.

Visit Shira's web site to learn more about the work she is doing with the perception formula.

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Transcript

Eric Eden 0:03

Today we have a very exciting topic. We're talking about how you can supercharge performance through the perception formula, and we have the perfect guest to help us talk through this. Shira, welcome to the show.

Shira Abel 0:17

Thank you so much for having me, Eric.

Eric Eden 0:21

So let's start off by you sharing just a minute or two, a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Shira Abel 0:30

I've been in marketing and sales for over 20 years. I occasionally teach marketing at Berkeley in the major of engineering in the School of Entrepreneurship, and I teach marketing for startups. I work with companies, have an agency, work with companies that are massive like Siemens, and tiny like startups, and I also am a marketing coach at the Alchemist.

Eric Eden 1:00

Very cool. Lots of awesome stuff there. Congratulations on all of that. I do have a question before we jump into the episode, which is when you're talking about and giving advice to people on marketing for startups. What is the main thing that you like to recommend there, If there is a top thing or two that you tell people that startups should do for marketing?

Shira Abel 1:25

You need to think about how do you want them to feel, which is also how the perception formula came about. Right, it's all about how you want them to feel. So, as an example of this, I had a client who was a startup, or they were a startup. They're still a startup, but they are now a purchased startup as part of an enterprise. So, okay, no, they're not a startup anymore, they're an enterprise. But when they were still a startup, they were going to a conference of, actually, the company that ended up buying them full speed ahead.

Shira Abel 2:00

He had paid for the conference and he's like all right, we're going to do this, but you know, we've got to work on this, this and this. So we're just going to go to the conference, wing it and it'll be fine, and I'm like no, let's take a step back, let's take a minute, let's breathe and let's do. Let's take an hour and put together a plan for how are you getting to people to the booth, what are you going to be offering at the booth? What's the theme of the booth? And you know, how do you end up building the engagement? How are you connecting with people before the event happens? How are you connecting with the ones that you meet at the event afterwards. Let's get the pieces in place and we put that together.

Shira Abel 2:45

It didn't take that long. It took a little bit. We had an hour early meeting, then a bunch of follow-ups afterwards and the event was a massive success, so good that a few months later it built the relationship with the company that had the event and they ended up getting bought by them. So you know, sometimes we need to take a step back and breathe and move a little bit slower in order to move a lot faster.

Eric Eden 3:15

Yeah, I love that story. That's the best possible outcome for events, and I think a lot of people just go to events and wing it, like you were saying. They don't do any pre-planning and they don't get a very good result. And this is probably one of the best possible results and that's really amazing. And I think that's what startups need to do is, like you said, take a breath, plan it out a little bit. Don't just move so fast that you don't execute very well. So I think that's great advice. So let's talk a little bit about the perception formula. Can you start by sharing how you came up with it?

Shira Abel 3:54

I've always been obsessed with the intersection of behavioral science and business, and I found that it's challenging occasionally to explain how these things all work together and why it's important. The perception formula is basically a way to think about perception and emotion and relationships. Think of it. Think of perception as a three legged stool. You've got heuristics, which are mental shortcuts. These are things like fear of missing out, loss, aversion, scarcity. You get what you pay for these type of things. There's a lot of different heuristics. And then you've got hormones, and these are the hormones that can be triggered through a message or an action or an ad, this type of thing. So this would be things like oxytocin, dopamine, cortisol. If you have your phone next to you and you check it every morning when you wake up, you are addicted to dopamine. These chemicals can be triggered through apps. They can also be triggered through actions, and they can be triggered through messaging, depending on what you're doing and how you're doing it. And it also depends on what hormone you're triggering If you've ever laughed at an ad endorphins. And then the final one is history. So perception is the function of heuristics, hormones and history.

Shira Abel 5:25

History is a little complex. It encompasses, if you're talking about, let's say, an ICP, which is your ideal customer profile. That would be, say, okay, who's your ICP? Put the general idea in there it's an engineer who does this and has this background and is generally like this this is what they do, this is what we're expecting from them. You could even go so far as to find a few in that role.

Shira Abel 5:56

On LinkedIn, open up Crystal Nose, which is something that tells you the personality of someone. It's an app that you can sign up for online and take that information, throw it into a GPT in order to get you more information of the history. It could be an individual, so maybe you're taking their LinkedIn profile and having perplexity, say, you know, tell me more about this person. You put all of that together and you could create a perception recipe that gets you perception recipe that gets you the perception that you're looking for. And I've been talking about this for a little while now. I started all of this really in earnest in June to work on this full-time and I'm giving talks on it and keynotes and such and so of the people, of the marketers, especially marketing and sales, who have seen the talks it's been sales, marketing and then executives and I found that they've come back to me and let me know that it works really, really well for them and it's changed how they're putting together the messaging and how they're putting together their plans of relationship building with key partners.

Eric Eden 7:11

Awesome, so tell me a little bit more about that. Why does the perception formula have that impact for them? What is it that is driving that impact?

Shira Abel 7:21

Well, I think that because it is a practitioner's framework. I'm not a scientist, I'm a practitioner, so I'm looking at it from a very practical point of view. How do we put this together in a way that works? And so I think that it works well, because you could take the different components, put it into a GPT and, if you give it the right framework, the GPT will give you the information that you're looking for. When I say GPT, I'm thinking specifically of either Perplexity or ChatGPT, but the O1 version, so these two seem to work well with it.

Shira Abel 7:57

Perplexity has been a little odd lately, but I'm hoping it gets back to normal soon. You never know, they do these updates all the time and then suddenly something that worked really well goes in a different direction. But assuming it goes back to being my favorite. These are ways, because it can also research individuals for you. So it's a way to design how you're going to build relationships. It's not a silver bullet there are no silver bullets but it gives you a more intuitive sense and it gets people from thinking transactional, because when we get to be super busy about things we forget about, oh, there's a relationship on the other side of this. Right, instead of I have to get all these things off my checklist. No, no, you need to think about the person on the other side. Take that step back, breathe, then move forward, and you move forward faster.

Eric Eden 8:45

Okay. So this is really interesting, that what the formula is really doing is it's helping people be more relationship oriented than transactionoriented. I'm curious if you're using ChatGPT a GPT to do that within ChatGPT, or Perplexity what is the magic that the AI is delivering that enables it to be more relationship-oriented?

Shira Abel 9:19

it to be more relationship oriented. So it's not that the AI enables it, right. I am obsessed with behavioral science, so I know the different hormones and I know a million different heuristics.

Shira Abel 9:26

But not everybody does Nor, quite frankly, why should you? You need to be focused on your job. There's other things Like if this is something that you're really into, awesome, but if it's not. Other things Like if this is something that you're really into, awesome, but if it's not, then this is information that the GPT has. This is something that the LLM already knows, so you could say all right, I want to build trust. This person has this background.

Shira Abel 9:52

I have worked with them in these ways that history say there's already a history there, and using the perception formula, perception equals the function of so an F and then a bracket heuristics, hormones and history bracket. How would I put together a perception recipe in order to build a relationship with them? Okay, I've used it with a friend. I went through and worked it through with a friend on how she could work better with a very challenging customer, and it gave her basically a framework of what she needed to move forward in order to get past the issues that she was having. I used it with another friend who needed it for messaging. It works. You could also take it and use it to be able to inform your scoring on your messaging, because you could say, all right, well, this hormone will have this level of score, this heuristic will have this score. Let's see how they perform.

Eric Eden 10:53

So this is something you could do manually, but the AI does it far more effectively and efficiently than if you tried to do this manually. Right, like if you went through all the steps yourself. You probably could do it, but it would take a significant amount of time, right? I don't know how much time, but it wouldn't be easy. Right, it doesn't seem like it would be easy.

Shira Abel 11:15

It would take a little bit of time. It would take a little bit of time. It would take a little bit of time. I mean, I might be able to do it off the top of my head, but I'd say most people it would take at least a few hours. So wow.

Eric Eden 11:25

So that's a huge savings yeah.

Shira Abel 11:28

Yeah, cause you really have to think about all the different things. And then you need to research the different heuristics and then how do you trigger those heuristics and what hormones will those heuristics trigger, whereas the LLM just puts it all together for you. So you just have to also use your judgment right. If something seems like it's off, you have to tweak it. You have to look at it and go all right, this makes sense to me, yeah, we're good. Or maybe this doesn't seem quite right, and then you tweak.

Eric Eden 11:53

So this may be why some people are telling me that chat gpt is actually a really good therapist. I'm like I don't know, but some people swear by it, and one of my best friends was just telling me that he uses chat gpt to have pre-conversations before he has a big conversation with his significant other. He, like you know, it makes me a lot more in tune with, like, what the other person might bring up, and it sort of does have this understanding of relationships inherent in it, but even more so when you give it the formula that you've mentioned, right.

Shira Abel 12:34

Yeah, yeah, that's great. That's been. It's the response to it. I gave a talk a few weeks ago, a week and a half ago, at the Alchemist and it was rated a 9.4. Would recommend.

Eric Eden 12:48

Amazing. So do you think this is where things are going? Do you think that if people start adopting this, it'll it'll even evolve further and be even more helpful? Are there like stages of adoption here that are going to be interesting?

Shira Abel 13:03

I think that once it starts, I know a few people who are now putting it in practice like all the time, and we're building out those case studies because, of course, I'm working on the book. So for those who are working on it and using it all the time, they're finding that it changes how they're going about their marketing. And I'm not going to dive into that too much at this point because it's still early days, but they're finding that it's getting them better results. It's a practitioner's framework. So if you're already working in marketing, it's probably pretty intuitive to you already. And if you're working in sales and you've got somebody who's just moved from wide accounts, where they have to be really transactional, to strategic accounts, this is a really good thing to teach them, to get their head into the framework that it needs to be in to build those relationships, to build out those accounts.

Eric Eden 13:54

Awesome and I really like the overall steer towards more relationship oriented versus being transactional. Across my career, that's always been something that works better in sales and marketing. So glad you came up with this formula and are evangelizing it. Evangelizing it I'm going to link to your website in the show notes so people can go there, dive deeper, learn more, get in touch with you if they'd like to learn more, and we really appreciate you sharing your story and your insights with us today. Thanks for being on the show.

Shira Abel 14:29

Thank you so much.