There are two types of insight
Not all insights are ground-breaking eureka moments where you experience a “dramatic feeling of sudden enlightenment that floods the mind when the right idea finally clicks into place”. The famous physicist Stephen Hawkins compares these “eureka” moments to sex.
How the brain produces Aha! moments
In the 1990’s, neuroscientists had begun using functional magnetic imaging or fMRI machines to scan the brain. fMRI is related to the ordinary MRI that your doctor uses except fMRI maps brain activities detecting changes in blood flow.
The first aha!
Because of their motivating power, insights are often called Aha! or eureka moments. Our first story of a eureka moment comes from ancient Greece. If you remember Archimedes, who lived in ancient Syracuse, was the Leonardo da Vinci of his day. He was a “master of thought”, a mathematician, scientist, and inventor.
His King, Hieron II suspected his royal crown maker had cheated him. He asked Archimedes to determine whether a recently commissioned gold crown had been cheapened by the addition of cheaper, inferior silver.
Leading with an Aha!. Marc Benioft revolutionizes the software industry
From software area product to software as a service
Selling isn't luck or magic - it's science
For the past 60 years, social scientists have been studying how successful persuaders switch our minds from no to yes.
Why does Consultative or Solution Selling no longer work?
Ultimately, customers buy from the seller who offers the best value. Yet salespeople who are seen by buyers as value-multipliers are as rare as pink diamonds. A recent Forrester executive insight survey asked senior executives to rate salespeople.1
Parisian love: how words can even outsell pictures, action and animation
Imagine you’re the Ad Director of a large advertising agency. You’ve been commissioned to create an engaging television commercial for an online search tool. Your instructions: Create a vivid commercial that will emotionally resonate with the audience.
Confusion reigns. So what precisely is an insight?
Insights help sellers and their customers see into a problem. Hence the word in-sight. But what precisely is an insight? Here are a few of my favorite definitions:
Facts and figures tell, stories sell
Aha! sales stars don’t just use insights to sell. They also use stories to sustain traction and momentum created by their insights. Sellers who use Aha! insights plus stories are much more successful than sellers who use facts and figures to support their insights. An ancient Jewish fable tells us why.
