Business Psychologie Archive - Johannes Winterhalter - building trust the scientific way

From 1,000s of Views to 0 Sales:

26. October 2025Johannes WinterhalterLeave a comment

My $200 Marketing Mistake and the Lesson That Redefined My Consulting” or “Why ‘High Traffic’ Can Be a Useless Metric: A Case Study on Targeting ‘Doers’ vs. ‘Dreamers’

I use this as a simple example for something much bigger: a year ago, I launched a promoted post for an article I had written. I spent a modest budget on Facebook… The results came in: thousands of views, plenty of clicks. I was thrilled. Then I checked my sales dashboard: Zero. Nothing.

The article was a philosophical piece... It was perfect for attracting an audience I call ‘Dreamers’—people who enjoy thinking about business in the abstract.”

But my service isn’t for Dreamers. It’s for ‘Doers’—founders, entrepreneurs, and managers who need to make a decision now. It is about finding the target group.

I thought publicising a philosophical piece of text will help my brand and so elevate my sales. It did not – there were many people who like my way of thinking, but hardly any of them needed my service. The connection trom the philosophical article to my services in market value, marketing ROI and brand value calculations and research was not present for the readers, or they did not need it.

How This “Failure” Makes Me a Better Consultant

“This experience is why I am so passionate about data-driven validation. Before my clients spend a single euro on ads, it is important to ask the tough, practical questions that separate ‘Dreamers’ from ‘Doers’:

The Message Test: Is my content speaking to the person who thinks about the problem, or the person who pays to solve it?
The Alignment Test: Does my Call to Action (CTA) on this post align perfectly with the service I’m selling?
The Market Test (The ‘Doer’ Question): Have I calculated my Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM)? Do I actually know how many people are in my target niche and what their potential value is?
The Metric Test: Am I measuring the right thing? (Stop tracking ‘Views’ and start tracking ‘Qualified Leads’).”

The market test is not expensive – see my order page. You, the reader, might even do it yourself and decide if you want professional assistance. Most successful campaigns are the result of contributions of multiple persons:

The business owner or Chief Marketing Officer
The consultant helping defining the target group and messaging with the help of AI
The responsive clients who help developing strategy and product by answering questions
The designers who do the final graphic appearance

Lets start it and find the marketing mistake.

Searching the Marketing Mistake — Measuring water depths does not necessarely help with marketing mistakes.

Recommendation Network or Artificial Intelligence in Sales – which one has warmer Leads?

25. September 2025Johannes WinterhalterLeave a comment

We are looking for people and organizations with a web presence or at least a listing in Facebook, Linkedin or some municipial business directories. AI cannot find others.

Recommendation networks – do they have qualified leads?

The power of recommendation marketing lies in its ability to effortlessly drive sales when a product aligns with a broad audience, eliminating the need to vet leads. Personal referrals, customer reviews, and influencer endorsements pave the way for seamless transactions without added complexities.

Ideally the other members of your recommendation network are looking for customers for their network and are warming up leads before. The prospect expects to be contacted when the seller reaches out.

This is an ideal setup. In practice most recommended leads are not warm, sometimes it is required to hire service people with bad quality just to please the guy who gave the recommendation.

However, the flip side emerges when the product caters to a niche market or appeals to a limited segment of potential buyers. In such cases, relying on recommendation marketing with personal endorsements can result in frustration. Vendors like myself may find themselves inundated with unqualified inquiries, while those offering recommendations witness their efforts to connect buyers and sellers go unrewarded, whether in commissions or praise.

AI is more than just talking about AI – Artificial intelligence in sales

How it is supposed to be:
Professionals in this area use AI-powered tools to personalize customer experiences, optimize marketing campaigns, and predict sales trends. They understand how to leverage AI for tasks such as customer segmentation, lead scoring, and content creation. A creative mindset combined with an analytical approach is key to suc
The reality:
Many of the ones selling products claiming to be AI-powered tools do not use AI for their own outreach to prospects. So it stays less personal, the approached clients get annoyed. AI applied correctly helps finding the ones who are open for the products.

AI is really good in finding information about prospects – it can read and digest complete web presences in less than a second. So just use it.

How AI took my side job – Artificial Intelligence Business Plan

2. August 2025Johannes WinterhalterLeave a comment

Until Summer 2024 I offered creating simple business plans for startups. I did that on my website and on Fiverr for about 120 € each. I stopped that for the lack of orders and a lot of weird questions regarding my gig which never ended in a purchase. The prospects were obviously looking for excuses for not ordering my service. Looking at other work about 50% of my personalized offers generate a contract. The gig was meant as entry offer for learning to know each other and sell more services later. I used a template and filled it with data from the client, then I added some treated and interpreted market data to make an earnings prediction. The origin of the data was publicly available sources.

Artificial Intelligince (AI) is really good at working with data and templates from the web. Actually I am using the AI behind Google Gemini. For testing I asked it to write a business plan for a dog grooming business, later I asked it for market data for dog grooming in Germany.

The result was a really nice plan – you can download it here. It was a working example for a plan with estimations done by AI.

For first orientation the plan is really good, and it looks nice. I even think it is possible to apply for a loan at the bank.

I checked the numbers: the market data is quite generic, the assumed sales price is not confirmed by market research, and there are no scenarios. What to expect for free? My former prospects group, who did not want to pay more than 120 € for a business plan, is obviously happy with the very cheap plans delivered by AI.

So Artificial Intelligence took my side job. Maybe it is similar to what they did to map suppliers with their free Google Maps. I use Google Maps frequently and consider it to be technological progress. Google Gemini as one example of an AI chatbot offer requires a subscription for full functionality.

Measuring the qualitiy of artificial intellgence business plan

Why finding trends using only observation often leads to false conclusions

30. July 2025Johannes Winterhalter

Human and artificial intelligence observe the environment. Observations are interpreted and used for finding trends and experiences are processed and result in learning experiences. Humans learn social behavior by observing their fellow humans; animals learn where food is, how to behave in a herd, and where dangers are present. Learning can be dangerous. If the underlying relationships are not understood, false conclusions are drawn. In the US state of Maine, for example, margarine consumption and the divorce rate developed in parallel. So, is stopping eating margarine doing anything for your marriage?

People seeking orientation in this confusing world look for guides and signposts. That’s why they tend to see trends where there are none. And some sellers of products of dubious utility for the customer load their products with predictions about the future. They say: “This is the current trend” or “soon everyone will be doing it this way” or simply “this is the future.” And some indicators, such as sales figures, support this theory. So what is genuine, well-founded trend analysis, and what is bullshit? With bullshit, the speaker usually doesn’t understand what he or she is saying, or they are simply lying. Unlike genuine digestive products from male cattle, like the beautiful Charolais bull on the right, Bœuf

charolais, taureau, with linguistic bullshit, you can’t tell by smell or appearance whether it’s phrases, inventions, or facts. Those who are intellectually ahead of the linguistic bullshit manufacturer notice contradictions and missing evidence. In this way, well-sounding inventions can be distinguished from reality. Difference between good arguments and facts There are three levels of content in a linguistic expression: the truth, which is understandable at least to a specialist audience, bullshit, and lies. Lies are criminalized and usually lead to the termination of the business relationship. Bullshit was elevated to academic honors by Harry Frankfurt. He, in turn, refers to Socrates: there are two ways to convince people. The first is to overwhelm the audience with pleasant-sounding but not really convincing arguments, thus creating a positive atmosphere. The second approach is clear, well-thought-out, and logical philosophical argumentation. See also here. The bullshit speaker doesn’t lie. He says sentences that, in his own opinion and experience, make a particularly strong impression on the unreflective listener. Many bullshit speakers don’t even notice the lack of connection to reality in their claims.

Use in Sales – Inventing

Trends In software sales and on the internet, new trends are often invented. This creates particularly thick piles of bullshit. I keep reading about the impending complete predictability of human behavior through big data. Anyone can check for themselves whether this is possible using contextual advertising on Google. A second industry susceptible to meaningless messages is health and nutrition. You can have texts tested for the bullshit factor at Blablameter. The result for this one: Your text: 3677 characters, 533 words Bullshit Index: 0.18 Your text shows only slight evidence of “bullshit” German. Another text on this blog about the Cournot point only achieved a bullshit index of 0.19. Texts with a lot of math, which may not be understood by everyone, have a better bullshit index.

Why artificial intelligence will not replace qualitative interviews done by humans

20. February 2025Johannes WinterhalterLeave a comment

This article is about the benefits of qualitative interviews and how to make a profit from a small amount of interviews. Qualitative interviews means there are less than 50 interviews, and the answers are not limited to yes/no or a 10-point scale.

Our goal is to improve customer relationship by asking our customers what they want and if there are secretive needs and wishes which are easy to fullfill for us or need only a small change in our product and sales strategy.

Artificial Intelligence relies on text already existing for training the model. So the answers given by AI are always a rephrasing and recombination of something already existing, and it is up to the reader to interpret if the results are valid or not.

How to make qualitative interviews worth the effort

Qualitative Interviews done by a good interviewer who makes the interviewees talk in the right direction gives direct access to the thoughts of our clients and target groups. This includes thoughts which do not exist in a written language.

Qualitative Interviews are expensive, about 300 € for each interview. This includes finding the right interviewees. Interviewing the correct respondents has a marketing effect: the respondents get aware that there is a supplier interested in them. If they are already customers the effect goes in the same direction.

This additional publicity pays for a part of the survey. The other one is additional sales following an improved strategy.

Stupid interviewers are a no-go

For best quality of interviews the interviewer has to dive into the world of the interviewed person. The interviewer has to direct the interview and add questions if necessary. This requires a lot of experience and knowledge for the interviewer. Hiring a random person without knowledge is the first step to disaster. Less experienced interviewers need the first interviews in a project for training, experienced interviewers do not need that. They can relate to previous experiences

References

This article is based on about 20 years experience with qualitative interviews and the usage of some form of artificial intelligence since 1992.

How to find investment opportunities that combine getting rich and being a good person?

22. January 2024Johannes Winterhalter

This article is about finding good investment opportunities, getting at least a little rich and being benefactor for society. Reading this article the spirit of Adam Smith, the author of Wealth of the Nations 250 years ago, may be with us.

An investment opportunity is supposed to give us gains and make us happy this way. Posession can satisfy: we are proud of having a part of this enterprise or owning some of these krypto-currencies. If it is possible to make the buyer also happy the world is becoming a better place.

Example: I buy an house for one million Euro. Two years later I sell it for 1.5 million Euro. I enjoy the gain, my buyer enjoys the beautiful he got for his money. Everbody is happy.

I calculated risks and gains and put money on real investment chances, which are a net worth for society. The worth of housing in general did elevate, and my gains are part of that. The house I sold has increased in value, the reason being the higher price the buyer paid,

Another way is to become active, found a business and calculate the perceived earnings per customer

Becoming millionaire with 10 € starting investment in 17 years

Many people got rich with less. For example, starting with 10 € which double themselves every year creates 1.31 million € after only 17 years.

No organism grows continuously over an indefinite time. So the growth will stop after some time. Or the investor looses interest, takes the money and moves to a hurricane-ridden Caribic island to satisfy other human needs and wishes there.

Benefitting society and becoming a little rich is possible

Is there anything in the world I can improve and I get a share of the money created from the use of the thing? This applies even for the ones who make us happy with their videos on tiktok or YouTube. Marc Zuckerberg created Facebook and got rich with that. He forced competitors out of business. His solution worked better and therefore he had more users and more advertising.

Let’s talk about a investor called Robert. He likes to sell and buy real estate or shares on real estate. Also he wants to contribute to modernization of energy supply. At this moment he has about 50.000 € available. Also he is thinking about selling natural dogfood online. He read that this can be a nice sidejob with little investment.

At first Robert is confused of the many good and bad investment opportunities. What does need to free his entrepreneurial spirit?

From an economical view, getting rich also means to benefit society. People buy things which are useful for them. The entrepreneur provides these goods and services and keeps a part of the revenue.

To find an easy way full of fun to success Robert has to consider the following:

1. What he likes to do

2. What others like him to do

3. What he think he likes to do ( notice the difference to #1 – this is about self-reception)

4. What Robert believes others want to buy from or the enterprise he bought a share

5. The limits of his environment – the world is bigger than the area he can take notice of

6. The hard numbers – is there really a big market for the products?

7. Where he can really improve the perceived life situation of others.

What is the next step?, Ok, consulting me or another business coach/consultant looks good. Some can discuss the matters with mentors and friends, who are good in business, others do better with paid assistance.

After having a free mind without barriers from culture and family background, there is a chance to see the next big thing, for you and society.

The real important steps are:

#7 is the most important thing: this is your working next best thing.

For researching #4 and #6 I am a good fit. I have a lot of data for calculating your market and possible success.

Robert looks for a good way to invest his money and having control about his money

Separating good investments from bad investments is similar to start an own business. Robert has to look at point 4 to 7 of the previous paragraph and do the analysis. If all goes well, he wants to buy. Thats it – buy after best possible analysis and wait for earnings. The investments have to be checked regularly and maybe sold at the right time.

Artificial Intelligence: danger to humanity, productivity increase or just boring?

16. December 2023Johannes Winterhalter

Artificial Intelligence is based on statistical learning. We all learn with statistics, even if we do not know it. Our brain is good at things we do often, remembers words we frequently use and puts others aside. When we touched an electrical fence we learn it hurts. Animals make a similar experience. Also we look at other humans to learn how they handle situations. This may improve our own lifes. We look at the experience of others, how they do things, and if we think its good we imitate it.

The challenge of Artificial Intelligence is to put learning into a statistical model. With more and more computational power more is possible. Impressive for me is the look at colored 100+ years old silent movies in colors . The machine learned from actual pictures how the old colours were when the original was filmed and put that knowledge in the colorized version. With human painters this process would have taken years of work. Another impressive example of AI is a comparison between the Donald Trump impressions of Alec Baldwin (actor) and Scaredketchup (computer artist working with AI)

What AI and all the models do is to analyze all available text and give the resulting language model the ability to create new text out the old text . This is all based on mathematical and statistical calculations. As a result the new text is really close to existing text found somewhere on publicly available sources. AI can pretend to invent something, just by combining results or something the readers did not find already themselves. Remember: it is not really new, the machine found it somewhere.

A personal view on the benefits of Artificial Intelligence

AI-generated text is good when I have a question and the machine prepares its findings for me. There it can use text I did not know before, and probably I am happy. AI can ease pressure on customer service – the bot can answer many frequent questions without human interaction.

How AI-generated Text creates boredom

The inherent lack of invention by AI may create boredom. Also Artificial Intelligence is actually not well trained to look into human emotions. This may change over time.

Human brains have a capability to recombine things which never put together before. This is called human genius or creativity. Machines cannot do that actually. Computers lack the capability to fast apply the invention on human minds and viewers and so see if it works. Scaredketchup combines his own creativity with AI tools for creating pictures.

For me interesting is to look at how music is created: the musician has some inspirations and tests it before live audience. His mind tells him what the listeners like and what not.

Forecasting and Storytelling – our personal history and decision taking

23. March 2023Johannes Winterhalter

Asked for predictions and future trends, younger people and elders forecast a different future. The judgement is based on past experiences, where the elders had a longer time to watch. Now there is research which uses stock market predictions and inflation expectation taken from surveys to measure different estimations of future values in age groups.

Ulrike Malmendier and Jessica Wachter show in their paper how long time experience correlates with investment decisions. People with long experience include old information in their judgments. Do they make better predictions? The study has no answer for that.

Past experiences stick. Did you ever notice the warm emotions showing up when memories to a nice situation long ago appear? Another nice thing of the past is that we know how all ended. And we can connect with others about the long gone events.

For the ones who follow politcs: party members choosing a candidate in primary eclectoins are mostly elder and more extreme than the ones who vote at the general elections. So their candidate might have problems.

Artificial Intelligence has no memory

Humans differ from artificial intelligence in learning. AI connects the data and learns from what was in short sight. Humans take their whole life experience together and build their judgements on that.

Hiding the past helps sometimes

There is a connection between memories memories in market research and in own, personal ways to think and judge. Discovering the role of memories in own judgements and being able to switch it on and off helps to get a better picture of the world of younger people. It is about trying to look at the world while leaving out past memories.

Having a long memory may be helpful in forecasts and judgements. Mathematical evidence from the stock market does not give any proof for that.

Customer journey and past experiences in market research

Along a customer journey the traveller takes a lot of decisions. Will old memories take a big influence on that decision? Research shows it does. Big example are cars. Seniors buy different and bigger cars.

The influence of past experiences in market resarch — Getting Advice from Groups – are THEY good for that (from: Are Crooks dishonest)

Village Storytelling And Advertising Today

13. September 2022Johannes Winterhalter

The article is about storytelling in village communities still observed in the 21th century, conspiration theories and modern advertising. My experience as longtime villager and suburb dweller helped me.

I am living in the same village I spent my childhood some years ago. There are still many natives, some of them never moved out of their parents and grandparents house. They tell stories about families in the village, what they do, what the members of that families do and their fates.

Wondering why I did not know anybody mentioned in the stories while quite many villagers from associations, businesses and events, I asked the storytellers who these people are. The commone response was how could it happen that I do not know the people from the stories.

The characters are fictional. It is similar to movies many people have seen. Everybody is expected to know the story of the movie, and some words go into common language, like “catfishing” (pretending to be another person online), “gaslighting” (making somebody questioning their own reality) and “weinsteining” (behaviour close to what Harvey Weinstein is imprisoned for).

Village storytelling, repeatedly told by villagers, are the local kind of the bigger stories in movies. The stories connect the community. In the neighbouring village they have other stories the locals do not know.

Modern conspiration theories follow a similar scheme. Insiders know the story, and they feel the knowledge makes them much smarter or at least better informed than others.

What do we do with that information? There are stories others impose on us with the argument “As long you do not know the story you do not belong to us” or they use for gaslighting us. These stories are not worth anything for anybody except for the teller. There are other stories well told and worth remembering and retelling, for example “Good Wife”. Newly elected governments might also suffer the comparison between their results and the stories they told before election.

Using A Group For Improving Advice

29. June 2022Johannes Winterhalter

This post is about using group decisions for personal development and avoiding the trap of getting contradictory advice. A scaled down method from social research is useful to get better advice for personal and business matters.

“Guter Rat ist teuer” (Good advice is expensive) is an old German meme. Jokes transfered that to “Guter Rad ist teuer”, meaning a good bicycle is expensive. This is also true for getting good advice in transition periods, where many of us are vulnerable and insecure.

Some annoying people give unwanted advice. Their motivation is to lift themselves and their self-esteem by influencing somebody to change behaviour. Social and market researchers exclude some participiants for the reason that their opinion is not helpful. For personal and business growth it is important to ignore them too.

We like to ask people we know and we trust. They tell us their opinion looking from their own situation. For giving best advice they are supposed to leave their world and go into the thought system of the one they want to help. That is not easy to do and it is prone to errors. Example: I (the author) am really good at fixing cars and bikes. I am inclined to I think everbody can do that. For many people that skill is not important, so they cant, and I have to consider that if giving advice.

So, what to do, to not fall into despair after the first advice from a friend, collegue or coworker or fall into more despair after getting different advice and statements from different people.

How about asking for example 20 people, and write down or memorize the answers. If the same answer appears more often, there must be some reason behind it. I do not include the statistical proof for that right now.

For me that technique solved a personal problem: I generally do not trust human authorities. I think most of them are somehow crazy, corrupt and stupid. How to find truthful information with this precondition? I want to participate at the wisdom of humanity. My solution is finding opinions and statements which are similar – if many rely in the same facts, there must be some truth in it.

Another way for solving similar problems you might find here: Price Negotiations and Decision Tree. There you make a decision tree and add probabilities to each event.