Why Details Matter

My daughter Mackenzie and her fiancée Matthew got married last month, and the entire experience was magical and amazing, despite all my best efforts to the contrary.

Let me explain: from the moment we left the hotel where she got dressed, to the ceremony itself at the same church where my wife and I were married 33 years ago, and on to the reception, everything went perfectly and every single detail was just right.

During all the planning, my main contribution was a vain effort to rein in the costs. I would ask my wife, “Why are we spending money on two different-colored linens to cover the tables—aren’t the plain white ones good enough? Why do we need so many flowers? Do they really need menus, and does the printing have to match the color of the linens? Do we really need specially-ordered M&M’s!?”

Naturally, I lost all those arguments, and I’m glad I did, because I was wrong. The whole experience made me re-learn a lesson that I should have learned many years ago: attention to detail pays off.

When I attended the Air Force Academy in the 1970s, the upperclassmen constantly repeated “attention to detail” as a mantra, but I saw myself as a big-picture guy, so I bought into it with my mind but not with my heart.

Yet over the years, I’ve come to appreciate how critically important it is to pay attention to even the smallest of details. Of course it’s a good idea if you’re going to fly fast, expensive jets for a living, but it equally applies to sales and persuasion.

In sales, attention to detail can keep you in the game or knock you out immediately. Small, seemingly unimportant details can have a huge effect on outcomes, either negative or positive. Just as one small fly in your soup can ruin a whole meal, and one tiny grain of sand in your shoe can cripple you, one typo can scuttle a million dollar proposal.

On the other hand, a small gesture thrown in at the last minute can put a negotiation over the top; one unusual or telling detail can make a sales presentation memorable (I still remember a presentation from five years ago that involved a Chihuahua named Pedro); and three Cuban cigars that I gave a client almost twenty years ago still pay off for me today.

Detail shows professionalism. Speaking of M&M’s, David Lee Roth of Van Halen used to insist that they be supplied with a large bowl of M&M’s at every venue where they played—with all the brown ones removed—upon pain of immediate cancellation with full compensation. That might seem like a case of massive egos gone wild, but the band in fact had it in there to ensure that the promoter had read their contract. They had enormously heavy and expensive sets, and failure to comply with their directions could actually hurt someone. If Roth ever saw a brown M&M, he would not only trash the dressing room, he would also meticulously check every other detail to make sure it was safe to go out and play.

Detail drives deeper thinking. In my opportunity planning workshops, I urge participants to be as detailed as possible in their analysis of the situation, especially the business and personal drivers of the customer’s need. The first broad pass through the analysis doesn’t do much for them, but when they challenge themselves to come up with more detail, it invariably uncovers one or two small bits of information that they can use to craft a unique understanding of the customer’s situation and a much stronger competitive value proposition.

Details convince. To see how details can make you more persuasive, consider the following scenario:

Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.

Please check off the most likely alternative:

1. Linda is a bank teller.
2. Linda is a bank teller and active in the feminist movement.

If you picked B, you are like 9 of 10 people who responded in this experiment by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman.[1] Logically, it’s impossible that B is more likely than A, but somehow it’s more convincing. Kahneman calls this the representativeness heuristic, and concludes that as the level of detail in a scenario increases, the likelihood increases. That’s why detailed testimonials and recommendations work so well. Along the same lines, details also make things more real by making the abstract more vivid and concrete in the listener’s mind, and by making you much more human and approachable.

Would it have been a great wedding without all that attention to detail? Who knows, but I doubt I would have received this testimonial from a good friend of mine: “You made lifetime memories for a lot of people.”

Note: A version of this post ran in Kelly Riggs’ Business LockerRoom blog on April 15.

[1] Scott Plous, The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making, p. 111.