Practical Eloquence Blog |

Value Is in the Eye of the Beholder

By Jack Malcolm / 2.3.2020 / No Comment

Imagine this situation: you’re choosing a wedding present for two close friends. You’ve visited their registry to get ideas, but you also have an idea for an excellent and unique gift that you are sure they will like. Which would you choose?

If you opted for the unique gift, you’re not alone; after all, it’s more thoughtful, isn’t it? You’re also probably wrong. According to one study, recipients of gifts that they had chosen beforehand reported “significantly greater appreciation of the registry gifts than the unique gifts.”[1]

The explanation given is that the gift-givers imagined how they would feel if they received those gifts, but they didn’t do a very good job of figuring out how the recipients would feel. To use a term coined by writer Tony Alessandra, they were operating on the Golden Rule when they should have been using the Platinum Rule: “Do Unto Others as They Would Be Done Unto.”

To cite a personal example, I post a lot of blog articles and videos and I’ve learned that it’s almost impossible to predict how many views I will get for each. I may love a video and think it’s a fascinating topic, and I’ll get very little reaction, or vice-versa. It’s a constant reminder that people do things for their own reasons, not for yours.

The first rule of lean communication—actually any type of communication—is that you must add value to the recipient, but only the recipient of the message gets to decide whether they received value, or how much. This makes it crucial to take their perspective to understand how they view, think, and feel about the situation. It’s easier said than done, because it requires nothing less than a reversal in our normal habits of thought.

By default, all of us think inside-out: how can we get our point across, or get our needs met through this conversation or presentation? Even the thoughtful act of choosing a gift we think someone else will like can go wrong because it’s slanted by our own perspective about what we would enjoy. Default thinking is natural and easy, but if we want to up our persuasive game, we must cultivate the habit and skill of outside-in thinking: doing our best to figure out how they will be better off as a result of having heard our message.

The paradox of outside-in thinking is that, the more we focus on making the other person better off, the better off we will be. Value, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

[1] Adam Grant, Give and Take, p. 89.

Persuasive communication - Sales

Sales Storytelling Masterclass Kicks Off Sunday at 6:30

By Jack Malcolm / 1.29.2020 / No Comment

I am looking forward to the Super Bowl this weekend. As a football fan, I am eagerly anticipating the clash between the Kansas City Chiefs’ dynamic offense and the San Francisco 49ers’ suffocating defense. But as a student of persuasive communication, what I am really looking forward to is the commercials.

The ability to tell a compelling and concise story is a huge and versatile asset in persuasive communication. Stories can grab attention, make a personal connection, dramatize a need, and make your point unforgettable. The best TV commercials can squeeze a complete and powerful story into a 30-60 second time slot, and the Super Bowl attracts the best the industry can provide.

Most of the ads are worth watching just for the entertainment value, but you can also learn some useful lessons from them, if you know what to look for. Here are just a few:

Most products and services are not that exciting, so a good story can capture your imagination and cast its glow on the product. For example, running out of beer is not that huge a problem, but Heineken and Brad Pitt teamed up in 2005 to turn that mundane problem into an epic quest.
Most big decisions are going to be made some time after you make your pitch, so it’s important that the decision maker remember the story when the time comes. The best illustration of a story’s staying power was Apple’s 1984 ad, which ran only one time but is still remembered today.
One of the most effective forms of persuasive story is the crossroads story, which shows the moment of choice and depicts the consequences of a wrong or right choice. This ad about a young Jimi Hendrix from Pepsi is probably the best example I’ve seen. (It’s even called “Crossroads”)
Surprise is a great way to maintain attention and make the story stick in memory. Since I’ve mentioned Pepsi, here’s one from Coke that uses Mean Joe Green to provide a twist.
It usually considered bad form to denigrate competitors directly, but you can get away with it if you use a story to gently and humorously poke fun at them. But just because it’s funny does not mean the message is unclear, as Wendy’s showed in this famous ad.
You don’t have to say anything about your competitors to dramatize the consequences of a wrong choice, as FedEx showed in 1999.
There’s often a fundamental tension in selling between pointing out a problem and not wanting to be too negative. Snickers teamed up with Betty White to show how humor can bridge the gap between those two incompatible aims.
Stories are a useful stealth way to humanize yourself and associate your image with goodness and positive associations. Babies are perfect for this, as are animals, and best of all—baby animals, as this Budweiser Clydesdale Foal commercial
But, precisely because stories can be so compelling and memorable, it’s critical to ensure that they are relevant to the point you’re trying to make. This Office Linebacker ad is entertaining, but I still have no idea what they were selling. What a waste—not only in terms of money, but especially in terms of the listeners’ time.

This Sunday, the best of the best will square off against each other, and I can’t wait to see who wins.

The game should also be fun to watch—between the commercials!

Sales

Value Is Not Enough

By Jack Malcolm / 1.27.2020 / No Comment

Supply chain executive Jon Stegner once tried to convince his company’s top management to centralize their disorganized buying centers. His analysis showed the company could save a billion dollars over five years, but no matter how hard he tried to convince them, nothing happened. Finally, he decided to dramatize the situation for them. He picked a single item—work gloves—and had an intern buy one pair of every single one on the combined approved lists. He next piled a boardroom table with the gloves, each with its price tag attached, showing that sometimes the same pair ranged in price from $5 to $17. When he brought executives in to see the pile, they were shocked to see 424 pairs of gloves in a pile about three feet high! That got their attention, and Stegner got his approval.[1] A picture is said to be worth a thousand words, but in this case it was worth a billion dollars!

The point of this vignette is that value is not enough. One would think that a billion dollars in savings would capture attention, but it took a simple dramatic demonstration to make something happen.

As an author of a book called Bottom-Line Selling, I believe in the importance of value in the sales process just as much as anyone out there. In the long run, value is the foundation of every successful enterprise account relationship. Bells and whistles are great, but ultimately you will only win and keep business if you are delivering value in the form of improved outcomes that outweigh the cost and risk of using your solution.

But value is not enough, for the simple reason that human decision makers are quirky in what they pay attention to, how they decide, and how they act. If a logical balance of benefits over costs were all it took for people to make the right choices, companies would probably be better-run and people on average would be thinner and smoke less.

Value is necessary but not sufficient. Especially for big purchases or large changes, people must not only logically understand the value, they must feel it. Even the most analytical, data-driven people need to experience a need.

Whether you’re selling a product or an idea, you need to start with value as your raw material, but then you must craft your message in a way that captures attention, brings to life the need, and elicits the appropriate emotions. You can tell stories, you can use questions to get them to articulate their needs and the pains that they face; you can use visuals or word pictures to get your audience to envision and simulate in their own minds how they will feel when they have the solution in place.

A complete sales approach effectively appeals both to the heart and the mind.

If you’ve read this far, let me end it with a shameless plug: Learn about the logical side of value with Bottom-Line Selling, and the emotional side with Strategic Sales Presentations.

[1] I first read this story in The Heart of Change, by John Kotter.

Success

Change Your Context, Change Yourself

By Jack Malcolm / 1.22.2020 / No Comment

In my last post, I wrote how good habits are so much more reliable over the long term than motivation, discipline and willpower in getting done more of what we should and less of what we shouldn’t. But there’s a bit of a Catch-22 in that approach: you need motivation, discipline and willpower to get through the initial difficult process of establishing a beneficial habit or breaking a bad one.

You can’t totally avoid the need for willpower, but fortunately you can make the path a little easier for yourself by paying attention to the context in which you perform the behavior.

Although it’s comforting to assume that we’re in control of our own actions and behaviors, our environment has far greater influence on our behavior than we think. In one study, researchers were able to get diners in a hospital cafeteria to drink 11% less soda and 25% more bottled water by simply changing where bottled water was placed.[1] I would bet that if you had asked someone why they bought a bottled water instead of their usual soda, they would give you a solid reason for it—and they would believe it, too.

A much more powerful demonstration of how the environment influences habits is described in Atomic Habits. During the Vietnam war, as many as 20% of American servicemen became addicted to heroin while there. Heroin is an immensely difficult drug habit to break, yet upon returning to the States, fully 99% of those addicts were able to break the habit! The difference was their environment had changed.[2]

Our environment affects our behavior in two ways. First, it can make it easier or harder to perform a specific behavior. If you have to walk somewhere to get that can of soda, you’re less likely to choose it than the water that is right in reach.

Second, our environment is full of cues that our minds may notice outside our conscious thought that trigger our behaviors. All habits are triggered by cues, so if we can remove or add cues we can weaken or fortify our habits.

You can fight against the influence that our environment has on your behavior by conscious effort, but that defeats the purpose, because it taxes your willpower and discipline. It’s better to make the upfront effort to redesign your environment so that it works for you and not against you.

First, make it easier to perform the behavior you want to turn into a habit, or harder for those habits you want to break. Arrange your materials and your workspace ahead of time so that you can get right to work. Lean thinkers call it 5S, and it’s a great practice to adopt in your personal work as well. In my own case, I want to write for a full hour every morning, and I’ve found it helpful to have my desk clean and my notes arranged in advance the evening before. (In fact, an end-of-day routine is what I call an enabling habit—one that’s relatively easy to establish and makes it easier to perform the more difficult habit.)

Turn off distractions such as incoming email notifications; put your phone somewhere that you won’t be tempted to check it every few minutes; put tempting foods out of sight—the small easy fixes you can make are all around you if you just take the time to look for them.

Also, think about your social environment. The old saying that “You become like the five people you spend most time with”, definitely applies to habits. For example, one study showed that participants who had a friend become obese were 57% more likely to become obese themselves! Your peer group is immensely important.

Second, take inventory of the cues that trigger unwanted behaviors and minimize or eliminate them If that’s not possible, try habit substitution. Use the cue that you can’t avoid to trigger a different, positive habit. That worked for me last year: I used to follow up may daily workout with my “recovery drink” (which comes in a little green bottle from Holland). Now, I meditate for a few minutes instead, and it has become a regular part of my day. That was a double win for me, and easily done.

Sometimes the hardest thing about starting a habit is remembering to do it. Your best antidote to forgetfulness is consistency, which is easy to achieve if you stick as closely as possible to a particular spot and a time for the activity. You might find it helpful at first to schedule “appointments” for yourself for the activity, but it will become automatic in a surprisingly short time if you stick with it.

Change your context first. Our environment shapes so much of what we do, but there’s no reason that we can’t in turn shape our own environment. We’re constantly told by the success gurus that we need to change ourselves if we want to change our lives. That may be true in the long run, but that’s a huge task. By changing the things around you, you make it easier to change the things inside you.

[1] James Clear, Atomic Habits, p. 108.

[2] Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Switch, p. 206.