One of the most widely-held beliefs about presentations and about learning is the idea that people have a preferred learning style—auditory, visual, or kinesthetic—so students learn more when the lesson is delivered in their learning style. A study cited in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal found that 94% of secondary school teachers they surveyed believed this is true.
And it’s not just teaching—a lot of sales experts tell us that we can sell more by using this idea: “Let’s see what the numbers look like. How does that sound to you?” (Full disclosure: I used to teach the idea in my own sales training, until I saw the science.)
Here’s a neat little experiment and accompanying visual that Richard Mayer reports in his book, Applying the Science of Learning. They first asked students a questionnaire to have them self-assess whether they were visual or verbal learners, and the strength of their preference. (e.g. “strongly more verbal than visual” compared to “slightly more visual than verbal”). They then taught a lesson to two randomly chosen groups, one in a verbal style and one in a visual style.
If the phenomenon does work, you would expect results to look something like this:
Instead, this is what the actual results looked like:
The first conclusion that can be drawn from these results is that even if Dick sees himself as visual, and Jane considers herself to be a verbal learner, they both learn the same amount, under either teaching style.
The second point is that the visual method results in greater learning, regardless of personal preference. As you can see, we are all visual learners.
Why should a salesperson care about this? There’s enough to keep track of in a sales conversation without spending valuable bandwidth worrying about the customer’s learning style and trying to change pick the right word to suit. Forget these tricks, and focus instead on sincerely understanding the customer’s needs and motivations, and on clearly explaining the value you bring.
I trust you hear my message loud and clear, that you see what I mean, and that you can wrap your arms around this concept.
We all know that good questions can uncover information that helps us in the sales process, but Dave Brock ‘s article on sales questioning this morning makes the important point that “the real power of effective questioning is how it helps the customer.” Questions help the customer by getting them to clarify the issues they’re trying to address and to think of things differently.
As he says, “the whole tone of a sales call changes when the customer says, ‘I’ve never considered that before.’” Dave is absolutely right, and it’s a wonderful feeling when that happens. I think back to a call I made to a prospect just to set up an appointment. He told me I was wasting my time, because they already had a sales process. When I asked him what percentage of his sales force were actively using their process, he paused and said, “Maybe we should meet to talk about that.”
But it’s also important to note that you should not expect good questions—even your very best questions—to always have an immediate visible effect. It’s not highly likely that the customer will say, “Wow, I never thought about it that way before!” In fact, the most likely reaction to this type of challenge question is either silence or some sort of combative answer. If you do get this reaction, do not think that your question has failed in its intent.
First of all, no one likes a know-it-all, especially when they’re right. Even if only to save face, the customer is probably not going to give you the immediate satisfaction of admitting you’re right.
Second, opinions are comfortable, and changing them is hard. Victor Hugo said “there is nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come.” The corollary to that sentiment is that ideas take time.
Put yourself in their position: Have you ever been asked a question that forced you to rethink your opinion, or at least to look at your situation through a different perspective? It probably didn’t feel too good at the time, did it? Long-held opinions don’t get changed instantly because of a single flash of insight, especially when that insight comes from someone else. They take time to work. Sometimes a great question is like a seed that plants itself in the customer’s brain and gradually takes root. By the time the first shoots are visible, the root system has taken a firm grip on the soil beneath.
Finally, the more astute buyers won’t let on that they’re excited about your idea because it weakens their negotiating position.
In fact, if the customer is too quick to come around to your point of view, maybe they’re simply the impressionable type who will change their minds back just as quickly when someone else challenges your challenge.
So don’t think that your excellent question has failed if the customer does not react in the way you hoped. They may need time to think about what you said, or they may need to talk about it internally. Your goal is to open their mind to a different perspective; don’t re-close it by pressing too hard for an answer.
On May 13, 1940, as the Western front was reeling under Hitler’s blitzkrieg attack on France and the Low Countries, the United States had a small third-rate army, equipped with obsolete weapons. The new Army Chief of Staff, George Marshall, was trying to change that, but President Roosevelt wasn’t buying.
That morning, Marshall accompanied Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, according to the story as told by Thomas Ricks in The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today, to the White House to make the case for a major increase in spending to build up the military. Roosevelt made it clear that he did not want to talk to them, and after Morgenthau spoke in support of the measure, Roosevelt cut him off and said, “Well, you filed your protest.”
Morgenthau then asked the President to listen to Marshall, but FDR said, “I know exactly what he would say. There is no necessity for me to hear him at all.” Others in the room sat quietly, offering no support. As the meeting ended, Marshall approached Roosevelt’s desk and said, “Mr. President, may I have three minutes?”
The President assented, and then began to say something else, but Marshall, afraid that he might not get to speak, spoke right over him. He spoke rapidly, full of facts and figures, saying, “If you don’t do something…and do it right away, I don’t know what’s going to happen to this country. You have got to do something, and you’ve got to do it today.”
At this point, he had FDR’s full attention, and he went on: “We are in a situation now where it’s desperate. I am using the word very accurately, where it’s desperate.”
It must have been a powerful presentation, because the next day, Roosevelt asked Marshall for a list of what the military needed.
What can we learn from this extremely short but momentous speech? That sometimes it is possible to dramatically alter the listener’s attitude and position quickly if that’s the only chance you have. You too, can pull off this feat, as long as you have:
Command of the facts: It begins with content: your proposal has to be grounded in reality, and you must have the facts to back up your position. You must command your material so well that without overwhelming the listener with detail, you leave no doubt that you have all the details if needed. Besides being convincing, facts also provide a face-saving way for the listener to change his mind. When it’s about opinions, it’s hard to change someone’s mind because it can get personal.
Conviction: Conviction is not the same as passion, which is easily dismissed by the listener as purely emotional. Conviction comes from a solid foundation of thought, and the deep belief that your cause matters. It certainly contains a strong core of emotion, but that emotion may actually be more powerfully expressed by keeping it in check.
Courage: It takes tremendous guts to stand up to the President of the United States, but Marshall had the character and devotion to duty that in effect left him with little choice. But the collateral benefit of having the courage to state the truth to power, even when it can be personally very costly, is that it can confer tremendous credibility.
One final thought: Marshall already had a reputation in the Army for his ability to boil down complex issues to succinct statements. It was a skill he had honed over years, and it paid off for his country when it was needed most.
Have you ever heard someone (perhaps even yourself) say something like, “our best-in-class quality and performance provide superior value that leads to unparalleled increases in productivity for our customers”?
Try to picture each of these words in your mind. You can’t, because they aren’t real or tangible. There’s nothing “wrong” with words like quality, performance and productivity, but you’re not doing yourself a favor if your conversations don’t use words that listeners can see, hear, feel, taste, or smell.
What do you give up when you lose concreteness?
When you give a presentation, or just have a conversation to persuade someone, you want your listeners to: listen, understand, believe, imagine and remember. Here’s how being more concrete can help:
Listen: People can’t be convinced if they don’t pay attention. Business abstractions such as quality, synergy, world-class, are used so often that we automatically block them out as meaningless buzzwords, while concrete words have the power to grab the listener by the shirt and force them to listen. You can talk about quality, or you can give a dramatic demonstration of it, by showing how beautiful or how tough your product is.
Understand: It’s tough to convince people who don’t understand your ideas. When we first learn about something, we learn about real objects, and then we gradually climb the ladder of abstraction. When everyone in the room shares a high level of knowledge, abstraction is efficient and can convey credibility. But when you’re selling an idea to someone, they typically don’t know as much as you do about it, so there’s always a danger that you will be more abstract and vague than you need to be.
Believe: One of the best ways to earn credibility is to show that you have been there and done that. Those who have, talk about real events, real people, and real things, not airy abstractions. You can mention customer complaints, or you can name a specific customer and share the language they used. Being specific is another aspect of concreteness, which is why even numbers can be used to make something more real. You can say your solution speeds up their process, or you can tell them it makes it 17% faster, which translates to $3.4 million in additional revenue.
Imagine: You are much more likely to be killed by a deer bounding across a highway than by a shark, so why do you think about sharks when you swim in the ocean but don’t worry about deer when you drive? Maybe it’s because the mental picture of having your living flesh ripped from your bones as the water turns red around you is a bit more vivid than a collision with a moving object.
People act on your ideas because they want to move away from pain or toward gain, and they are more likely to move when they can actively imagine the pain or the gain. Imagining real pains gets the motor running, and envisioning the future can get the wheels moving in the right direction. King’s Dream speech is memorable and inspiring because he helped an entire nation picture a better future. On a more mundane level, research has shown[1] that concrete and specific implementation intentions are much more likely to be carried out than general desires.
Remember: Unless someone is making an immediate decision, which is unlikely in a complex sale, they’re going to have to remember what you said when they weigh the pros and cons. They will remember things and sensations more than they will remember concepts, especially when everyone is using the same concepts (quality, value, etc.) in their presentations.
How about a concrete example?
When Boeing designed the 727 in the 1960s, they could have told their engineers to design a best-in-class, high quality and high performance airplane. Instead, they told them to build a plane that could carry 131 passengers nonstop from Miami and land on runway 4-22 at La Guardia (because it’s a short runway).[2] Besides making it clear for the engineers, do you suppose it made it easier to sell to the airlines?
[1] An excellent description of implementation intentions research can be found in Succeed, by Halvorson.
[2] The story came from Made to Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath, although they got it from Built to Last, by Collins and Porras.
, to the White House to make the case for a major increase in spending to build up the military. Roosevelt made it clear that he did not want to talk to them, and after Morgenthau spoke in support of the measure, Roosevelt cut him off and said, “Well, you filed your protest.”
