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Is Your Sales Force Ready for Disruptive Change?

By Jack Malcolm / 4.18.2018 / No Comment

New technologies always change the way things are done in some way, but there are some technologies such as 5G that provide such a quantum leap in performance they can totally disrupt the ways your customers currently do things. If you want to keep up, or even better, get ahead of the change, you need to be an expert in exactly how they do things, what may change, and what that will mean to them.

By definition, technology is the application of knowledge for practical purposes. The “practical purposes” that your customers care about are the processes that they use to add value to their customers, and new technologies can affect those processes in three ways. I’ve used examples from health care to make the point, but you can probably substitute almost any industry:

Improve: take a current process and speed it up, reduce the error rate, raise uptime, etc. In healthcare, for example, 5G can offload computing power from portable medical devices to the cloud, making them cheaper and improving their battery life.
Change: change the current process in some fundamental way. Ultra-low latency can enable surgery to take place without having the doctor and patient in the same location.
Replace: enable totally new processes. In health care, predictions are that the share of spending will shift from treatment to prevention, diagnosis and monitoring. These are the hardest to predict. Who knew that digital photography would spawn selfie sticks and Instagram?

As you move up this pyramid, value to the customer increases, but so does the complexity of your sales process. That’s why you should start preparing now to improve, change or replace your own processes—your sales processes.

Here are some question you should start thinking about:

What processes do your customers use to serve their customers and differentiate themselves?

What improvements will you be able to make? How will that affect the quantity and quality of outputs? How will it affect the various inputs into the process? How much time will be saved?

How will those processes change? People taken out of the equation, faster, more reliable, fewer mistakes, new capabilities, etc.

What new processes will the technology enable? What new capabilities will they have?

How will any or all of these changes affect their revenues, costs, and asset investment requirements?

What risks will they face?

What potential unintended consequences do they need to prepare for?

What will those cost them?

What obstacles will they encounter trying to upgrade their processes? Who will be the new/different problem owners? What will they care about? How are they measured?

Who will be most likely to resist the necessary change?

How will your competition (players, differentiators, and strategies) change, and what will you do about it?

What selling skills will you need to learn, develop or reinforce to be able to adapt your sales approach?

I don’t expect that you will know the answers to all or even a majority of these questions, but the sooner you start asking them, the better off you will be when the change starts to happen. And it’s coming soon! In that spirit, I will leave you with one final question:

Will you be a disrupter or a disruptee?

Podcasts

PE 15: Make It Happen

By Jack Malcolm / 4.17.2018 / No Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Everything we’ve talked about so far in this series on persuasive communication psychology is just a means to an end, and that end is making something actually happen. Somebody buys, somebody acts, something changes. Even when you have wholehearted agreement, you haven’t until they’ve followed through.[1] As Alfred Adler said, “Life happens at the level of events, not words.”

How many times have you walked out of a meeting with someone with a clear sense that everybody is on board and knows what to do, and after time passes nothing has happened? How many times has initial enthusiasm fizzled out? Frustrating, isn’t it? What’s WRONG with those people?

It happens all the time, but before you get angry that others don’t follow through on their agreements, think about how many times you’ve broken agreements with yourself. For example, have you set goals that you did not achieve—not because you were incapable but because you didn’t really try? If you made New Year’s resolutions for 2018, how’s that working out for you? Do you ever procrastinate? In some ways, maybe it’s a miracle when someone else actually follows through on their agreements!

So the key is not to get angry about it and give people a hard time or continue to hound them until things get done, but to understand why there’s a gap between decision and execution, and use that knowledge in your approach to maximize your chances of seeing the behavior and action you seek.

What keeps people from acting on agreements?

Persuasive communication is a vehicle for making things happen, and every vehicle needs two things to do its job: motive power and direction. Everything we’ve covered so far deals with the motivation, so I’m going to address the direction part as the major antidote to inaction. Three principal reasons people don’t follow through on agreements is that they may be uncommitted, unable, or uncertain.

Uncommitted

First, despite telling you they agree, they may be lying or at least not telling the full truth. Maybe they’re too nice and don’t want to hurt your feelings. Maybe they’re afraid to openly disagree because you’re the boss or prevailing opinion is against them. Maybe they even hope you will fail for whatever reasons of their own they might have. Or maybe they kind of agree but still have nagging doubts. Sometimes Gut-level Gus prefers to just keep quiet and bide his time for the right moment—when it’s time to do something.

Unable

Even if they have the best intentions and confidence at the moment, they could find themselves unwilling or unable to do what they have to do when the time comes. Unwilling is when you tell yourself that you’re going to wake up an hour early and get a workout in before work, only to “reconsider” your plans when the alarm goes off. What’s going on is a chronological goal mismatch: the sure short term pain of waking up now is a lot more pressing on your mind than the long term promise of being fit at some undetermined future time. The unable part comes when they run into an unexpected obstacle and can’t or won’t muster up the will to take it on or figure it out.

Uncertain

One of the most common and easily solvable reasons for procrastination and excuse-making is uncertainty about what to do. I feel this myself many times when I sit down to write and churn out my goal of 1,000 words a day. When I’m not sure what I want to write about, it’s so much harder to get started. Ambiguity causes anxiety and anxiety tends to default toward the status quo.

How to drive action

To attack these three action-stoppers you must:

Be sure you have full agreement.
Make it hard for them to not act
Make it easy for them to take the action you want

Be sure you have full agreement

It’s tempting to assume things are going well, and it takes a strong person to invite objections, but sweeping disagreement under the rug only guarantees that you will trip over it later. If they don’t agree, better to find out early so you can address it. There are a couple of ways to do this.

The first is to be very clear up front what your ask is. A lot of speakers fear to do this to avoid provoking disagreement, and there’s something to be said for using your discretion if you know they will automatically oppose your idea. But being clear about your ask up front is a great way to find out early where you stand.

Second, ask checking questions to see if they have any concerns; pay close attention to their reaction and invite them to open up about their concerns. If you’re the boss, make it safe for people to speak openly; one way to do this is, bring up specific objections if you think they’re holding back, to show it’s OK to talk about them.

If those fail, you can be more direct and tell them that if you don’t hear objections, you’re going to assume you have complete agreement.

Make it hard for them not to act

As we’ve seen, at the moment of truth it’s so easy to find reasons not to act, so you want to harder for them not to follow through.

Get individuals to commit publicly to act, which increases compliance in two ways. First, it puts their credibility at risk if they change their minds and don’t come through and second, it taps into the Cialdini’s consistency principle. But make sure that they commit to something specific, which I cover in the next section.

Anticipate obstacles and plan for them. If you make the road ahead sound easy, you may get quicker agreement but run into problems later. Planning for obstacles makes it much likelier that they will follow through, because their minds are prepared for them.

Put them in control of their commitment. Most of us hate to be sold, even if we don’t mind buying, so do everything you can to make it the other person’s idea to do what you want them to do.

As strange as it might sound, sometimes it helps to make it harder to decide but easier to act once they have decided. Making an effort up front deepens commitments, which is why elite organizations have difficult initiation rituals. Instead of trying so hard to make the decision a no-brainer, we should get them to put skin in the game.

Make it easy for them to act

If you want someone to stay on the path you’ve set, make it effortless by making the path well-marked and smooth as possible.

Make it clear

Your listeners must be absolutely clear about what you’re asking them to do. This starts with being clear in your own mind about your purpose and specific actions before you go in.

Specificity is major ingredient of clarity. There’s a great example in Switch, by Chip and Dan Heath. Donald Berwick, CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in on December 14, 2004 told a room full of hospital administrators that their goal was to save 100,000 lives by 6/14/06, at 9AM. More prosaically, it’s like the difference between saying “let’s do lunch sometime” and “how about next Tuesday at Anthony’s?”

When asking someone to take action, you walk a tightrope: on the one hand, people don’t like being micro-managed, but on the other hand, they are more likely to follow through on clear behaviors. The best way to square this circle is to ask them for their plan and only then make suggestions as you see fit.

So, for example, instead of recommending that you to be clearer in their recommendations, I might suggest that you word your ask in specific and measurable outcomes that a high school sophomore could understand and repeat back to you.

Make it easy

One of the major contributors to the success of Amazon was its development and patenting of one-click ordering in 1997. You may not be able to make it that easy for others to act, but you should strive as much as possible to reduce barriers to action. Chip and Dan Heath call this tactic “shrinking the change”.

You can also shrink the change by breaking things up into small steps which are easier to accomplish. That can help you get things moving and then the power of commitment and constancy will keep the momentum going.

Finally, always close with a call to action. Here’s mine: as soon as possible, write down the three things you are going to do differently in your next presentation to ensure that others will act.

[1] One exception: If it’s simply compliance you’re aiming for, such as permission to proceed and approval of resources, you can stop right here.

Clear thinking

Ignoramus: The Power of Productive Ignorance

By Jack Malcolm / 4.16.2018 / No Comment

We’ve all heard that knowledge is power, but admitting your ignorance is a necessary step to knowledge.

So says Yuval Noah Harari in his book Sapiens. As he says, the Scientific Revolution could not begin until a few brave souls dared to openly admit their ignorance, saying in effect, ignoramus, which is Latin for “we don’t know.” Freed from certainty dictated by rulers and priests, a few individuals here and there began questioning, observing, experimenting, and discovering, and ultimately ignited an explosion of progress and wealth, and almost every aspect of human life was fundamentally and irrevocably changed, mostly for the better.

On a more modest level, I’d like to ask how much our lives would change today if we were all willing to say ignoramus a bit more.

I see the value of admitting ignorance in two different ways in my classes. The first form is when I get a grizzled sales veteran sitting with his (it’s always a man) arms crossed as if saying; “I know it all. I dare you to try to teach me something I don’t know.” Those usually turn out to the easiest to teach, but only after I’ve asked a question or two about their accounts that they can’t answer. They often do a complete 180 when they recognize they don’t know something, and see its importance.

Second, I always stress that what kills sales deals—and I suspect much else in business and in life—is the seductive certainty that you have the situation under control because you know all you need to know. Ignorance is productive when it exposes what Donald Rumsfeld called the unknown unknowns, or as I call them, (DK)². But the most insidious form of (DK)² is the assumption, where you think you know but you really don’t. The only cure for the assumption is to admit to yourself what you don’t know.

I don’t pretend to be perfect yet; I still have trouble admitting my ignorance. Just this week I was in a meeting where a speaker threw out a term I didn’t understand. I didn’t want to show my ignorance so I sat quietly, but a woman in the group stopped him and said, “What do you mean by that?” Turns out no one else in the room know either. In times like that’ it’s useful to remember what Will Rogers said, “Everybody’s ignorant, only on different subjects.”

In selling, there is tremendous value in admitting to others that you don’t know. I learned my first big lesson in sales when a prospect asked me why he should do business with my company, and I surprised him (and myself) by saying, “I don’t know.” That frank admission led to an open and productive conversation and a big sale.

What about relationships? Ignoramus makes us humble, and hence quicker to listen and slower to judge. It helps us avoid the fundamental attribution error, in which we impute others’ wrong actions to their character, while we excuse our own wrong actions as being caused by the situation. If we get into the ignoramus habit, we would be more likely to think a little deeper about the causes of the other person’s misbehavior. As Lincoln said, “I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better.”

This one I know will never happen, but how would politics change if everyone was more willing to admit their ignorance? Certainty wraps you in a comfortable cocoon of confirmation bias and closes your mind to anything that might challenge your worldview. Is it any wonder there doesn’t seem to be anything getting done in Washington these days?

Ignoramus, what a wonderful and useful word when it’s directed not at others but at ourselves! How much more would we know if we admitted what we don’t?

How high you go is up to you

Clear thinking - Success

Inflating a Blimp with a Bicycle Pump

By Jack Malcolm / 4.13.2018 / No Comment

If you are truly serious about becoming an excellent persuasive communicator, one of the most important things you can do is to become a writer. You don’t have to do it for publication and in fact you don’t even have to be particularly good at it, but the more you write the better you will get at expressing your ideas.

Everyone wants to be admired for their brilliance of thinking and expression, and we envy those who seem to possess it naturally and effortlessly. We may even feel a twinge of envy and despair that we can’t do it ourselves. But I suspect that many of the people who seem to have natural gift actually work very hard at it.

Here’s what a brilliant writer, Kurt Vonnegut said about it:

“Novelists have, on the average, about the same IQs as the cosmetic consultants at Bloomingdale’s department store. Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.”

I’m not a novelist. I don’t aspire to be one, and you probably don’t either. But we can still learn from Vonnegut’s sentiment. What can we use from his idea?

Write it down. Sounding halfway intelligent means you sound like you thought about it, but for important meetings and conversations, I don’t believe it counts as thinking until you’ve written it down. That’s because it always sounds better in your head than it looks on paper, at least the first time. As Barbara Minto says in her book, The Pyramid Principle: “No one can know precisely what he thinks until he has been forced to symbolize it—either by saying it out loud or by writing it down—and even then the first statement of the idea is likely to be less precise than he can eventually make it.”

Make time. You don’t have to shoot for the great American novel, because you have a day job. But you still have to carve out some time to give it the attention it deserves. As the old saying says, if you don’t have time to do it right the first time, when will you have time to do it over? Besides, how many times have you regretted something you wrote in haste, especially now that everything written electronically will live forever?

Start early. Patience is a powerful tool, but you have to start early for it to work. I used to think I did my best work under deadline pressure, but I’ve found that starting early to let the idea marinate in my unconscious mind usually pays off in the form of insights and flashes of semi-inspiration at the most unexpected times. It’s better for my blood pressure, too.

Pump up the pump. The metaphor of inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump isn’t exactly correct. When you pump long enough, you get better at pumping, and somehow the pump begins to get upgrades as well. Over time each push of the handle gets a little more productive, in either quantity or quality. It’s the idea of personal kaizen, where thousands of small improvements use the magic of compound interest to add up not just mathematically but geometrically.

Inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. It’s a powerful idea, brilliantly expressed. I wonder how many times he wrote it and rewrote it?