It has been quite a while since I’ve written a book recommendation. I simply haven’t come across much recently that was worth passing on to my readers.
Until now.
In Making Numbers Count, Chip Heath and Karla Starr have produced a comprehensive set of best practices for presenting numbers for maximum effect.
We all know that it is important in business communication to be data-driven, hence the need for numbers to make our case. Yet data is not enough. It’s easy to think that numbers speak for themselves, but unfortunately that’s not the case. Why not?
Persuasive communication is about getting people to act in a certain way. In order to do so, they must first attend to your message, understand it, believe it, remember it, and then act on it. By itself, data supports only action number three. Simply providing numbers without using some of the techniques in this book will guarantee that you leave a lot of persuasive oomph on the table. With these techniques, you’ll be able to grab attention, get your intended meaning across, make it stick in their memories, and evoke emotions which drive action.
Let’s start with understanding. On the face of it, nothing should be easier to understand than a number. We know that 6 is more than 5, and 60 much greater than 6. It’s obvious 43% is bigger than 17%. We know 1/3 is larger than 1/4. (Actually, that last is not so obvious. When A&W introduced a 1/3 pound burger at the same price as McDonald’s quarter-pounder, sales declined because more than one-half of their customers thought it was smaller. Just another illustration why numbers sometimes need a little help.)
On the other hand, nothing is more meaningless than a single number. Is 5 a big number? If you drink 5 ounces of water after a hard workout, it’s not near enough. If you down five ounces of liquor before driving home, it could change your life. Numbers are meaningless except when compared with something we already know.
Exceptionally large or small numbers can be especially difficult to understand. We all know a billion is more than a million, but it really hits home when you say a million seconds is about 12 days; a billion seconds is 32 years.
If you want to manage the meaning, you must choose the comparison. When you present a number without context, your listeners or readers will interpret the number relative to their own experience, which might not prompt your intended effect. If you want your numbers to count—to serve your purpose—you need to choose the proper context. Here’s an example from the book:
59% of Americans polled said that growing trade ties between countries are “very good” or “somewhat good”. When I read that statistic, I thought that since the US has traditionally promoted free trade, it’s not too surprising that 3 out of 5 support growing ties. But, what if I had told you first that of 47 countries surveyed, the US came in dead last by far?[1] (This example also illustrates how you can grab attention with a number by setting up and then breaking an expectation.)
Understanding is a good start, but often you also need to make numbers memorable and vivid. Abstract numbers tend not to stick in minds very well, so one of the best ways to make them memorable is to make them concrete, often by relating them to something familiar, such as comparing tumor sizes in centimeters to familiar objects (1 cm = pea; 3cm = grape). There are many such techniques in the book.
If you’re going for emotional impact, you will have to make your numbers vivid, especially because even dramatic numbers may fail to make an impression because of psychological numbing. To punch through indifference, we need to think about something that evokes the requisite emotion. Imagine the horror we all feel when learning about a plane crash. What if I told you that the current daily COVID death toll is equivalent to a fully loaded 737 crashing every three hours of every single day?
This post has only given a hint of the myriad techniques you can learn in the book. I don’t want to steal their thunder, and besides, I’ll probably use a few of them in future posts! The best part of Making Numbers Count is that it’s full of before-and-after examples—77 in all. You could become a more eloquent communicator simply by becoming familiar with the examples, or better yet, follow their advice and try to improve on their efforts.
[1] That survey was taken in 2007; I don’t know comparable stats for today, but that simply underscores the need to provide proper context.
As the author of Lean Communication, I appreciate a book that delivers valuable information with few wasted words. Mike Kunkle has done just that with The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement. In less than 150 pages, he manages to be clear, concise and comprehensive—but above all, practical.
In my thirty years as a sales trainer and consultant, I have seen far too many instances of the old school sales “leader”, whose only tools are incentives and intimidation. That approach just won’t cut it anymore, as sales get more complex and competition gets more intense. It reminds me of the old saying that amateurs study tactics, armchair generals study strategy, but professionals study logistics. Just as logistics place the right people with the right equipment in the right places, sales enablement does the same for sales.
This book will show you how to get it done. Whether you are a sales leader or a sales enablement professional, you will find a lot of useful insights and actionable ideas to design and implement a system that will maximize the performance of the sales force. Depending on your own specific situation, some chapters will resonate more than others. I especially appreciated the chapters on buyer acumen, sales methodology, and training, but there is something for everyone, including hiring, compensation, coaching, analytics—fourteen building blocks in all.
So many business books are long magazine articles puffed up with “been there, done that” stories. This is the rare business how-to book that leaves you wanting more. In fact, the only quibble I have is that Kunkle could have used a few more examples and stories from his deep experience to illustrate his points. For example, he cites the importance of having exit criteria in the buying process, but the lack of real-world examples could make it unclear to someone just becoming familiar with the topic. And ironically, the building block that Kunkle says he is least expert in, sales compensation, is the only one enlivened and enlightened by a story from his own experience.
The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement is like a map that you consult once to get your bearings, and then keep at hand for a long time to consult on your sales enablement journey. Although Kunkle reminds us that the map is not the territory, you still need one to envision the destination and plan the most efficient route. This is the best one you will find.
When you try to open a drawer and it gets stuck, what’s your first reflex? You yank it again, a little harder the second time, and you may repeat this several times until you finally realize brute force won’t work—and you might even break something. So you finally get smart about it: you stick your hand in and feel around to find out what’s blocking the opening, move it out of the way, and the drawer slides open easily. How much lost time and potential damage might you have avoided if you had removed the obstacle first thing?
The same thing may happen when you try to change someone’s mind. You try to sell them an idea, and they shut you down. So you try again, maybe a little bit more forcefully, or you polish your arguments and come at it a different way. But that doesn’t always work, work, because there are factors which block people from changing their minds even in the face of the strongest rational arguments. In these cases, you need to first remove or work around these impediments.
That’s where Jonah Berger’s book, The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone’s Mind, comes in. The key point is that when you set out to change something or someone, don’t start by asking “What can I say to try to convince them?” Start by asking yourself, “Why haven’t they changed already?”
Berger identifies five factors which prevent people from changing (or resisting persuasion), conveniently arranged in the acronym REDUCE.
Reactance is our inner 2-year-old which causes us to resist being told what to do. If we feel our freedom to act threatened, we tend to resist, even when we know it’s good for us. (Probably the single biggest reason so many people are refusing to wear masks in a pandemic). The way to get around reactance is to give the other person at least the perception of having the freedom to decide. You can do this by giving people a menu of choices, asking questions to get them to reach the intended conclusion, especially by highlighting a gap between status quo and ideal.
Endowment effect and loss aversion simply mean that we place a greater value on things we have than those we don’t. So, change is hard unless we see a much greater benefit—at least two to one, according to research. The antidote to endowment is to surface the cost of inaction, and that’s best done through asking them questions to arrive at the conclusion you want them to accept. (In case you haven’t figured out how important it is to ask questions, here’s a reminder).
Distance means that people have can have a range of different attitudes regarding the topic being discussed, from strongly in favor to strongly opposed to somewhere in between. For each topic they care about, they have a “zone of acceptance” and a “zone of rejection”. If your message falls into the former, it can move their attitude towards you; if the latter, the message can actually move them further away from agreement. This means you need to know where they are starting from, and most likely ask for less to start. This may require strategic patience on your part, but it beats getting shot down for good.
Uncertainty about potential outcomes makes people nervous. When people are asked to make choices between a sure thing and potentially more valuable gamble, risk aversion biases them toward the sure thing. As Berger puts it, anything new carries an “uncertainty tax”. To get over this hump, you’ve got to make it easy for people to try things out conveniently and at little risk to themselves.
Corroborating Evidence, Berger’s fifth factor, is a little out of place because it’s not technically a factor that impedes change; it’s a requirement. When people hold a strong attitude about the thing being changed, you may need reinforcements in the form of extensive and varied social proof. The theme of this chapter I “Don’t take my word for it.”
The Catalyst is a highly readable and useful book about removing barriers to persuasion. However, I don’t feel it lives up to its subtitle, ”How to Change Anyone’s Mind”, because it’s incomplete. While it’s important to remove roadblocks to change, you also need to make a positive case for the direction in which to move or the destination to aim for. Maybe that will be the theme of a sequel, in which case I look forward to reading it.
True consultative selling is about selling with your customers, not to them. In other words, you work closely together in partnership to co-create value by eliciting the best thinking on both sides to create better ideas, stronger buy-in, and unshakeable relationships.
It’s a beautiful thing when it happens, but it’s also not common because it takes a rare mixture of relevant knowledge, interpersonal skills, and an outside-in mindset to make it work. I’ve written about that in my book, Bottom-Line Selling.
But there is more to the story than the quantitative and logical approach I advocate, and there is more value possible in co-creation than can be captured in a spreadsheet. That’s where Chip Bell’s new book, Inside Your Customer’s Imagination: 5 Secrets for Creating Breakthrough Products, Services, and Solutions, comes in.
Knowledge, skill and outside-in thinking may not be enough unless you can also get inside your customer’s imagination. The customer’s mind contains a potential treasure trove of ideas for working together to generate incredible value, much of which they may not even be aware of. The trick is to harness that imagination. Have you ever had a customer meeting that just sparkled with enthusiasm and produced ideas almost faster than you could write them down? This book will show you how to make that the norm rather than the exception.
The book is divided into five tactics for creating and sustaining a co-creation partnership, each with three techniques to apply them effectively. Bell calls them “secrets”, but I prefer to see them as plain common sense, creatively applied. They are:
Curiosity: The first step to selling with someone is to be curious about them. Chip says “curiosity is fundamentally an optimistic treasure hunt”, and it springs from a genuine desire to know as much as you can about them.
Grounding: Grounding is about establishing a shared purpose with your customer. It starts with defining the customer’s core need or aspiration.
Discovery: Curiosity and grounding are important to get started, but at some point you have to start generating ideas. Discovery is about creating a climate to make innovation possible—maybe even inevitable.
Trust: All innovation contains risk for both parties, so trust is essential. Both parties must trust each other enough to open up fully and generate ideas, and they must also trust each other enough to share the risks of implementing them.
Passion: Just like a marriage, a co-creation partnership needs to be nurtured with passion to avoid complacency and indifference. Passion ensures that both sides consistently bring their best.
This short synopsis does not do justice to the book. Chip uses excellent analogies and tons of compelling stories to illustrate and support his points, which makes for excellent reading. If you’ve ever had the chance to see Chip in person, you’ll see that he writes like he speaks, with a dynamic combination of entertainment and insight.
