There’s an old joke about a battleship cruising through the fog at night when the bridge sees lights approaching. The ship signals: “Move to the right.”
Morse code from the light signals back, “You need to move to the right.”
The Captain signals again: “I have the right of way. MOVE TO THE RIGHT!”
The mysterious light replies: “I suggest you move.”
As the lights begin to converge on a collision course, the Captain signals: “I am a 50,000 ton United States Navy battleship! MOVE TO THE RIGHT!!!”
The light replies: I am a lighthouse. I suggest you move immediately.”
If you want to achieve max cred, your aim should be to make sure that your presentations and your conversations are like the lighthouse in that story: so rock-solid that they have the right of way in any question. As John Adams said,
“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
I put credentials first in this series because they get you in the door, but content is the most important factor in keeping you there; it’s what delivers on the promise of your credentials. Ultimately, your personal credibility will rest upon the quality of your ideas. Therefore, the first and most important factor in personal credibility is the truth, logic and relevance of what you say.
Content is hugely important for practical and ethical reasons. It’s supremely practical because it’s based on reality, and reality can be tested and verified. As long as you say things that make logical sense, and are backed up by verifiable facts, your credibility can not be undermined. It will stand on its own.
You also have to keep in mind that people may not act or decide immediately on hearing you, so even if you can get them fired up, the excitement might wear off but the facts on the ground won’t change.
Of course, content is also ethical. Unfortunately, the world has too often fallen victim to people who managed to appear credible even though the content of their messages was false and or harmful. These manipulators know how to pull the levers of credibility for their own immoral ends; I hope you are not one of them, and that’s all I’ll say about that.
Of course, we all know that content is important, so how can we actually use this to improve our credibility?
Be sure of your facts
The power of internet search engines gives us more information at our immediate disposal than anyone in history could have ever dreamed possible, but at the risk of filtering out the BS from the truth. Make sure your information is from a trusted source, or cross-check it against other sources whenever possible.
Know them cold
Of course, you don’t always have to have knowledge at the tip of your tongue. It might be enough to know where to get the relevant knowledge to bring to the table, but far more impressive and credible to others is the person who has a firm grasp of the relevant material and can discuss it fluently and at length from memory.
Get your own
Even more credible is knowledge gained through personal observation; it’s difficult for anyone else to challenge, because you may have had unique access to it. The key here is to make sure you have a personal acquaintance with the facts, by getting to the scene and observing first-hand as much as possible.
Anticipate depth, breadth and height of questioning
Superficial knowledge of your material may be just enough to get you into trouble. You don’t want your presentation to be like a movie set of a western town with all front and no back. Any favorable initial impression can be quickly lost if you can’t answer the deeper questions others might have. And, you can be sure that if your audience consists of higher-level executives, they will drill down to help themselves understand what you’re saying, or to test your mastery of the subject.
Pressure-test your ideas
Research and analysis are not enough—you’ve got to test your position against challenges for maximum confidence. Ideas are like organisms: survival depends on adapting effectively to competition. Carefully consider the position of the listener, think of their counterarguments and then write down effective responses. Expose weaknesses and shore them up, and then enlist others to try to pick holes in your position.
Don’t get out in front of your facts
The surest way to avoid credibility loss is to thoroughly master your material, or to speak only about that which you are expert in. That is not always possible, of course, so the next best thing is to make sure that you don’t overstate your expertise or claim more than your facts allow. Be honest about your limitations if asked, or even before you deliver the material. (There is a fine line, here, of course, because admitting your limitations up front can damage your credibility.)
Keep facts and opinions separate
There is nothing wrong with using personal opinion to support your arguments. In fact, in most persuasive efforts you will not have an airtight case that can be proven with mathematical rigor. Some of the information you might need is simply unavailable, unknowable, or untested.
If you do use opinion, make sure you are transparent about it. Be honest about the difference between fact and opinion with others. More importantly, perhaps, be honest with yourself about the difference.
If you follow these rules carefully, you will have lighthouse content and you’ll be able to defend your credibility against any battleship bully in the room.
Other Articles in this Series
A very useful ingredient when being sold
We all know how important it is to be a critical thinker, especially so today, when we are deluged with so much misinformation and it seems like we are being sold almost every single minute. That’s why most of us find it easy to turn on our skeptical radar whenever someone we don’t know pitches us with an idea that’s a little different or seems too good to be true.
But, in terms of cognitive resources, skepticism and critical thinking are expensive. It’s mentally exhausting to be on your guard at all times. According to what Daniel Kahneman calls the law of least effort, we gravitate to the easiest thinking path when we can. So, it’s tempting to simply trust and accept what the other person is saying.
Trust is comfortable. Trust is a shortcut. And trust that is built up through long years of familiarity and experience with someone is can be an extremely reliable and useful shortcut. In fact, unless you’re on a desert island somewhere, it’s impossible to live without it.
The problem is that we generally overestimate our ability to accurately size people up and determine their trustworthiness. Regardless of how smart we think we are, we use shortcuts to form our judgments of trust.
We’ve heard the phrase that Reagan made famous: “trust but verify”. But while trust is comfortable, verifying is hard. And sometimes, that comfort gets us into trouble.
Crafty persuaders know this, and they work hard to establish the conditions to relax our skepticism. Bernie Madoff belonged to the right organizations, he gained trust vicariously through word of mouth, and he worked hard to produce the bogus results for so long.
But the crafty persuaders may be the least of our worries. It’s the sincere persuaders, who truly believe in what they’re selling, that can get us into the most trouble. We may need our skepticism more than ever, not only to keep from going down the wrong path but to save others from themselves.
Here’s where I’m conflicted. I strongly promote all the things that make for successful persuasion: passion, stories, credentials, etc. But none of those factors, or even all of those factors combined in one package, guarantee that it’s a good idea. Whenever the following ingredients are present, remind yourself to dial up the skepticism:
Passion. I put this number one, because when someone is passionate about what they do, they almost always ignore any contradictory evidence or differing interpretations.
Stories. I love stories just as much as anyone else. Stories suck you in, and get you to suspend your disbelief. Of course, good stories don’t mean the person isn’t telling the truth, but remember that the plural of anecdote is not data.
Credentials. They are generally a reliable guide to credibility, but watch the limitations. Peyton Manning is a great quarterback, but that doesn’t mean I trust his taste in pizzas. Besides, if the person speaking is highly important, they may have cut corners themselves, because they have grown too accustomed to being believed because of who they are.
Confidence. As pack animals, we respond to outward shows of strength, and when we reflect that confidence back to the speaker, it just reinforces it. It never hurts to scratch beneath the surface by asking a tough question.
Evidence. Pay attention to the diagonals. When someone says that successful companies did these three things, have they said anything about the companies that did those three things and failed, or the companies that did not do those three things and did succeed?
Optimism. I learned early in my banking days to use the borrower’s worst-case projections as my best case. An engineer in my Precision Questioning class once taught me that any projection that looks like a hockey stick on a graph is wrong.
When you’re selling your ideas, every one of those ingredients can help. When you’re being sold, every one of those ingredients should be taken with a pinch of salt.
Have you ever had the dubious pleasure of presenting a proposal to someone who had a knack for asking exactly the right question to get right to the heart of the matter, or to expose all the things you didn’t think of before you went in?
How would you like to make sure you won’t get exposed if you have to do it again, or better yet, become one of those people yourself?
Many senior executives have developed that ability through years of experience in evaluating proposals and ideas, but there is a way to shortcut the learning process. It’s a powerful tool kit developed by Vervago called Precision Questioning, and I like it so much that it is the only material I teach that I’ve licensed from someone else.
Precision questions can be used to test the soundness of an idea, whether you’re evaluating someone else’s or if you want to test your own idea before putting your credibility on the line. I’ve personally found it useful to prepare for critical presentations and sales calls.
It comprises seven types of questions:
Go/No Go: Should we have this discussion right now, and if so, how should we talk about it? Just asking these types of questions could save untold hours in unproductive meetings.
Clarification: What do you mean? One of the quickest ways to spot the shallowness of someone’s thinking is to determine how vague their terms are. Clarification questions can clarify meaning or quantity. Remember the Mars orbiter that missed its target because of confusion whether a set of measurements was metric or imperial units? One simple clarification could have saved hundreds of millions of dollars.
Assumption: What are the assumptions you are making? We couldn’t function without assumptions, but sometimes we need to reexamine them, especially in a dynamic environment. In 2003, we assumed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. As I’ve written before, there are at least a dozen different types of assumptions that people can make, and they are the hardest to uncover because we tend to take them for granted.
Data: What’s the quality of the evidence? Is it accurate, relevant and sufficient? Persuasive communication is fundamentally about credibility, and credibility ultimately rests on being right, and being able to show you’re right with sound evidence.
Causes: What’s causing the situation that needs to be changed or resolved? Are we addressing the problem at the correct level? Sometimes we need to drill all the way down to root causes, and sometimes a band-aid will suffice. (If you’re not sure, ask a few go/no go or consequences questions).
Consequences: What happens if we do this? What happens if we don’t? What are possible side effects? What are the opportunity costs?
Actions: What should we do about this? What specific time-bound steps will everyone take? How does this align with our strategies or other initiatives?
For every one of the seven types of questions, there are various subsets and an endless variety of specific drill-downs that you could ask depending on the situation, and on the answers you get. Great questioners can easily ask dozens in a brief conversation, because they usually know precisely what they’re looking for. The questions are not a script that are followed in any particular order; you still have to use your own judgment and experience to direct the conversation
There is an endless variety of ways you can express your message to increase their chance of being accepted by others, many of which I’ve written about in this blog. But in the end, the best way to get your ideas to stick is to have good ideas. The best way to ensure your ideas are good is to think about them carefully and pressure test them through a rigorous—and precise—questioning process.
It is the #1 skill for salespeople.
I got the idea for this post while reading Dave Brock’s post about the importance of letting salespeople think, and the latest HBR offering from Matt Dixon and co., “Dismantling the Sales Machine”. Both articles were addressed to sales management, urging them to allow salespeople to use their own judgment.
While I agree with both of them, it’s important to stress that the individual salesperson also has a personal obligation to make sure that they are properly using their most important selling tool.
It reminded me of a story that Richard Feynman, one of the brightest and most interesting scientific figures of the 20th century, told in his memoirs, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character)
When Feynman was a kid, he was one of those bright nerds that liked to figure out how things worked, and he taught himself how to take apart and fix radios, which in the 1930s were cumbersome boxes full of vacuum tubes and electrical components. He quickly developed a reputation for his skill, and friends of his parents would pay him to come over and repair their radios. Most of the fixes were pretty easy, but one day a man showed him a radio that would make an ear-splitting noise when it was first turned on, but then gradually begin working normally.
Feynman listened carefully, but rather than opening the back of the radio, he then began to pace around the room. After a couple of minutes, the man impatiently asked what he was doing. “I’m thinking,” Feynman replied. What he was doing was trying to imagine what could cause the problem. He finally figured out that the tubes were getting power and heating up in the wrong order, so he opened the radio, rearranged them, and it worked perfectly.
Feynman said the man became his greatest word of mouth advertiser. He went around telling people the kid was a genius, saying “He fixes radios by thinking!” He never thought it was possible.
I wonder how many customers would think it’s possible for a salesperson to solve their problems by thinking? Most of them probably haven’t seen the feat performed. They tell the salesperson about their problems, but don’t see them hesitate before immediately pitching a one-size-fits-all solution. They encounter sales reps who have read their annual reports, but haven’t turned the knowledge gained into practical insights. They endure presentations that have been clearly cranked out by someone else.
If customers do encounter a salesperson who manifestly thinks before offering a solution, do you suppose they might tell all their friends about it?
Feynman’s story exemplifies analytical thinking, but complex sales require several other forms of thinking in addition. Here are a few, with some questions to help you think about them:
Flexible thinking: Can you thoughtfully plan a sales call, and then scrap the entire plan when an unanticipated problem or opportunity comes up? Can you deviate from company policy in a pinch, and then defend your decision back at the office?
Outside-in thinking: Can you think about the situation, from the customer’s point of view? Can you demonstrate the three levels of empathy? Can you truly listen with your brain and not your ears?
Win-win thinking: Can you figure out strategically how to grow the pie during a negotiation and not just tactically scrap for every sliver? Can you understand your customer’s business deeply enough to offer innovative ways to grow their profits?
Long-term thinking: Can you patiently build and follow an account plan that increases customer profits, builds barriers to entry and solidifies trusting relationships high and wide? Will you pass up the quick strike that is not in the client’s best interest?
Self-aware thinking: Jeff Immelt says you have to be “massively self-aware”. Can you take an honest inventory of your strengths and weaknesses and devise a continuous learning and deliberate practice plan? Do you make it a habit to conduct after-action reviews?
