It only hurts for a little while
I had one of those moments this weekend that vividly reminded me of something salespeople know is true but often don’t do a good enough job of reminding their customers.
I rolled out the bottom section of our dishwasher to load some dishes but didn’t pay close attention to what I was doing, because I was startled by a loud crash as the whole section jumped its tracks and rolled onto the floor.
My wife came running into the kitchen attracted by the first noise, which was of course immediately followed by some forcefully expressed choice words. My first coherent sentence was “This thing is a piece of crap! That’s what I get for not spending a little more for the next level up.”
Then the thought hit me that if I had paid a premium for the dishwasher when I bought it, the pain of the higher price might have lasted until I paid the credit card bill, but that’s the last time I ever would have thought about it. Yet, because I made the cheap decision, I’m reminded of it almost every day. The pain lingers in the form of dissatisfaction, frustration and workarounds. I didn’t know it at the time, but paying a lower price once continues to cost me now.
It’s obviously a simple point, but one that we need to constantly remind our customers (and ourselves) every time they’re tempted to try to save a little in the short run by compromising on the things that will cost them much more in the long run. Short term gain, long term pain.
Steep but worth it
Many parents want to see their kids grow up to be doctors, engineers or accountants, because of the prestige that comes from being known as a professional. When you see the diploma and the certification on the wall you know that the person you’re relying on has met certain minimum standards set by a responsible organization, so you give them the benefit of the doubt for respect and trust.
So where does that leave the rest of us, the ordinary entrepreneurs, salespeople, managers, small business owners and such? Because we don’t have that built-in shortcut to trust, we may have to work a bit harder at it, but there is no reason that we can’t earn the same level of respect as the folks who have the certificates on their walls.
Professionalism is a way of acting. As I’ve written before, professional is as professional does. It’s also an identity, or an approach to life and to interactions with others that speaks loudly about who we are.
You don’t need a professional certifying body to be professional, but you do have to meet some rigorous standards:
Accountability for client outcomes. When my son was an infant, he had a seizure from a high fever that sent him to the hospital. Both his pediatricians showed up at the hospital—wearing tuxes, because they were at a wedding for the daughter of one of them. Yes, it was above and beyond the call of duty, but I still remember it 26 years later. Professionals always put the client first.
Fiduciary responsibility. Honesty and integrity are a given, so I won’t harp on them here. But if you want to be a professional, you have a fiduciary responsibility to your clients to act in their best interests, to never violate a trust, and to maintain absolute confidentiality.
Continuous learning and professional study. Professions never stand still, and clients would much rather work with someone who has ten years’ experience than one who has one year’s experience ten times. As a personal professional, you don’t have someone telling you what to learn; you have to take charge of your own education.
Affiliations. You may not have annual tax-deductible meetings in Hawaii, but you do have a choice of whom you choose to associate yourself with and the company you keep. When professionally-minded individuals get together the standards above become socially self-enforcing.
Pride in your work. I worked construction while in college, and once asked a master carpenter why he took so much care with some joints that no one would ever see. He told me that he would know. That kind of pride drives personal professionals to do their best work regardless of who is watching.
It may be too late for you to go to medical school, but if you want the respect that comes from being a professional, the path is wide open to you—every single day.
Today being Monday, let’s start with something simple and very old school: how to take notes. There is an old saying that the palest ink is better than the strongest memory, and I learned a long time ago that good notes are critical to memory, follow-up, and to encourage meaningful dialogue.
But it was only a few years ago that I learned about this note-taking hack called the Cornell note-taking system, which is one of the most deceptively simple yet powerful tools I’ve found to improve listening and learning. Although it was devised by an academic to be used in college lectures, you can use it during sales calls, meetings, and telephone conversations.
How it works
All you have to do is draw a vertical line about one-third of the way across your page, sovaldi dividing it into two sections. The wide section is the notes column and the narrow is the cue column. Take notes on what the speaker is saying in the wide section, and use the narrow section to jot down your thoughts and reactions, which they call “cues”. That’s all there is to it! (And if you’re too lazy or fastidious to draw a line, TOPS sells note pads designed exactly for the system, as you can see in the picture.)
Why it works
I’m not sure why it works, but I think it’s because it gives you a greater awareness of what’s happening during the dialogue. When you are listening to someone, you can process verbal information about four times as fast as they can speak. All this extra processing time leads to two conversations going on in your head at the same time. The first is taking in what the other person is saying, and the second is reacting and making judgments (or thinking about something else entirely). I believe that jotting down cues frees up your working memory to concentrate fully on what is being said in the moment.
While we often think about the post-meeting benefits of notes, I find that the greatest benefit of taking notes in this way is to squeeze more juice out of the conversation. In dialogue, people have the strangest habit of giving you more than you asked for when you ask a good question. This system allows you to quickly jot down a reminder to come back to something the other person said, without interrupting the main thread or trying to keep it in your mind. I remember a role play I coached once where the “customer” mentioned about five different needs in one sentence; the seller—who was not taking notes–pursued one need and forgot to come back to the other four.
Imagine the benefit if later in the meeting, he had said, “I’d like to come back to something you said about _____”. He would have taken the conversation into a deeper level while also showing how closely he had been listening.
The mere fact that you’re taking notes can send a strong signal that you care about what they’re saying, and when you refer to your notes to probe further on a topic, you prove that you’re not just going through the motions.
Of course, there’s a post-meeting benefit as well. After the meeting, when you try to recall the conversation, it helps you clarify in your own mind who said what. My own addition to the system is to draw a check box next to each follow-up item, which provides a quick visual reminder if anything remains to be done.
If only it were that easy…
Next month I will get my renewal notice in the mail for my Dolphins season tickets. My wife and I have had the tickets for almost 30 years, but very year for the past half-dozen or so I’ve struggled with the decision. It should be a no-brainer: I’m unhappy with the performance of the team, don’t see much evidence that it will change soon, and quite frankly don’t enjoy attending the games nearly as much as I used to.
But so far I keep forking out the money, and I blame a mental bias called the endowment effect and its close relations, status quo bias and loss aversion[1]. The endowment effect means that having ownership of something makes us value it more; we ask for more to give something up than we would be willing to pay to acquire it. If I were completely rational, my decision would not be swayed at all by the fact that I already own the tickets. Decisions only carry consequences in the future, so what’s in the past should have no effect at all. If I were not already an owner, and I received an invitation to buy tickets for the very same seats at the same price, would I buy? That should be the question I ask myself. I know the answer is no, but I persist in making the same flawed decision every single year.
The patron saint of scientific persuaders, Daniel Kahneman, ran an experiment once in which students were put into three groups chosen at random. The first group, called “Sellers” were given attractive coffee mugs with the university insignia on them (which they knew were available at the university store for $6), and given the option of selling them at any price they wanted. The second group, called “Buyers”, were given the option of bidding on the mugs at their chosen price. The third group, called “Choosers” were given the option of receiving a mug or a certain amount of cash at their chosen price. Here are the results:
Sellers $7.12
Buyers $2.87
Choosers $3.12
What do the numbers mean? First, most people would not buy a mug for more than $2.87, but if they have one, they would not part from it for less than $7.12. It’s a wonder anything ever gets sold. But the Sellers and Choosers comparison is even stranger, because it’s exactly the same choice! Both groups could go home with either the mug or the cash, but possession of the item made it more than twice as valuable.
Here’s a specific negotiation example of the endowment effect in action. A friend told me about some work done for his organization, in which the architect had gone beyond the original instructions and over-designed the project, leading to unexpected cost overruns. There was an outstanding balance on the original contract of $5k, but the architect then sent an additional invoice for an extra $15,000 of work over what he had agreed to. John called him to protest, but the architect would not listen, so John said, “Listen, I’m getting ready to leave for the airport, and I have a check for $5k I’m going to put in the mail right now, and that’s it. But if you don’t agree, I’ll tear up this check and you won’t get a penny.” The architect asked how much time he had to think it over, to which John replied, “Ten seconds.” He took the money.
When John said he was going to give him $5k, that registered in the architect’s mind as ownership. In this case a bird in the hand was worth three in the bush to him, because a guaranteed $5k trumped a speculative $15k.
Knowing about the endowment effect is useful in selling. If you can get the buyer to take mental ownership of your solution by envisioning what life would be like with it, they are likely to be more tenacious in holding on to it when it comes time to decide. In my own selling, I’m sometimes asked if I can shorten a particular course. Because I won’t compromise on quality by trying to rush things, I say, “Sure. Which modules do you want to take out?” When they try to answer that question, they find it hard to part with the parts they already “own”.
When you think about it, you can see the endowment effect in action almost everywhere, such as holding on to investments too long, keeping long-held opinions long past their sell-by date, sticking to flawed strategies because they are “our way” of doing things, etc. As Oliver Wendell Holmes said:
“It is in the nature of a man’s mind. A thing which you enjoyed and used as your own for a long time, whether property or opinion, takes root in your being and cannot be torn away without your resenting the act and trying to defend yourself, however you came by it.”
Of course, just because it’s irrational, doesn’t mean it’s wrong; without it, the world would be a much more unstable place, divorces would be more common, and so on. Some people would call it loyalty.
So, next month–will I be logical, loyal,, or just plain dumb? Stay tuned…
[1] Or it may be because if I do give up the tickets, and they end up having a great season, I’ll feel foolish. (Although given their track record, that’s not very likely to happen.)
