To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others (17 page)

People often find potential more interesting than accomplishment because it’s more uncertain, the researchers argue. That uncertainty can lead people to think more deeply about the person they’re evaluating—and the more intensive processing that requires can lead to generating more and better reasons why the person is a good choice. So next time you’re selling yourself, don’t fixate only on what you achieved yesterday. Also emphasize the promise of what you could accomplish tomorrow.

Finding an Off-ramp

Once you’ve found the problem and the proper frame, you have one more step. You need to give people an off-ramp.

A study about a college food drive illustrates this point. Students were asked to nominate two groups of peers—those “least likely” to contribute to a food drive and those “most likely” to do so. Then researchers divided each group in half. They sent half of the least likely group and half of the most likely group a letter, addressed to each of the students by name, asking them to donate a specific type of food and including a map showing where they could drop it off. A few days later, researchers gave these students a reminder phone call.

The other half of each group—again, half of the least likely group and half of the most likely—received a different letter. Researchers addressed it “Dear student” rather than to a specific person. The letter didn’t ask for a particular kind of food and didn’t include a map. These students didn’t receive a reminder phone call, either.

What mattered more—the disposition of the students or the content of the letters?

Among the students in the least likely group who received the less detailed letter, a whopping 0 percent contributed to the food drive. But their counterparts, who were more disposed to giving but who’d received the same letter, didn’t exactly wow researchers with their benevolence. Only 8 percent of them made a food donation.

However, the letter that gave students details on how to act had a huge effect. Twenty-five percent of students deemed least likely to contribute actually made a contribution when they received the letter with a concrete appeal, a map, and a location for donating. What moved them wasn’t only the request itself, but that the requesters had provided them an off-ramp for getting to their destination. A specific request accompanied by a clear way to get it done ended up with the least likely group donating food at
three times
the rate of the most likely who hadn’t been given a clear path of action.
²⁰

The lesson: Clarity on how to think without clarity on how to act can leave people unmoved.

—

T
his chapter is also an off-ramp of sorts. I hope you’ve seen in Part Two that the qualities necessary for sales and non-sales selling today—the new ABCs—include a keen mind, a deft touch, and a sense of possibility. They’ve shown you how to be. But you also need to know what to do. For that, once you’ve looked at the Clarity Sample Case, please turn to Part Three.

SAMPLE CASE

Clarity

Clarify others’ motives with two “irrational” questions.

Michael Pantalon is a research scientist at the Yale School of Medicine and a leading authority on “motivational interviewing.” This technique, which originated in therapy and counseling but has since spread to other realms, seeks to spark behavior change not by coercing people, promising them rewards, or threatening them with punishments, but by tapping their inner drives. And the most effective tools for excavating people’s buried drives are questions.

However, for the purposes of moving others, all questions are not created equal, Pantalon says. “I’ve learned that rational questions are ineffective for motivating resistant people. Instead I’ve found that irrational questions actually motivate people better,” he has written.

So suppose your daughter is hemming and hawing, delaying and denying, and generally resisting studying for a big end-of-the-year algebra test. Using Pantalon’s approach, you wouldn’t say, “Young lady, you must study,” or “Please, please, please study for the test.” Instead, you’d ask her two questions.

Question 1. “On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 meaning ‘not the least bit ready’ and 10 meaning ‘totally ready,’ how ready are you to study?”

After she offers her answer, move to:

Question 2. “Why didn’t you pick a lower number?”

“This is the question that catches everybody off guard,” Pantalon writes in his book
Instant Influence
. Asking why the number isn’t
lower
is the catalyst. Most people who resist doing or believing something don’t have a binary, off-on, yes-no position. So don’t ask a binary, off-on, yes-no question. If your prospect has even a faint desire to move, Pantalon says, asking her to locate herself on that 1-to-10 scale can expose an apparent “No” as an actual “Maybe.”

Even more important, as your daughter explains her reasons for being a 4 rather than a 3, she begins announcing her own reasons for studying. She moves from defending her current behavior to articulating why, at some level, she wants to behave differently. And that, says Pantalon, allows her to clarify her personal, positive, and intrinsic motives for studying, which increases the chances she actually will.

So, on a scale of 1 to 10, how ready are you to try Pantalon’s two-question technique? And why isn’t your number lower?

Try a jolt of the unfamiliar.

Clarity, we’ve learned, depends on comparison. But many times we become so rutted in our own ways that we scarcely notice what we’re doing or why we’re doing it—which can impair our ability to bring clarity to others. Sometimes, as Tufts University psychologist Sam Sommers says, “it takes the jolt of the unfamiliar to remind you just how blind you are to your regular surroundings.”

So give yourself one of the following:

Mini Jolt:
Sit on the opposite end of the conference table at your next meeting. Travel home from work using a different route from normal. Instead of ordering what you usually do at your favorite restaurant, choose the eleventh item on the menu.

Half Jolt:
Spend a day immersed in an environment not typically your own. If you’re a schoolteacher, hang out at a friend’s law office. If you’re an accountant, take an afternoon and spend it with a lifeguard or park ranger.

Full Jolt:
Travel to another country, with a culture different from your own. You’ll likely return jolted—and clarified.

Become a curator.

In the old days, our challenge was
accessing
information. These days, our challenge is
curating
it. To make sense of the world, for ourselves and those we hope to move, we must wade through a mass of material flowing at us every day—selecting what’s relevant and discarding what’s not. Trouble is, most of us don’t have any method to attack the madness. Fortunately, Beth Kanter—an expert in nonprofits, technology, and social media—has created a three-step process for curation newbies.

1. Seek.
   Once you’ve defined the area in which you’d like to curate (for example, middle school education reform or the latest skateboard fashion trends or the virtues and vices of mortgage-backed securities), put together a list of the best sources of information. Then set aside time to scan those sources regularly. Kanter recommends at least fifteen minutes, two times a day. As you scan, gather the most interesting items.
   
2. Sense.
   Here’s where you add the real value, by creating meaning out of the material you’ve assembled. This can be as simple as making an annotated list of Web links or even regularly maintaining your own blog. She recommends tending to this list of resources every day.
   
3. Once you’ve collected the good stuff and organized it in a meaningful way, you’re ready to share it with your colleagues, your prospects, or your entire social network. You can do this through a regular e-mail or your own newsletter, or by using Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. As you share, you’ll help others see their own situations in a new light and possibly reveal hidden problems that you can solve.
   

“Putting content curation into practice is part art form, part science, but mostly about daily practice,” writes Kanter. For more, see her “Content Curation Primer”: http://www.bethkanter.org/content-curation-101/.

Learn how to ask better questions.

In the new world of sales, being able to ask the right questions is more valuable than producing the right answers. Unfortunately, our schools often have the opposite emphasis. They teach us how to answer, but not how to ask. The folks at the Right Question Institute are trying to correct that imbalance. They’ve come up with a method that educators can use to help students learn to ask better questions—and that can assist even those of us who graduated back in the twentieth century.

Before your next sales call, or maybe in advance of that awkward upcoming meeting with your ex-spouse or annoying boss, give RQI’s step-by-step Question Formulation Technique a try.

1. Produce your questions.

Generate a list of questions by writing down as many as you can think of, without stopping to judge, discuss, or answer any of them. Don’t edit. Just write the questions that pop into your head. Change any statements to questions.

2. Improve your questions.

Go through your list of questions and categorize each one as either “closed-ended” (questions that can be answered with “yes” or “no,” or just one word) or “open-ended” (questions that require an explanation and cannot be answered with “yes” or “no,” or just one word). Then, looking over the two types of questions, think about the advantages and disadvantages of each variety. Finally, for a few closed-ended questions, create an open-ended one, and for a few open-ended questions, create a closed-ended one.

3. Prioritize your questions.

Choose your three most important questions. Think about why you chose them. Then edit them one more time so they are ultra-clear.

Through this process you can identify a trio of powerful questions that you can ask the person on the other side of the table. And those questions can help both of you clarify where you are and where you should be going. Find more information on this at: http://www.rightquestion.org.

Read these books.

Several books discuss some of the themes in this chapter—from framing arguments to finding problems to curating information. These are five of my favorites.

Influence: Science and Practice
by Robert Cialdini. Cialdini has done more to advance the scholarship of persuasion than anyone in the world. This book is his classic. You need to read it. Seriously. Go get it now. His public workshops, which I’ve attended, are also excellent. More information at: http://www.influenceatwork.com.

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. The Heath brothers are worthy successors to Cialdini. Their first book, which came out in 2007, is a gem. It will teach you how to create messages that stick, through the principles of simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions, and stories.

Switch
by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. Three years after
Made to Stick
, the Heath brothers came out with another book that’s equally good. This one is about change—which they’ll tell you depends on the emotional elephant and the rational rider working in concert. (Trust me—it makes sense.)

Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think
by Brian Wansink. The opposite of clarity is murkiness. And murkiness’s close cousin is mindlessness—the state of being unaware. Wansink shows how mindlessness allows us to fall prey to hidden persuaders that make us overeat without even knowing it.

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness
by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein. Two professors harvest the field of behavioral economics to reveal how altering “choice architecture” can nudge people to make better decisions about their lives.

Ask the Five Whys.

Those of you with toddlers in the house are familiar with, and perhaps annoyed by, the constant why-why-why. But there’s a reason the little people are constantly asking that question. They’re trying to figure out how things work in the crazy world we live in. The folks at IDEO, the award-winning innovation and design firm, have taken a lesson from the under-five set in one of the methods they use to find design problems.

They call their technique “Five Whys.” It works like this: When you want to figure out what kind of problem someone has, ask a “Why?” question. Then, in response to the answer, ask another “Why?” And again and again, for a total of five whys.

Yes, it might annoy the person you’re asking. But you might be surprised by what you uncover. As IDEO explains it, “This exercise forces people to examine and express the underlying reasons for their behavior and attitudes.” And that can help you discover the hidden problems that most need solving.

Find the one percent.

A long time ago, when I was in law school, I took a course called “International Business Transactions,” taught by a professor named Harold Hongju Koh. I don’t remember much about the particulars of what we learned in class that semester—a few things about letters of credit, I think, and some stuff about the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. But I’ve never forgotten something Professor Koh told our class one spring afternoon.

He said that in an attempt to understand the law—or, for that matter, just about anything—the key was to focus on what he termed the “one percent.” Don’t get lost in the crabgrass of details, he urged us. Instead, think about the essence of what you’re exploring—the one percent that gives life to the other ninety-nine. Understanding that one percent, and being able to explain it to others, is the hallmark of strong minds and good attorneys.