Sales & Persuasive Techniques: Clarity: Making Your Message Count – Part 6/15

What we want when we are selling and persuading is we want to bring clarity to people’s understanding, and clarity is simply the ability to see a situation in a fresh light and help people surface problems they didn’t realize that they had. Now, this has two more specific dimensions to it in the world of influence and persuasion.

One of them is this- it used to be that you could be an effective persuader if you have access to information that nobody else had. In fact, in many ways, expertise is defined by having privileged access to information, whether in financial services, or in medicine, or any specialized field. What made you an expert was your access. Today, everybody has access. So the world is moving from access to information as an advantage to the ability to curate information. There’s so much information out there. The central ability is, can you make sense of this information? Can you separate the signal from the noise in that information?

This other dimension of clarity is moving from problem-solving to problem-finding. A lot of people over the years say I’m not really in sales. I’m a problem-solver. And you know what? God bless you for being a problem-solver. It’s just less important now. Because if your customer or prospect knows precisely what the problem is, they can often find the solution without you. They don’t need you very much. Where they need you more is when they don’t know what their problem is or they’re wrong about their problem, and therefore, the premium has shifted from problem-solving to problem-finding.

That’s what clarity is. See things in a fresh light, surface problems people didn’t realize that they have, move from information access to information curation, from solving existing problems to identifying the hidden problems.

Find Problems, Not Solutions

Let me give you an example of the difference between problem-solving and problem-finding. Imagine this, I am shopping for a vacuum cleaner, right? Now if my problem is that I need a vacuum cleaner, I don’t need any help from anybody else, right? I can go online and find 87 different varieties of vacuum cleaners. I can stack them up by price. I can find the cheapest one, the one that’s the most energy-efficient, okay? If my problem is that I want a vacuum cleaner, I don’t need any help, right?

However, is a vacuum cleaner really my problem? Because ultimately, right? What do I want? I want clean floors. So maybe, the reason that my floors are not clean is that there’s stuff getting in through the windows because my screens are falling apart. Maybe I need new screens. Maybe my carpet isn’t right and collecting too much dust. Maybe I need a new carpet. You know what? Maybe I should just buck up and get a cleaning service and not buy a vacuum cleaner but get someone else to clean my floors, all right?

I have to identify what my problem is. My problem is that I want clean floors. My problem is not necessarily that I want a vacuum cleaner. And so, that’s the difference between problem-solving, getting a vacuum cleaner, and problem-finding, wanting my floors to be clean. So instead of asking the person, what kind of vacuum cleaner are you looking for? Ask them to tell you about their house. Then probe and probe and probe, like that.

And so, with problem-finding, you actually are shining rays of light. You’re saying, you know what? This isn’t your problem. And what you want is you want the moment., that startling moment of clarity where the customer says, Oh my gosh, that was it was! You want to see their reckoning of clarity. You want to see their eyes light up.

The Power of the Five “Why’s”

One technique I really like for finding problems is a technique called the Five Whys. The gist of this exercise is to try to act like a 4-year-old. Because the 4-year-olds are always asking the why, why, and why’s. So, when you’re presented with an issue, ask why five times.

Let me give you an example. Suppose that I’m a management consultant and I am trying to sell you- and you’re a CEO – on my services, my glorious management and consulting services. And you say, I am not interested. I say, why? And you say you can’t afford it. I say, why can’t you afford it? And you say, the reason I can’t afford it is that we’re actually cutting our budget right now. Cutting your budget? Why?

Third why. We’re cutting our budget because, actually, we didn’t get enough revenue from this one product line of ours, and it’s really hobbling our whole company. And as a consequence, all across the company, we have to make some cuts. Why didn’t the product line work?

That’s our fourth why. Our product line didn’t work, I think, because one of our most talented leaders left, and her replacement was a complete dud. Why was that? Well, our hiring practices are not very effective.

That’s our fifth why. So you say, you know what? As it happens, I can help you improve your hiring practices. I have some techniques, and some consulting that will help you improve your hiring practice. And so I am going to come in there as a strategy consultant. But if there is a legitimate offering, and you can’t just make this up, of how to improve your hiring, all of a sudden, I’ve gotten into the real problem. The real problem is not that they need a strategy consultant. They need to get better at hiring. And I can do them a great service by asking those five whys and being as annoying as a typical four-year-old.

Become an Expert

If you are a salesperson, the way to deduce what someone’s problem actually is by using a lot of the skills that we’ve been talking about, by asking questions, and also by being an expert. There is a premium now on expertise. So let’s say that you are in the vacuum cleaner business. You don’t only want to be in the vacuum cleaner business. You want to be in the home and office cleanliness business, seriously. Because what you might be able to do, is you might be able to say – okay, maybe you want a vacuum cleaner but let me talk to you about some other options, because we have actually partnered with a cleaning service. Maybe that’s a more effective way of doing what you want to do.

We actually recognize that certain carpets are better than others, but if you have a certain type of carpet we also sell this kind of treatment that will allow your carpets to be better. You wanna know truly everything there is to know about cleanliness. And here’s the thing, and it is really important – expertise matters more than ever but the nature of expertise has changed.

You think about real estate, one reason we have had realtors for a long time is that they have the password to the listing service. But now, everybody has it. So how do you become an expert in real estate? You know everything about houses and apartments in the area that you serve. You have a way of understanding your customers so you know precisely what kind of house is right for them. You know everything about financing. That’s how you become an expert. You don’t rely on just access to information. You rely on being able to take a wealth of information, make sense of it and use it to help your customer or your prospects, solve the real problem.

Information Curation

Information curation is more important than ever because we have more information than ever. And so while the customers and the prospects and the people on the other side of the persuasion table have the ability to get all that information, they don’t necessarily mean that they know how to make sense of it. And that’s where your expertise comes in.

I’ll give you an example of this. In the old days – in the early days of the internet – you would have people come into the doctor’s offices. And before the appointment, they would go on AOL, they would print out some stuff that they have found, and then bring it to their doctor and say, Doctor, you know what? I’ve done my research. And I am presenting these two symptoms and you should prescribe this medicine. And doctors were appalled by that. They were outraged by that. What’s happening? Now you have, in American Medical Schools, courses on how young physicians help out the patients on how to work through that information. So instead of saying, how dare you to bring that pile of printouts to me, it sullies my white jacket, you instead say, let me see what you’ve got there.

Okay, this study that, that study have been overturned by other subsequent research, this actually is not a reliable source, this one here is pretty good. Focus on that. I tell you what, here’s another link that you should check out that will help your understanding of this. Here’s an article that summarizes this very well. What you’re doing is the patient doesn’t know necessarily a huge amount about medicine. They are just collecting all this information. What you can do as a persuader is to help them sift through it, help them find out what’s meaningful, and help them find out what’s reliable.

And that’s what curators do. Think about the curator in a museum. They don’t just say, whatever you got artists, bring it in, and we’ll put them on the wall. They are very careful about what goes on the wall so that it is coherent. And that’s what you, as a persuader, have to do in this world of information overload. Curate information. That’s where expertise comes from, not from accessing it.

Find the 1%

So long ago, in a moment of youthful indiscretion, Dan went to Law school. He took a course called International Business Transactions. He remembered this course very well because he sat next to his then-girlfriend and now wife, in that course. She was one of the outstanding students and it was one of those situations where the professor would ask him a question and he would totally bomb it. And he then would go to the first sitting next to him, which was now his wife, and she would just nail it every single time.

Therefore, he does not remember anything from that class but clearly remembers one deep life lesson, that is invaluable in the realm of sales and persuasion, which is to focus on the 1%. Don’t get lost in the weeds. There’s a body of law. A body of knowledge. What’s the 1* that makes the 99% understandable?

Let’s say that you are writing a novel or a screenplay, right? What’s the 1%? You have somebody with a goal who has obstacles along the way to achieving that goal. So don’t get lost into saying, oh man, should I use the word he said, he averred, or he argued? Don’t get bogged down on that if you’re feeling stuck. What’s the one percent of that story that you are telling? You’ve got a hero. The hero has a goal. There are obstacles in the way of that goal. And he uses this for himself a lot. And that truly is one of the most important things he learned in all that many years in law school, which is when he gets bogged down in the details, if he’s trying to explain something to somebody, the way you bring clarity is to ask yourself, what is the 1%?

If you get that 1%, the other 99% will fall into place. Getting to the 1% helps in at least two dimensions here. First of all, it allows you to present your ideas with clarity so that even the details are designed to amplify the things that matter most. It helps you understand someone else’s perspective as well because if you know their 1%, you’re going to be better off finding the real problem to solve.

Less is More

When we’re making our case, we’re trying to convince somebody, we often wrestle with the idea of how many ideas should we present. How many arguments should we offer? And a general rule of thumb is that we have overvalued addition and undervalued subtraction. That less is often more, that taking things out is often more persuasive than leaving them in.

And here’s a great example of having to do with how many arguments should you offer in support of your cause. So let’s say I am trying to persuade you. Is offering one argument better than offering zero arguments? Of course, no question about that. Is offering two arguments better? You bet. Is offering three arguments better than two arguments? It is. Is offering four arguments better than three arguments? Absolutely NOT.

Amazingly, that fourth argument deteriorates your persuasiveness. And I think the reason for that is that it feels like you’re trying too hard. One would already think that your offer must not have been a great offer since you’re just trying to blizzard the other person with all of those reasons.

The other thing is that it might be the antithesis of clarity, which is confusion. We should not underestimate how difficult cognitive load is. It’s hard to keep things in your head if you’re trying to understand things. So, stop at three. More is not better. When you get to the fourth reason, you actually lose your persuasiveness.