Eureka!

by Walker Royce

  There are several synonyms for persuasive: trustworthy, influential, logical, charming, and articulate. These synonyms are the positive reactions that you want your message to cause in the audience you are trying to persuade. However, each of these attributes has a diversity of meanings to different people. For example, articulate means concise and expressive to me. To someone else, it might mean thorough and analytical. Charming means humorous and clever to me; to my wife, it means gentle and thoughtful. Like beauty, these attributes vary somewhat with the beholder. Once again, as the stakes of the communications increase, the need to understand your receiver and address their style preferences in your communications also increases. Some specific examples of persuasive communications illustrate how the 8W framework can be used to facilitate the planning and execution of a persuasive argument.

  First Example: A communication from a subordinate to a superior

  Suppose I’m a teenager and I want to sell my parents on letting me get my driver’s license earlier than they want me to. In my family, children weren’t allowed to drive until they were 17 years old, even though our state allowed children to drive at 16. My parents believed that teenagers were just not mature enough at 16 to be trusted with the responsibility of an automobile. I failed to “sell” my parents to change their minds. If I could go back and redo my approach, armed with the wisdom of the intervening decades, here’s the analysis I would perform.

  To whom are you selling? My parents are reasonable, but they are not going to bend the rules without a good reason. My rotten brother screwed me over by setting the wrong precedent 2 years ago when he got his license. Within a week, he had permission to stay out late. He went someplace different than he had told my folks and got ratted out by nosy neighbors. So now my parents are going to be biased against my request by mistrust. They constantly harp that privileges come with increased responsibility, and my lame brother didn’t make my case easy to sell.

  Why would they buy? They are not going to let me get my license early unless I can demonstrate that I am more trustworthy than my brother. If they think I am more responsible than he was when he was younger, they might see the value of my proposal.

  Where do they live or operate? We live in a rural community where I have many transportation needs. My folks and my brother have to drive me everywhere. Because they are willing to do this, however, my parents think that a driver’s license is a luxury for me, not a necessity.

  How will they realize value? My folks and my brother would see some benefit in not having to drive me around. My parents would save time, and they would be spared frequent arguments with my snobby brother who doesn’t like being seen with me.

  When are results expected? As soon as I get my license, they will have more freedom. This will give them less hectic lives between my 16th and 17th birthdays. I have already saved enough money to pay for my insurance, which I know is a precondition in our family for getting a license. So there should be no timing issues.

  How much value will be realized? It is hard to quantify the value of allowing me to get my license early. It would save my parents some time; I estimate about 10 hours a week. That should be worth a lot to them. They could spend more time at the gym, or cooking together, or doing other things for which they wish they had more time. The biggest value to them would be to see me demonstrate increased responsibility in exchange for this early privilege. How can I quantify that? Maybe I could demonstrate my willingness to be more responsible by offering to take the trash to the dump every weekend (dad hates that errand) and take on half of the snow shoveling. My lazy brother would love this, since he has all that responsibility now. If I can offer some benefit to everyone in the family, I have a better chance of selling my idea.

  Which language should you use? My dad’s style is pretty analytical, and my mom’s style is a driver. So I need to use some facts and data to satisfy my dad and make sure that he knows I have a well thought-out proposal. I will have to promise some definitive results to satisfy mom and give her some control over my destiny. I know they will be predisposed against my proposal, thanks to my brother. I will need to emphasize that I am different from him and that this decision should be based on the merits of my proposal, not on his past mistakes.

  What should you sell them? After noodling through the seven dimensions discussed above, I am prepared to make a persuasive proposal to my parents. Here is what that might look like in its simplest form.

  Mom, Dad, I want to ask you for something that is really important to me. I’ve been thinking through the pros and cons for a while, and I would like you to listen to my whole story before you make a decision.

  My request is for you to allow me to get my driver’s license next month. I understand your reasons for wanting me to wait until my 17th birthday. But getting my driver’s license has great value to me, and I would like to offer something of even greater value to you and my brother. In exchange for this privilege, I will enthusiastically take on more responsibility for household chores to demonstrate my maturity. I will make the weekly trip to the garbage dump and I will take on half the snow shoveling duties.

  I did a rough analysis, and I estimate that you will free up 10 hours a week by not having to drive me around. That would give you more time to go to the gym or cook together or do other fun things. I have saved the money for my insurance, and if things don’t turn out better from your perspective, you could take away my driving privilege at any time. What do you say?

  That proposition would not succeed in every household, but I think it might increase the probability of a yes answer over the usual approach that most teenagers take. Even if I fail to get the answer I want, I will have impressed my parents with a respectable attempt and built some further trust that will pay off in the future.

  Here’s a more complicated example.

  Second Example: A professional sales scenario

  Suppose you are selling software tools for website construction. The value proposition for your products is pretty simple: The software tools provide a 20% performance improvement in website construction by automating a lot of coding and testing. The cost of your product runs about 5% of typical labor costs for a year. Therefore, your customers could save 15% on labor costs or perform 15% more work for the same labor using your products. That sounds like an easy sale, but it is not. Some industry background explains why.

  Performance improvement in many businesses, such as software development, is frequently measured using some function of productivity. Productivity is not always easy to measure in creative activities like software development, movie production, or book writing. Productivity is defined as some measure of cost per unit output. Let’s say that this book has 200 pages and required 2000 hours to produce. That is a productivity of 10 hours per page or $1000 per page if you assume that I make $100 per hour.

  You can write many pages of a chapter, program several software components, or script several scenes of a movie and appear productive. For example, I drafted this 200-page manuscript in about 600 hours, by my estimate. As I write this sentence, that was more than a year ago and I am still revising, editing, and even adding new material that was not in my original manuscript. Until you start copy editing and integrating chapters, or testing and integrating software components, or shooting and integrating movie scenes, and then exposing them to an audience of readers, or software users, or movie goers, you are not sure how much progress you have made.

  Even though I had a draft manuscript more than a year ago, I knew that I was only about 50% complete. Creative disciplines tend to require several iterations, extensive teamwork, and significant scrap and rework to achieve a suitable end product. The necessary revisions and the amount of work remaining are frequently difficult to estimate. Because productivity, interim progress, and interim quality are difficult to measure in such creative endeavors, the related industries don’t put much trust into such measures.

  The performance measurements in most software organizations ar
e more like the sleight-of-hand statistics quoted by politicians than the matter-of-fact statistics quoted by engineers and scientists. Politicians have a well-deserved reputation for being disingenuous, and they have track records similar to software organizations for under-delivering on committed productivity improvements. Disingenuous means “deceptively calculating” or “smart but dishonest.” The software industry is full of cynical customers because their experience with software productivity improvements—internally as well as externally from vendors—is plagued by hyperbole and spin. It is difficult to sell your software tool product line in a market where there is mistrust.

  Another key challenge in selling software tools is that the client initially sees only an increased cost. The productivity improvements (if there are any) won’t pay for themselves until many months or years later. Asking customers to spend now and benefit later is a tough sell. Most clients won’t buy unless they have rock-solid confidence in your value proposition. You must make productivity improvements more credible and demonstrable, and thereby earn more trust than your competitors. Otherwise, your selling efforts will look just like those of your competitors: long-shot propositions with no compelling evidence that you can improve on the customer’s status quo.

  This situation confronts a jillion sales professionals every day. Their product lines range from $20 items sold to individuals to multi-million dollar products sold to multi-national organizations that have thousands of people distributed across the world collaborating over the internet. The 8W model provides a good framework for diagnosing both simple and complex customer situations. Table 6-3 captures an example of how this could unfold for a very complicated sale.

  The table only hints at the different perspectives you would use to communicate with the three key constituents: executives, managers, and practitioners. In many selling situations in today’s technologically complex world, it may take 6 to 9 months for a sales team to diagnose the client’s situation. Until they have this complete context, they cannot fully prepare to make a proposal that is persuasive and has the right value to compel the client to buy.

  TABLE 6-3. Example of an Industrial Strength Selling Situation

  Diagnostic Dimension Elaboration of Client Context

  To whom are you selling?

  We need to gain buy-in from the executives, managers, and

  practioners.

  Why would they buy?

  Executives: Financial benefits, such as higher profits, lower

  costs, corporate growth

  Managers: Improved morale, ability to attract better people

  Practitioners: More creative and productive work, less overhead

  and tedium

  Where do they live or operate?

  Executives: In several countries and in a competitive market

  Managers: At a specific work site with an existing labor pool

  Practitioners: Collaboratively over the web in cyberspace

  How will they realize value?

  Executives: Increased revenue through more attractive products

  Managers: Increased team productivity and less personnel

  turnover

  Practitioners: More output per hour, less boredom

  When are results expected?

  Executives: 15% improvement within a year, 5% improvement each quarter

  Managers: Monthly improvements in operational efficiency and

  hiring

  Practitioners: After one month of training and transition

  How much value will be realized?

  Executives: 10% increase in profits, 20% increase in market share

  Managers: 10% more team productivity, 10% higher bonuses,

  promotions

  Practitioners: 20% less dog work, 20% more output per hour,

  good raises

  Which language should you use?

  Executives: Financial, business results

  Managers: Operational, teamwork, operational efficiencies

  Practitioners: Technical, demonstrable, features

  What should you sell them?

  Executives: Financial leverage

  Managers: Team productivity leverage

  Practitioners: Individual productivity leverage

  SELLING IS NOT ABOUT WINNING

  Dysfunctional selling practices are rampant throughout the world today, especially where people are selling stuff with intangible, or difficult to quantify, value.

  Dysfunctional buying practices have evolved to defend against dysfunctional selling practices. The world of buying and selling has devolved into a world that is driven by mistrust. This can be a very frustrating world to live in.

  Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play by Mahan Khalsa is one of the books that has helped me advance my professional sales skills. Khalsa lays out an insightful rationale on why professional sellers struggle with prospective clients and why clients struggle with prospective sellers. Here is his memorable description of the problem:

  With due respect to sales professionals, the notion of sales and selling carries a lot of negative baggage. It is the second oldest profession, often confused with the first. No matter what you put in front of or in back of the word “selling” (consultative, solution, visionary, creative, integrity, value-based, beyond), it still ends up with the sense of doing something “to” somebody rather than “for” or “with” somebody.

  The perception that sellers are preying on you (they win, you lose) rather than trading with you (you both win by receiving good value in the exchange) is the source of mistrust that drives our perceptions and fear of sellers. To be blunt, this perception is often deserved. It is a rare human being who will negotiate for the fairest exchange rather than an outcome where they come out ahead. When the value of something is intangible and difficult to quantify (a piece of art, a manuscript, or some other collectible), fairness becomes a very elastic measure. This adds complications because the people negotiating with each other have no consistent measurement standard on which to base their arguments.

  Trust is the recurring theme for successful selling. This topic is well covered in Stephen M. R. Covey’s classic, The Speed of Trust. His essential point is that trust speeds up everything and reduces the cost of everything. If you look at your life, you will see that his assertion holds up well. In cases where you detest some process that wastes your time, you can usually find mistrust as the root cause of your dissatisfaction.

  If employers trusted employees to spend company money as if it were their own, they wouldn’t need spending limits, detailed expense reports with receipts, expense audits, and other administrative procedures on which companies spend money and employees waste time.

  Our tax system is expensive for the government to administer because citizens are not trustworthy in paying their fair share. People cheat on their taxes because they don’t trust the government to fairly administer the tax system and spend their money wisely.

  Have you gone through an airport security line recently?

  I may not think these things are fair to me, but most of them are necessary because enough people are untrustworthy and will take advantage of situations if they are given the chance. Corporations, governments, and even families create costly mechanisms for us all to protect against the untrustworthy actions of a few.

  A SELF-ASSESSMENT

  I spent a lot of time trying to decide how to conclude this chapter. Finally, I asked myself, “What are you trying to sell the reader?” Eureka! I should close with a practice-what-you-preach example. So in conclusion, I’m using the 8W model in Table 6-4 to communicate how I view my target audience and how I want to communicate the value of this book. If it’s persuasive enough, it will provide a foundation for the material on the back cover.

  TABLE 6-4. To Whom are You Selling?

  Diagnostic Dimension Elaboration of Client Context

  To whom are you selling?

  People who want to communicate better

  Young adults who want practi
cal lessons

  Professionals who want to build advanced skills

  Why would they buy?

  Deep insights delivered in simple, thought-provoking lessons

  Years of lessons learned packaged in 200+ entertaining pages

  A reference book of reusable knowledge, puzzles, and observations

  Where do they live or operate?

  English-speaking countries

  Schools and workplaces

  Communications workshops and adolescent leadership camps

  How will they realize value?

  Observing their own communications patterns

  Observing the communications strengths and weaknesses of others

  Solving puzzles and relishing their observation skills

  When are results expected?

  Aha! moments in every chapter

  Immediately upon observing other people’s communications styles

  Over time, improving the effectiveness of their

  communications

  How much value will be realized?

  A huge, colossal, gargantuan, mammoth amount

  Heaps more than the cost of the book, or about

  $100,000*

  Which language should you use?

  An informal style suitable for everyone

  Occasionally advanced, occasionally humorous, always useful

  Practive what you preach

  What should you sell them?

  An entertaining mix of communications topics, including:

  Educational tidbits, principles, patterns, trivia

  Puzzles, anecdotes, know-how, worldly wisdom

  * This is my context-independent, rough order of magnitude, wild-ass guess of the value that the typical reader will realize in 2010 dollars. If you have a better guess, use it.