let your customers persuade themselves

8/9/2019 Let Your Customers Persuade Themselves

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SELLING THEMSELVES

When I walk into an Apple retail store, I get the feeling that I am on my own to explore,

touch, lift, try and compare. Sure, I can get help if I want it. But what the store isdesigned to do is get people engaged with the product directly.

MIT’s Michael Schrage calls this a selling themsel!es" strategy, opposed to the sell

to" approach we get when we listen to a sales pitch.

I’d argue that the future of salesmanship and inno!ation alike will increasingly depend

on gi!ing people easier ways of selling themsel!es on whate!er it is you’re selling,"Schrage writes. It’s not enough to #e persuasi!e$ you’!e got to make it easier for people

to persuade themsel!es."

%!en professional ser!ice firms should adopt this approach, Schrage argues on his HBR.org post, &et 'our (ustomers )ersuade Themsel!es. * )S+ would #e well ad!ised

to ask the uestion, What can we gi!e away to entice prospects into a serious

con!ersation a#out #ecoming a client-"

It’s all a matter of degree, I think. Some people are uncomforta#le trying on a newtechnology or law firm without some guidance and context, which comes in the form of a

uick sales pitch.

Schrage admits he doesn’t like #eing sold to. I don’t mind it at all, as long as the sales

person is listening to what I want, a point sales guru Tom Hopkins makes in this niceinter!iew with my B%T colleague Geoffrey James.

So at the end of the day, your #est #et is to understand how your own customers want to

#e approached, and #e ready to mix and match tactics to help them make a decision.

+rom your experience, what company really gets it in terms of a compelling sales

experience- Who gets the #alance right-

http://blogs.hbr.org/schrage/2010/01/let-your-customers-persuade-th.htmlhttp://blogs.hbr.org/schrage/2010/01/let-your-customers-persuade-th.htmlhttp://blogs.hbr.org/schrage/2010/01/let-your-customers-persuade-th.htmlhttp://blogs.bnet.com/salesmachine/?tag=content;col1http://blogs.bnet.com/salesmachine/?tag=content;col1http://blogs.hbr.org/schrage/2010/01/let-your-customers-persuade-th.html


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Let Your Customers Persuade

Themselves

11:39 AM Friday January 22, 2010 |Comments (7)

While working atMIT's Media Lab, "Demo or Die" not "Publish or Perish," was

our academic motto. I quickly observed that we basically produced two kinds of

demos.

The first was show-and-tell: We'd show off a clever object or a device or software

snippet. The goal was to make jaws drop and/or blow people away. There was

something of a "magic trick" quality to the best of them.How did you do that?

Cool!Did I mention thatPenn & Tellerwere huge fans and welcome guests at the

Lab?

The other kind of demo — though culturally less cool — intrigued me more.

These were demos where you'd give your prototype to people to play with.Try

this...see if you can get it to... Designers of the former type loved the theater of

their demos. They loved an audience. They loved performing. Designers of the

latter kind of demo preferred participants to spectators. They wanted to watch

people having fun with their inventions instead of putting on a show. Their demos

weren't props — they were playgrounds.

You might say that the first group enjoyed "selling" people. Whereas the second

group liked people to "sell themselves."

That design distinction stuck. Although I consider myself open-minded, I dislike

people — no matter how charming or expert — trying to "sell" me something. To

heck with charisma. I don't like being "sold." On the other hand, I do like selling

myself. I'm less likely to be persuaded by someone doing a fantastic show-and-

tell than by someone giving me the opportunity to sell myself. If you hand/send

http://blogs.hbr.org/schrage/2010/01/let-your-customers-persuade-th.html#comments%23commentshttp://www.media.mit.edu/http://www.pennandteller.com/http://blogs.hbr.org/schrage/2010/01/let-your-customers-persuade-th.html#comments%23commentshttp://www.media.mit.edu/http://www.pennandteller.com/


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me something and say, "Play with this for as long or as little as you'd like and get

back to me," I'm yours. Some people need to be — some people want to be —

convinced. But I want the chance to convince myself. Which type are you? How

do you know? Better yet, which type is your best customer?

When working with technical innovators and marketing entrepreneurs, I'm struck

by how little creativity and effort go into exploiting these fundamental behavioral

differences between people. Designing a model, prototype, or simulation that

makes it easier for an innovator to "sell" it is fundamentally a different task than

coming up with something that makes it easy for a prospect to sell themselves.

Everyone reading this post can think of mobile phones (or enterprise software)

that invite playful exploration that leads to new value — or those that end up

inadvertently deleting your most important data. Clearly,Apple's appstorehas

become a virtual — in both meanings of that word — paradigm for innovativesampling and sampling innovation. Less celebrated but remarkably clever is

Google Labs, the search engine's public playground for its more offbeat

innovative betas. These are "sell yourself" marketplaces. I'm surprised thatIBM,

with its strongcloud computing infrastructureand "Smarter Planet" campaign,

hasn't done more of this. Then again, IBM is a classic "sales" culture rather than

one empowering customers to convince themselves.

But the "sell" vs. "sell yourself" sensibility transcends digital devices. Professional

service firms are fools if they're not constantly looking for ways not just to bettercommunicate the value of their work, but to give people things that let them sell

themselves on the firm's value proposition. What should a law firm or financial

services practice "give away" that prospects could play their way into a serious

conversation about becoming a client? Or what about retail? If I were running

Ikea, I'd tell the Swedish superstore they'd sell even more DIY furniture if they'd

let me see YouTube-like videos of people actually building the darn things.

Whether you'reWhole Foods,Wal-Mart orBest Buy, you have to acknowledge

that — as important as friendly and knowledgeable staff may be — you need to

create places, spaces and opportunities for your customers sell themselvesthrough self-sampling instead of selling-sampling.

For completely understandable reasons, managers and executives feel

compelled to be better salespeople both inside their organizations and out.

Whether itsconsultative selling orZig Ziglar motivational selling, people are

http://www.apple.com/iphone/apps-for-iphonehttp://www.googlelabs.com/http://www.ibm.com/us/enhttp://www.ibm.com/ibm/cloudhttp://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/enhttp://www.ikea.com/http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/http://www.walmart.com/http://www.bestbuy.com/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consultative_sellinghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zig_Ziglarhttp://www.apple.com/iphone/apps-for-iphonehttp://www.googlelabs.com/http://www.ibm.com/us/enhttp://www.ibm.com/ibm/cloudhttp://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/enhttp://www.ikea.com/http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/http://www.walmart.com/http://www.bestbuy.com/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consultative_sellinghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zig_Ziglar


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always looking for tips, techniques and technologies to sell better. That's fine. But

between the Media Lab,my research into innovation adoption and the global

pervasiveness of digital media, I'd argue that the future of salesmanship and

innovation alike will increasingly depend on giving people easier ways of selling

themselves on whatever it is you're selling. It's not enough to be persuasive;you've got to make it easier for people to persuade themselves.

Are you making the right kinds of persuasiveness investment?
http://www.strategy-business.com/article/06216?gko=dd19d&tid=27782251&pg=allhttp://www.strategy-business.com/article/06216?gko=dd19d&tid=27782251&pg=allhttp://www.strategy-business.com/article/06216?gko=dd19d&tid=27782251&pg=allhttp://www.strategy-business.com/article/06216?gko=dd19d&tid=27782251&pg=all

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