Dr. Michael Gerharz, Autor auf The Art of Communicating

The brilliance of salespeople

“Look, you’re not so brilliant. But don’t worry because I am.”

That’s, in essence, the approach of a certain breed of salespeople: To play the high status game. There’s a matching breed of customers who that works for. They are ok with someone else taking the lead.

The opposite approach is the low status game which is all about doing whatever the customer wishes for regardless of how useful that is. There’s a matching breed of customers who love that kind of relationship.

For the rest of the customers, a third approach might work a little better: “You’re brilliant in what you do. We’re brilliant in what we do. Let’s so something brilliant together.” It’s a balanced relationship in which everyone gets to shine in their respective field.

Error without consequence

“The essence of training is to allow error without consequence.”
Ender’s Game

The great thing about training is the safe environment.

It’s like taking a risk but without the actual risk. You can try out ideas and approaches that you would never have tried out for real. Or it can lead you to find yet another path that does work but would have been impossible to see without taking the risky route first.

But the one thing that you won’t get in training is tension. The tension of that it matters now. The tension that this is the moment and you absolutely have to give it your all. Which might be way beyond everything that you did in training. Simply because in training, you didn’t have to.

And also the tension that errors actually do have consequences at times.

That is an experience that no amount of training can give you. You can gather a vast range of experiences, you can get ever closer to the real thing. But eventually, you’ll have to go out there. And face the consequences.

It’s better to be well-prepared when you do. But it’s also essential that you don’t hide from it.

Is it a product?

Is it a product? Or a bunch of features?

Can you say why it exists without saying how it does what it does?

Can your customers?

For great products, the features are there for a reason. They serve a cause. That cause sparks a story and that story can be told and retold.

For bad products it’s the other way around. The features are the reason the product exists. There is no clear and concise cause and therefore, there is no simple story to tell.

This is usually the point at which a marketing agency is hired to come up with a story. Which they do. And it might be a good story. Or it might not. In which case, it becomes really hard to sell the product.

I’d suggest starting with the cause so the story is built into your product. It simplifies the whole marketing.

Here’s to an open mind

A mind is like a parachute. It doesn’t work if it is not open.
– Frank Zappa

Unlike parachutes, though, an open mind might actually accelerate your journey.

Trusting your customer

Let’s suppose your customer knows what you know. Would you trust them with the decision to buy from you?

If not then why not?

Is it because you don’t trust in your offering or because you don’t trust in your customer to make the right decision?

If it’s the former, fix your product.

If it’s the latter, try empathy. How does the right decision look like for your customer? Why wouldn’t they choose you? Could it be that they are right in not choosing you? Or could it be that they would choose you but you won’t believe it until they actually do?

The best marketing starts with trust in your customer. If you lack that trust, the best investment is to figure out where that lack comes from so you can adjust accordingly.

Good intentions gone wrong

“I’m just going quickly over this graph!”

And she’s doing it with good intentions. Because that thing she’s going quickly over is not that hard to understand. Also, it’s probably not the most exciting part of her presentation. So, just going quickly over it seems like a great service to her audience.

Except that it’s the exact opposite.

Because she’s going over it so quickly that her audience doesn’t even have the time to read the graph, let alone understand it, let alone question it.

What was easy for her is hard for her audience. If only for the simple fact that it is new.

When in doubt, assume that it’s harder to see the point than you think it is. Rather than go quickly over something that is easy ask yourself how to focus on the most relevant bits. Rather than go quickly over something that is unexciting ask yourself how to make it more exciting.

Lighting the path is the presenter’s job, not the audience’s.

How not to buy tea

I wanted to buy tea. Easy, right?

Wrong!

Our local supermarket carries hundreds of different teas. Which means that for someone like me who is not an expert tea drinker it’s not easy to find the right one. Luckily (or not), the supermarket figured that out, too. So, they put up some signs for better orientation.

And achieved the opposite.

I’ve never counted the number of signs in the image above which is an actual photograph of the tea aisle in that supermarket. It’s a crazy number of signs. There are large signs and small ones. Some indicate the cheaper ones, others the new ones. Some indicate the organic ones. Some are even combinations of these. All of them wildly spread across the aisle.

The thing is: I’m only going to buy one tea, maybe two or three. Certainly not 50. But how am I supposed to choose?

The trouble with so many signs is that I don’t even know where to start looking. They are meant to provide orientation, but due to their sheer number they actually provide disorientation.

This is a general observation regarding prioritisation. When everything’s important, nothing’s important.

This approach delegates the task of prioritising to the customer.

That’s true for your marketing problem, too. If you don’t focus, you’re essentially delegating that task to your audience. If you put up too many signs, you’re asking them to prioritise.

The bad news is that – just like me in the supermarket – they will. They will pick one message, maybe two. Certainly not 23.

(And if things go really bad, they will just leave without any tea, frustrated with the paradox of choice.)

You don’t need permission

You don’t need permission to change the world.

If you feel that you have a great idea that has the potential to change things for the better, that’s enough of a permission to make it happen.

You don’t need anyone else’s permission to go for it.

Just make sure that it’s true to who you are and that it actually changes things for the better.

Then, simply tell a true story about it.

If it really changes things, people will resonate with that story.

Looking forward to you lighting the path in 2022.

Your best decision

What was the best decision you made in 2021?

Think a moment about it.

I bet you chose a decision that led to a great outcome. Didn’t you?

Well, so did I when I was being asked that question by Annie Duke while reading her book “Thinking in Bets”. In fact, everyone does it. It’s due to what Annie Duke calls resulting, evaluating a decision from its outcome.

After all, when the outcome was great it must have been a great decision, right?

But that ignores luck. (And bad luck.)

Because what if the great outcome was due much more to luck than the quality of your decision? Take e.g. hiring. Hiring your best employee has as much to do with her applying as it has to do with you choosing her over someone else. That she applied in the first place had nothing to do with how you decided. But it influenced the outcome heavily.

It’s just as likely that another decision of yours didn’t turn out so well because of bad luck. She actually was the best candidate. But nobody, including you and her, could have predicted that she would be diagnosed with cancer 2 weeks after.

Once you see this you can’t unsee it anymore: The quality of a decision is not the same thing as the quality of its outcome.

Here are a couple of thoughts that I’d like to end the year with:

Once again: Looking back at 2021, what was the best decision you made? Why?
Can you think of a situation where you feel like you made a good decision even though the outcome wasn’t that good?
How about the opposite?
What can you learn from that for your decision making in 2022?

So incredibly powerful when she says it

“It sounds so incredibly powerful when she says it.”

Just wow.

But why is it that the same thought that you’ve thought a thousand times suddenly becomes powerful when you hear it ushered out of the celebrity’s mouth?

Because it’s immediately turned into a story. It gets filled with all the things that she’s achieved and said before. She embodies it and so you fill out all the missing pieces. When she says it, it becomes a profound truth that has enabled her path.

The crucial bit, though, is that when we experience a story it’s the hero we look at but it’s us who we see. We project ourselves onto the hero’s canvas.

Hearing the hero say out loud your thoughts brings you even closer. The incredible power of her saying out loud your thought is that it reassures you that you’re on the right track.

It’s not so much that you agree with her but that she agrees with you – which elevates you onto the hero’s podium. She’s picking up your thought. You’ve become the hero because the hero’s saying your thoughts and feelings.

That’s the power of lighting the path. Putting in words and saying out loud what your audience thinks and feels. It’s incredibly powerful.

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