S2 E8 | Selling New Ideas

A lot of people, they don't want to change because they don't actually see the bigger picture or see the pushes. Right. And so part of this is helping people understand the context of why you feel you need to change and then understanding by articulating the pushes that are on you and hopefully helping them see the pushes that might be on them as well. Right. And so part of it is most people, again I think of change, nobody wants to change. Right. It's the fact is that at some point we're more creatures of habit than anything else. And so how do we actually help people understand that it's time to change?

Welcome to the Circuit Breaker podcast where we challenge the status quo of innovation and new product development. We'll talk about tools and skills and methodologies used to build better products and make you a better consumer. I'm Bob Mesta and I'm the co founder of the Rewired Group and I'm one of your co hosts and we're.

Joined by Greg Engel, who is my.

Co founder and the chief Bob interpreter. Join us now as we trip the circuit and give you time to reset, reorganize and recharge your brain to build better products.

Hey, Bob. Hey Greg. What's going on, man?

So today we're going to talk about something that we've got a lot of questions on lately and it's. It goes to Jobsy dawn, but it goes to anything you're trying to sell in. So how do you sell in new ideas? It's something that I think everybody struggles with at one point or another because we all have to sell in ideas, whether it's our personal life or whether it's our corporate life, whether whatever it is. Right. We have to help people understand why we want to do something, why we.

Want to change or, and how does it impact them.

So the first thing I want to tackle before we get into the whole crux of it is a myth or a belief system that most people have, which is sales or trying to get someone to change their behavior is about convincing.

Yeah, that's a myth.

And the reason why we say that is because when you try to convince someone to do something, that's where you actually create a lot of buyers remorse or second guessing or things like that because they actually never see the reason to change. They're just convinced to change. Or in the moment they give up.

Right. In the moment you actually create a context where they're like, oh yeah, I got to do this. And then when they get out of that context like, why did I do that?

So can you. And now I'm throwing you under the bus here a little bit. But can you, can you come up with a situation in the past where you've seen somebody or you've tried to convince or you've convinced somebody to do something and it's failed?

Oh, yeah, many times.

All right, so spill the beans.

So I think the. My first one was basically when I started my first business is I tried to actually spin out of an old business called American Supplier Institute. And one of the things that I did is I tried to convince the owner, who was, you know, basically that, that this was a good idea to spin this thing off. And I could get him one on one in a room and he could make sense of it. And at some point in time, it got to the point where he was convinced and we drew up all the papers, and when I got to the room, he fired me. And so all of a sudden it was one of those things where I thought I had convinced him. And the reality is it went completely bad and it ended up end up getting into a lawsuit over it.

And generally when you're convinced, you know, you're convincing somebody when you're talking more than listening.

Yes.

When you are leading the conversation and not understanding where they're coming from.

And. Yeah. And you're defending what they're, what they're saying is you're like, no, no, no, that's, that's not it. Let me tell you what it means. And it's like you're, you're, you're constantly, almost like on, you're pushing and at the same time you're descending.

So if we're not trying to convince people, what are we trying to do? We're actually trying to get people to understand the progress that we're trying to make and the progress that they can make.

That's correct.

And that's really what you're trying to do. If you're in a situation where you're trying to sell into a company an idea you have, you're trying to do both. If you're selling a product, you're trying to show them the progress. Right. You take yourself out of it at that point. But so it's about showing progress or what life will be like when you change and how that benefits you, the company, or whoever you're talking to, or.

Whoever you're talking to. But the other part is to also make people aware of the bigger context that they're really in. Because a lot of people, they don't want to change because they don't actually see the bigger picture or see the pushes. Right. And so part of this is helping people understand the context of why you feel you need to change and then understanding by articulating the pushes that are on you and hopefully helping them see the pushes that might be on them as well. Right. And so part of it is most people, again, I think, of change, nobody wants to change. Right. It's the fact is that at some point we're more creatures of habit than anything else. And so how do we actually help people understand that it's time to change?

Well, and I want to change that just a bit because I think people want to change. I think change is hard and going back to the status quo is always easier than. Than keeping the change going. Right. So I have aspirations to change, and that's the problem is I have aspirations to change most of the time. And until you make them real with what's going on now, what the future can look like and what's holding us back, they are just aspirations. They are just things. It's easier to go backwards than forwards.

Their aspirations of, if you will, fuel. But at the same time as they have no. They have no friction in order to make it happen, they have no traction to actually make it happen. So you start to. This is where people dream a lot then, right?

Yes. And you can dream and you can, you can make small changes, but then how off. How long do they last? That's the problem. Right. The other thing I wanted to touch on and from what you just said was, you know, helping people understand their context they're in. That's a very tricky thing. Yes. Because most people do that by just drilling people. Yeah, by either if they. A lot of times you don't even ask questions. They just.

What do you mean by drilling?

Well, that's what I'm going to say. So there's two ways to do that, or there are two ways we see people do that poorly, which. The first way is they just tell people their context, the people's context. Right. Bob, you don't want to do that because you are in this situation doing this. And. Well, that's not actually getting people to understand their context. That's a piece of convincing. When I paint the picture for you, I'm convincing. When you paint the picture for me, when I'm asking questions to you, then you're creating your own context. You're telling me what your context is. The other problem is just drilling questions without actually unpacking answers. So that would look like, hey Bob, what's going on in your business today? And then you would answer and I would say, oh, that's great, but what do you want the future to look like? Well, you had no time to actually absorb your answer. So we need, as we do this in sales, we need to give people the time and space to give us the answer, but then also swim around in the answer, immerse themselves in the answer, change their answer.

Yes.

Or distort their answer so they can actually be more articulate about their answer. Oh, so you mean it's this. No, no, no, I don't mean it's that, it's this, Right?

Because our first answer is not always the best answer. Because I'm catching you off guard, right?

I haven't thought about it.

Right? So as you answer the question, I give you more time to swim around in that answer. You might change, you might deepen the answer, you might give more context the answer. There's many different things. But if I just shut you off and drill you with the next question, and this is why we hate pre planned presentations or preplanned questions, right? Is because your job then, when you have all those in your head, is just to get all the answers. Where your real job is to get to the answers that are important to the person, not to your questions. And they will lead you if you do it correctly. They will. Because there's been many sales calls where I've only had to ask one question and we talk about that answer for an hour.

Right? So here's the thing is you keep talking about this as a sales context, but to be honest, whether you're a developer, you're a designer, you're a marketer, and you're trying to actually help people understand what you're trying to do. It's, it's, you're still selling your idea. So the notion of when we use sales is not just for selling product or selling services, it's for actually helping other, helping to align others on the progress you all want to make. And so the same thing, this is the same thing true for, for whether you're putting in a new system at a, you know, in an internal system. It's like you have to get alignment and you have to understand the context and they have to understand why you want to change the system. All those things are part of this. And so we talk about it, quote, as sales. And sales is usually seen as a dirty word.

Well, that's why I said it. Selling in new ideas, because it's not about selling a product. Exactly. Selling your ideas. You have to sell your spouse, you have to sell family, everything.

Right, right. But I mean, you developed a course, you know, a while ago around the whole notion of, you know, non sales selling. Like how do you teach people who are not salespeople how to sell their ideas? And to be honest, it's one of those things where I think we need to resurrect it because it's just one of those aspects that's just phenomenal.

That's the difference between convincing and helping people see progress. Right.

Helping discover progress.

Right. And that's the crux of a lot of what we talk about is trying to bust that myth of anytime you're trying to sell an idea, whether you're a salesperson, whether you're a corporate executive trying to tell people below you how to do something or discover something, you're. You're still selling, you're still trying to do those things and to, just to convince somebody is not getting compliance or not showing people what to do. So that's the first step. We want to, we just want to get that out there, that concept out there of when you're selling in a new idea, you're not trying to convince, you're trying to understand. Well, first, and let's get to the crux of it. The first thing you have to do is understand why you want to change if you're selling a new idea and you're not a salesperson. Right. Take it out of the salesperson realm.

Put the forces of progress on you.

You have to, you have to understand the forces of progress of why you want to make the change. And you have to look at it from you personally and you also look at it for, from the company. Right. So you have to do both in the. And what I tell people most of the time when they're doing that is it's very easy for us to describe the new. But I need you to spend less time on that and spend more time on why you need to change. So the pushes, but then really, really the anxieties and the habits.

The habits is the big one.

Because most of the time when we're talking to people about, let's say jobs, we done, and I ask them, well, what anxieties do you have about bringing jobs? We're done. They always tell me none. Well, that's B.S.

Because in the sales process, both people can't see it until after the, after the fact.

But this is where people have to get better at actually articulating. Articulating and discovering and understanding those things below the watermark. Right. That's what you talk about, is that below the watermark, because we don't want to go there. That's scary. But you have to go there in order to make sure you're making the right decisions and also to keep you on track. Because those anxieties will come up when you go to sell your idea. When you go to implement your idea, those anxieties all perk up again.

And the thing is that any change has unknowns embedded in it. And so it's like, really, what are the unknowns that scare you? And there's two types of unknowns. There's known unknowns. Right. Like, oh, my gosh, I don't know about this. And then there's unknown unknowns. And that's the bigger thing that most people aren't aware of, kind of what they don't know or what's those anxieties. And they emerge as they get closer and closer to that change. And so part of it is to actually figure out how to tease that out. So ultimately, this is about alignment and about getting people together and defining the progress.

Yep. So, but first you have to do it on yourself. So let's. Let's stay there. So we're gonna go kind of try to do this linear.

Linearly. Sorry, I jumped ahead.

And so the first step is to do that. And your point of, you know, discovered unknowns and known unknowns. That's why the force of progress is always a living, breathing document. When you're talking about selling in ideas and doing those things is you, you have to go back to this because you're gonna. The next step is to now discover who you need to go talk to. And most people do that and they think it's really easy. Well, I'm just going to go talk to my boss. Right. Because that's who I have to convince.

And that's wrong. That's actually wrong. It's part of the step. I'm not saying you don't do that.

It's a step, but not necessarily the next step.

You actually have to discover all the different influencers. And what I want you to do is I want you to look laterally, I want you to look up and I want you to look down. And sometimes you actually have to look outside your realm too, because you might be a product developer in, let's say.

Pet food, but you know there's going to be somebody in snack food that could be an ally. They should be on your list because you should because eventually you don't want this just to be in one place. You want to go all over or you need support from other places.

Well, and as you're changing it, you have to realize like, you're going to change the label. So you have to actually realize like, the label people should probably be honest because they're going to be a frictional coefficient because of like, hey, we don't want to change the label. It's like, okay, what are we going to do?

So the thing there is you're going to, you're going to sit hopefully by yourself and you're going to think about who are the people that can help you and then who are the people that you have to help along the way to get to understand their progress so that they will not be in your way.

That's right. Who's gonna. To be honest? It's just natural that there are people who will have friction.

Skeptics, they'll have skeptics, you know, people that don't want to change.

I love the skeptics. Right.

But you have to identify all those people. Now what do you do? Do you just sit in a room and do you think, how am I going to convince them? No, you go talk to them. And what do you talk to them about?

You talk to them about the context, outcome, and then anxieties and habits.

So you're talking about the force of progress, you're talking about their forces of progress.

I would say you want to talk about your forces of progress, why you want to change, and then understand kind of how that aligns with their forces of progress.

But you have to discover their forces of progress. You can't give them their forces of progress. You have to understand why would. If you. And, and that's the point you're making, is if you scope what you want to do, so you have to really, again, scope what you want to do.

You have to have intention of what.

You'Re trying to do, and you give that to them and you put that into the light bulb for them and then ask them questions about why would this be good? Why wouldn't this be good? What about the future? Do you think this can help with what about the current? What do we need to change and what scares them? What habits will a team have to give up? All those things you have to talk about. So you have to go talk to, talk to however many people you need to go talk to. And I would tell you it's not about going to talk to 100. You don't need. You don't need everybody. You need the three or four at each level, two or three at each level. That will help you see the bigger.

Picture and see alignment.

Well, do two things for you. Get permission to move forward, but then also shape your idea.

Well, that's where I say is what I like to do is actually I never always have. You know me, I never have one idea, but partially I have usually two, if not three ideas. Because I want people to realize, like, okay, doing nothing, what happens, Doing this, what happens? And then what's something in between? And so it's that prototyping mentality that we have in there to say, instead of trying to tell people what I want to do, it's like, hey, we need to change for this reason. Here's three different ways which ones align with you and not. And help understand and use it as a mirror to help reflect their. Their forces of progress. And so instead of trying to just give them one, because one is so easy to shoot down, right?

So I'm, I'm gonna. You're gonna, I'm gonna shoot you down a little bit because I'm gonna tell you, yes, that works.

That's the advanced technique.

If you're an expert.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And you know, and you. And you're confident that you can change or be flexible or know a bunch of different options. But if you're not, you have to go with the one you think you want to do. Like, if you want to bring in jobs we've done, right, you. You have to put that one in there and figure out how it helps other people and understand why it doesn't help certain people, because it might be that there will be somebody. I've never seen something I've never seen like jobs we've done or anything that we've done shot down by one person dissenting, right? So even if you can't get that one person on board with that, they usually will never say, no, don't do it. They'll say, yeah, do it, but with these constraints, and you need those constraints. So that's okay. You've done the first step. You've discovered why you want to change. Then you've done the second part where you've looked at other people.

Empathetic perspective of seeing other people's perspective.

You've identified other people. You've understand where they're coming from. Now what's next? Well, what's next is you actually have develop a plan. Because you don't just stop there. You develop a plan of how do you now Go talk to these people and show them what you're trying to do. Actually helps majority of the people make progress.

And so this is where I want to take it away from a plan, but it's more that you want to design the solution that aligns with, you know, where you want to go and where they want to go. And so it's this just not just building a plan like here's, here's the steps, but more like here's why we're doing this and, and make it more comprehensive than yourself and make sure that it's including the progress they want to make. And so it's, it's about designing kind of what they want to design in the future.

You're going to make me unpack the word plan?

Yeah, that's what I'm trying to do.

Because what is plan? Because plan to me is what do you plan to do? And it's not steps, it's everything.

It's everything.

And this is the problem where people go to a word and they start taking your word. It's one of my triggers of. Of what it is. Well, because what you described as a plan is steps. A plan should have direction, should have scope, should have boundaries, should have metrics, should have resources, should have next steps, should have all that into it. So don't take plan as. And this is a lecture to Bob and I, so sorry everybody, but don't take the one word and say what is the functional characteristics that's wanted to unpack that.

Because at some point it's like people think they know what a plan is and what we mean by a plan, and what other people mean by plan sometimes is very different.

So you've done that. You've now come up with your plan.

Fine, you can use the word plan now.

You've come up with your way to help people understand what they do, what this will do for them.

Ultimately, it's, it's implementing, it's taking the first couple of steps and monitoring how things are rolling out.

Well, I think the first. So yes, but you might not be done selling yet.

Right, because there's good.

So now you might have modify the plan.

Yes.

Right. Because now you've got everybody's. Everybody's input, you've got everybody's progress. And it might be. You might have to change what your idea was at first. You can still bring in that core thing. You're still trying to get in that core thing you were trying to bring in. But how do you now modify it to make sure you're hitting Majority, not all. Because you can never hit everybody's objective, it's impossible. But majority and then make out that metrics of the plan because you have to modify them. As you discover all these things, you're going to modify those metrics of. We're going to get this out for this person. We're going to get this out for this. We're going to be able to use the team. It's going to get the language which is what the HR department wants. Whatever those things are, you're going to map that out so everybody can see it and you can actually monitor that progress as you bring in this new idea.

Yep. As it's rolling, as it's rolling out.

Because sales doesn't stop getting the.

Yes, that's right. Once people. Yeah, that's exactly right. Yes, yes. Is only the commitment to make the change. It's not making the change.

Right. It stops when the project is over.

When progress is made. Yeah, when the habit is built.

So that's the thing that's different. The way we look at sales is most people end sales at the. Yes. They don't think about the implementing the getting people through it, the how does it look at the end. They don't think of that things which is very important because that's actually consumption and consumption is part of the sales process.

That's correct. That that's why when we talk about demand side sales, we talk about how marketing, sales and customers, customer success are all actually one system, not three different systems. And that they need to be aligned because at some point I need all of them to help make that progress. Right. And so it's the alignment of that and making sure that we're all aligned around what the customer wants as opposed to what we want.

So just to kind of recap this, the first step is kind of understanding why you want to change. Identifying those forces of progress, understanding them, really spending time below the watermark of those habits and anxieties because you have them. The excitement of the change often clouds them. But they're there. Spend time doing it. Then it's identifying people that could be sponsors, advocates and also detractors. Get that list together, try to make it as manageable as possible. Because you don't want to spend 30 hours trying to interview people. So get it down to the most manageable or the most logical list you can. Then it's go interview them. And when we talk about interviewing, we're talking about try to get out the forces of progress. Then it's taking those answers and developing a Sales plan, implementation plan, whatever you want to call that, but developing a thing to take back to them and saying, can we say yes to this? And then once you do that, then it's making the plan or implementing what you're trying to do and making sure you're putting in milestones and metrics that align with everybody else's kind of progress. So that's kind of the steps in selling in a new idea. And I know it sounds easy, right? We just made it, we made it sound really logical, really step by step easy. But it's not because. Why is it not? It's because you actually have to go interview. And interviewing is hard because we always tend to listen with our ear.

Why did you use words? Just go talk to them. Why is it an interview, not just a discussion?

Because anytime you talk to somebody, you're actually interviewing them. Anytime you talk to somebody, it's about. Unless it's a pure social call, right? Pure social calls. Yeah. You're not really trying to understand too much. And those are what I call fake interactions. Real interactions are really where you're trying to get a understanding of something. And there are very few false interactions. Right. Most of our interactions are actually very meaningful. We just don't know how to do them as humans very well. And the reason why it's an interview to me is because you have to understand from their demand, not from your supply. And that's convincing. Again, if you're asking questions from your supply, from you, what you want to do. If you're asking close ended questions, Bob, don't you want to get better? Yes. Well, you're convincing.

That's right. Yes. No is usually convincing.

So you want to make sure that you're having those conversations and you're doing those things. And interviewing is hard. And that's why when someone tries to buy something from us, we try to help with these steps. And we have not been as transparent with them as we probably should be. And we're trying to change that.

We tell people, we're trying to get your forces of progress. We've told people that.

Well, how they can sell it in internally, we're not real clear on that. We tell them things, but we don't lay out the process. So we've kind of laid out the process. We're trying to be more transparent in 2023 with that, with helping people do that.

So what's the homework?

So the homework here is just the next time you try to sell something in. And I would start outside of the business world, I'd Start with your family, a vacation, whatever, whatever the next thing is.

Because it could be a restaurant, could be a movie. It could be a movie.

It's. Why do you, you know, first just go through the steps and they can go very quickly. And that's why I say start with a family, because it's usually one or two people, depending on what you're trying to accomplish.

There's a lot of my family.

Well, not if it's just you and Julie. So start with something small where you don't have to go interview a bunch of people and where the second step is kind of defined for you. But just get used to. And what I really want you to get used to is, is discovering your below the watermark things, because that's actually the hardest part. Then the second hardest part is getting people to tell you what they're under. The watermarks are because those things are the things that really scare us as humans. And that's a defense mechanism that we all have, is let's just talk about the future and bright, shiny things so I don't have to talk about the uglies in my. In the pit of my stomach. But once you get good at talking about those uglies in the pit of your stomach, you actually make progress faster.

The uglies in the pit of your stomach.

That's kind of what we want to talk about today, and we'll see you guys next time.

Thanks for listening to the Circuit Breaker podcast. If you haven't already, please subscribe so you won't miss an episode. If you know somebody who's stuck on the innovation treadmill, please share it. If you'd like to learn more information, visit us@the RewiredGroup.com to find out how we work, how we can help. Some resources, some books, some software. Join us now next time as we trip the circuit breaker to help you recharge, re energize and refocus your new product development.