Making Your Conversations a Source of Growth With Jim Karrh

Hello, my friends, and welcome to another exciting episode of Negotiate Anything. Negotiate Anything is produced by the American Negotiation Institute and with over 3 million downloads and listeners in over 180 countries, listeners just like you have made this the number one negotiation podcast in the world. I'm Kwame Christian and I'm the director of the American Negotiation Institute. We're growing and I want to introduce you to our new team members and new trainers. This will help to give you new diverse perspectives on negotiation and conflict resolution. That's why I'm excited to let you know that Shane Martin, our head of sales and partnerships, is going to serve as co host of the show from time to time. We are passionate about providing you with the best content that will help to make your difficult conversations easier, both at work and at home. Lastly, before we get into the episode, I want to remind you that our team conducts negotiation and conflict resolution trainings in the United States and abroad. Our trainings will give you the practical skills you need to resolve conflict, negotiate, lead, and persuade with confidence. Click the link in the description below to learn how we can help to make your difficult conversations easier. And now, let's get to the show. Jim, thanks for joining us today, Kwame.

It is a pleasure and an honor. And I'm a big fan of Negotiate Anything. I subscribe to the podcast myself, so I'm really glad that we could have this conversation.

I love it, man. Hey, listen, as you tell the listeners about yourself and what you do, make sure you give yourself a shout out with your show because your show is pretty awesome, too.

Well, thank you so much, Kwame and everyone. Basically, my professional role in life is I help companies and teams to grow profitably through better sales conversations. And I do that in a few ways. I do host a podcast called the Manage youe Message Podcast. I wrote a book called the Science of Customer Manage youe Message to Grow youw Business. And so I do consulting and advisory work and I also do some virtual and in person speaking as well. And Kwame, like you, I actually have an academic position as well, so I'm a clinical instructor at the Culver House College of Business at University of Alabama, where they also play football, like at the Ohio State University. And so it's a real pleasure. I get to deal in both academic and practical professional settings as well.

Oh, that is great. Not the Alabama part, but the rest was really great. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. This is great, Jim. We've been trying to coordinate this for a while, so I appreciate your patience and Listeners, you are in for a treat. In for a treat. So today I'll just give a little like a high level overview, then we'll just flow for a bit. So first we're going to talk about your message using the right words, stories and questions. Then messengers encouraging and enlisting other people. And then and lastly, management making your conversations a source of individual and business growth. Jim, when we're thinking about the message, where should we start? There's so many different angles.

There are a lot of different angles when people think about message and messaging. It's all the way from a clever pitch to a slogan, to a mission statement, to a promotional campaign or the like. I actually think it makes sense to back up a little bit because much like you, Kwame, I mean you see the issues with negotiation, it's pervasive, right in our businesses and at home life and all of our relationships. There is this chronic and very expensive problem, especially in professional settings that I see and I've experienced it in more than a decade of doing my advisory work and it's really crystallized for me lately. Here's the issue. Most professionals, most companies have far more confidence in the value of what they offer than in how to talk about it. So what happens when you lack confidence in what to say? You probably say the wrong thing or you avoid the conversation altogether. I was having a conversation with a fellow named Tim Pollard who runs a business called Oradium. He deals with a lot of business to business selling teams about this very phenomenon. And he said, Jim, we actually did a survey of a couple of hundred high level, very well accomplished salespeople a couple of years ago and asked that very question. Kwame, they said on a scale of 1 to 10, how confident are you in the value of what you sell? And the answer on average was greater than 8. But it also said how confident are you in the messaging behind it? The average answer was less than 4 on a 1 to 10 scale. So you've got this gap of I really believe that for the right kind of customer, the right kind of situation, what I offer is valuable. But I don't know what to say. I'm not sure which stories to tell, the questions to ask, how do I position myself, all of that. So to your question, what I've developed over time is a way to break this problem down a bit into what I think are the three components that make it work is messengers and management habits. So we can take those one at a time. But it really is, I think it makes a lot of sense to to concentrate on the problem because it is one that it's really difficult to grow and to grow profitably. Kwame, if people on your team, or even if you as a business owner, business leader, aren't quite sure what to say, which conversations to initiate, again, the right questions to ask, the stories to tell, and just nothing's really happening right.

In the marketplace, you're spot on. You're spot on. And it's such an interesting discrepancy because there's clearly confidence in the product, but not confidence in the message. What I found a lot of times is that people struggle predominantly because of fear or confidence. That's why my first book was all about that confidence aspect. When you're talking about the message, the discrepancy between faith in the process and faith in the message, how are we defining message in this context?

I define message in the context that I work very conversationally, much as we're talking now. So I'm working a lot with companies and teams for whom the conversation is itself important. So if you're dealing in just a repeat purchase, kind of a good something that's simple, inexpensive, a lot of consumer goods, they deal in the world of advertising and trade promotion and things like that, but the individual and the small group conversations really aren't a big deal for how they're going to grow. But if you're dealing in something, a high level professional service or a technical product or something that may be higher value, it's a little more difficult to understand. You have several people involved at the buyer level who all have to get a sense of what you're offering and why it might be worthwhile. Then there's nothing that replaces the value of a good conversation because you're helping frame the problem, you're helping determine fit, and you're helping you and your company to be able to stand out. There's another little bit of shorthand that I develop. And Kwame, I know you've worked in this a lot too, so you can confirm or deny my perspective on this, but everybody I deal with and every company leader, every company owner, every very highly accomplished professional salesperson or professional wants to be trusted or to be trustworthy. We use words like I want to be a trusted advisor, right? I want to be a good source for my prospects and my customers. And what I find is that trustworthiness at a very simple level is really a balance between two factors. It's expertise and empathy. Expertise and empathy. So the expertise is that you demonstrate to me that you know what you're talking about. And that's the objective language of credentials and years of experience. And here are the logos of the companies that we've worked with, the things that we put on our websites. And it feels we're very comfortable in sharing that because it feels very defensible. But empathy, it's a trickier sort of construct. It's really the sense that you as the provider here, you get me, like, you understand what makes me a little bit different or a little bit unique. And it that element of fit. And I think you can only as a company, as a seller, really demonstrate your empathy, your understanding through conversation. And so what I tend to find is that a lot of companies over index on the expertise part, and there's nothing wrong with it, but it only takes you so far because again, it feels much more comfortable to do that, but to really engage in conversation, to do the work, to understand your customer and to be able to tailor your message for different situations to demonstrate that you get it. And if you can balance those two parts, then if I'm going to want to engage you for you and your team services, it's like, I know what you're doing, that you know what you're doing in terms of negotiation training, but you also would understand how I would apply it and what my constraints are and what my hopes and dreams are. So expertise and empathy. And I really find that only through conversation, Kwame, can we demonstrate empathy and get that deep understanding of the customer. Message is really conversationally based in the way that I approach it.

I think that is great. Expertise and empathy. I think that's really great. To summarize the origins of trust, you correct me if I'm wrong on this one, Jim. It sounds like what we're saying is that the person is saying you have the skills necessary to get the job done. And I believe that you can help me solve my problem because you have taken the time to understand my problem.

Yes. And in the absence of that, I can think that you as a company, you as a seller, you as a business leader might know your stuff. You're just not for me. I mean, you could be a great accountant, you could be a great attorney, you can have a great technical solution or a piece of software, you might say, that's great for somebody else. And so again, it's being able to engage in conversation, do the work, have the right preparation, and be able to demonstrate that empathy and understanding. It'll make you more persuasive. You also do a better job of solving the problem for your customer.

Yeah. This is great. Let me riff on this a little bit, because it sounds when I think about it, for example, for me as a lawyer in law school, passing the bar exam, which was a harrowing experience, I think every lawyer carries a little bit of baggage from that test. Three days, 15 hours is horrible.

Do I detect a little twitch or cringe when you think back on that?

Yes, Jim, no lie. At least twice a year, I have nightmares about the bar exam. I wake up like, oh, no, I failed. It's still with me. It's still with me. But I know for me as a lawyer, we kept on focusing on legal skills. Hey, you need to learn this, retain all of this information. Be the best, be the best, be the best. That's all that matters. But it seems to me that a lot of professionals focus so much on their skills and they miss the human elements. And then they don't understand the disconnect between where they are currently in their business and their career and where they want to be. And they're missing out on opportunities. But they don't understand why does your company invest in professional development training? If you believe that your team would benefit from a negotiation workshop, all you need to do is go to our website, fill out the workshop request form, and then we'll set up a time to chat. These workshops are completely customizable, and we've done them all around the country. Negotiation and conflict resolution skills are beneficial across all professions, but they're especially useful in procurement, purchasing, sales, sourcing, and contract management. Our calendar is filling up quickly, and we even have some workshops scheduled for next year if you think you might want one. I'd suggest reaching out soon so you don't miss out. Check out the link in the description to learn more. And now back to the show.

That's very true. I think that's a good perspective, Kwame. And when I take a look at it, as you say, the understanding why, I find that if for those listening and watching for yourself, for your business, if you're wondering, I get it at a conceptual level that discomfort or lack of confidence or lack of skill in selling conversations is a good thing. But wondering how that might be showing up in your business today, I actually find there are three types of symptoms, if you will, and I put labels on each of those, and each of them lead to a different core problem. In messaging, they kind of get back to a lot of the original questions. So here are the types of symptoms that you may or may not be seeing in your own business. So I call them crickets. Cowboys and commodities. Easy to remember that way. Crickets, cowboys and commodities. The first one is crickets. And so, Kwame, if the crickets are chirping, not much is happening, right? So from a business sense, if the crickets are chirping, that growth is hard to come by. So whether you're going for new customers or you're trying to get renewals and customer retention, you might even be trying to sell more to your existing customer base. But somehow it's just, it feels like it's an uphill climb. And I find this a lot, especially with small to medium sized businesses or entrepreneurs where you have, the leader of the business is carrying a lot of load, right? It's like they're the ones who are supposed to establish the relationships. They may be the one closing the deals. A lot comes on them. Crickets are a scale problem, obviously a messenger problem, in that you probably don't have enough of them. You might have one or two stars on your sales team or your account team or your fundraising team, or again, in your leadership, but you don't have enough people who are confident and consistently good at cheering the conversation themselves. And that can show up again in growth rates and the like. The second one is cowboys could be cowgirls, but we like the cowboy spirit of autonomy of people who just want to get it done and do it themselves. But in a business growth capacity, especially on a sales team, that can be a bad thing. It's lack of consistency. And so you have people that are just going to do it their own way. I had a client a number of years ago who told me at the beginning of our engagement, he said, jim, around here everyone rolls their own. And so the problem is that makes you vulnerable if you only have a few people who are really driving the growth and they're doing things their own way. It's also inconsistency, I think, also undercuts trustworthiness, right. And undercuts your brand and your reputation. So you want to, in that sense, you want to develop some more management habits to bring more consistency. Not scripted, we'll talk about that. That's going too far the other way. But to bring a source of conversational truth to all of this. And the final part is I call commodity and that's a messaging issue. So you sound like everybody else. It's hard to be distinctive if you're caught in industry lingo or you've got a mission statement which is kind of bland. Right. You know, we want to grow and serve our communities and be sustainable and blah Blah, blah. But it doesn't really ignite any passion. It doesn't make you sound any different than anyone else. And I find that that happens a lot in. Okay, well, let's call this one out. Most attorneys, I would say, and not to paint with too broad of a brush here, Kwame, most attorneys sound the same, right? A lot of accountants sound the same. A lot of engineers sound the same. People who are in software sound the same. And it's not the language probably that your buyers speak. And so the challenge there in the actual words and questions and stories and phrases is to break out of the lingo and, and break out of the blandness and have something that's much more clear and engaging, especially for lay people.

Oh, that makes so much sense. So much sense. And I love how we're connecting all of these things together. And I think it gives the listeners a clear roadmap of what some of the problems are and how to fix it. One of the things that I'm interested in hearing from you is the concept of going back to what you said about the expertise side of it. How do we trigger that expertise? How do we trigger that feeling of authority and credibility without coming off as arrogant to the other side?

I'll offer another guideline for your viewers and listeners to keep in mind, and I think we'll get to that very thing. When your buyers or potential buyers have a problem and they have an issue that they're trying to deal with because ultimately you want to come across as the solution to their problem, as someone whose recommendation they should follow or solution they should buy and what tends to happen. Unfortunately, a lot of times people who are knowledgeable and well intentioned and have that expertise, what they do is they lead with that, right? Here's what you should do. Here's what I know, here's you're just like everybody else and here's how good I am. So follow my advice. When they really haven't yet plugged into the unique elements of the problem the other person's trying to solve. So here's the premise. Most people, if it's an important problem, especially in business, and they're trying to solve, they've got a challenge or they have a big opportunity, they'll follow a sequence of questions that frankly, they ask themselves. And they may or may not be consciously aware of it, but it tends to follow the sequence. The first question we ask ourselves is why should I consider a change? Or why should I change what I'm doing today? Because we're all pretty comfortable in what we're doing, even if we know it's not perfect, right? Change is hard. The second question is, why now? What's the sense of urgency? Because we can only have a few priorities at a time. We have a lot of great ideas, but we have to take them just a few at a time. And then the third question would be, well, why you? Like why you as a person, why you as a company? Why would you be the answer compared to competitors or doing it myself or whatever the case may be. So it's kind of why change? Why now? Why you? What tends to happen more often, though, the way that our brains work and our desire to talk about ourselves. Is we trying to go in reverse? Kwame so we'll start with the whole credibility thing. Let me tell you about me and how much I know and how I think that we're different. And that can be really frustrating because you're giving this solution to a problem that hasn't been well defined. And then what I find is that companies then say, well, I can't get. We can't close anything, right? So we got to move the needle, right? How do we develop a sense of urgency? And they'll do it in kind of a contrived way. We'll cut the price, we'll bundle things differently. We'll do something along those lines. And then that becomes frustrating. And you hear companies say, well, they meaning the marketplace or their target customers, they just don't get it. So we have to educate the marketplace. So they're trying to drive in reverse. And it's very frustrating and slow. So if we to go back to how do we demonstrate our expertise, it start without being self important, right? Is we demonstrate an understanding of the problem, we're asking good questions, we're bringing some insights, we're helping people frame what's really going on, maybe the root causes of their problem and ways to think about it, and then determining if that's a priority for them to really solve going forward. And we're guiding them different types of conversations. There's the why change conversation. There's the why now conversation. There's the why us conversation. And so we should be tailoring what we do depending upon the point where our buyers are in their journey as well. So demonstrating your understanding of the problem and asking good questions to understand how to tailor your recommendations, that's how you demonstrate expertise and empathy at the same time.

Wow. And so to me, it sounds like what we need to do in order to get to the point where we could demonstrate our Our expertise, we have to start with empathy to show that we have an understanding of the problem.

Yes. And I think an understanding of what the other side's feeling and dealing with and their alternatives and their constraints, all of those things as well. That's also a very good thing in any type of negotiation, any type of valuable conversation, as you're trying to help set the stage before you're jumping in and telling people what to do. And so there's a. There's a. There's a discipline about this. And part of what I, through my book and through the other work that I do is I really encourage. And you can do this yourself or you can get help to do it, but in terms of the things to know and the things to do across your team, across your company, I think it helps to have playbook or a guide or something along those lines. That again, not a script, but it's also not laissez faire. You can't just leave this to whatever do in the cowboy syndrome. And so it's the best practices. And I highly recommend, get your marketing people and your salespeople and product people and customer service people and others together and come up with, you know, what are the insights that we can bring to people? What are the things that we know about our priority customers and prospects? What are good questions to ask, what are useful stories to share and which ones to share in different situations? What are the things that truly make us different from the competition and how do we express that? So just getting a guy together as a team, as a company, that will help build in more consistency and keep people from going to what is a reflexive kind of. And I've done it too, Kwame. You know, I've been too quick to jump into talking about myself or make a recommendation before I kind of fully establish. It's a very human thing. But here is the good news for everyone. This is a very manageable business issue. It's chronic and it's expensive if you don't manage it. But you can manage it. There's some simple steps you can take, and you don't have to be perfect because no one is. But if you're consistently good at it, you will be far better than your competitors who are out there struggling with the. I believe in what we're selling, but we have no clue of how to talk about it.

Spot on. Oh, this is good. This is good. And I want to make sure we leave time to get to the other two elements too, because we have to talk about messengers and management and we've touched on those. But I want to go deeper. And so in your methodology and your framework, when you're talking about messengers, let's start with who are the messengers?

Messengers at the most basic level, Kwame, are anyone who can authentically share about you and your business and has an audience themselves. What I tend to find is that a lot of really good business people underestimate the number of good potential messengers that they have. The obvious place would be your sales team, marketing team, account managers, again fundraisers, customer service people, anyone who's kind of customer facing. They'll tend to not take into account the so called back office or not customer facing, which is a misnomer because everyone has a part to play in a good client experience. But you also have people who are going to be in your community who know you, your current baseline of customers. You may have suppliers, you may have other people in partners or in a sales channel, for example, all of those people. So you think in terms of their role with your business, all can have a role to play. Now clearly you're going to expect more out of your salespeople than out of your current customers, right? You're not going to try to script them, but they can all have in their role and in their everyday business conversations, ways to keep you top of mind and way to help amplify and echo your story. The other thing I will mention in terms of messengers, and this was a surprising finding, came out eight or nine years ago, I believe Adam Grant of the Wharton School did some of the original research. Bottom line is he found that despite a couple of generations of assumptions that extroverts are the most persuasive salespeople, he found that that really doesn't matter. In fact, if you control for other factors with real world salespeople that extroverts and introverts were no more effective one versus the other. And in fact it's people in the middle of that continuum he called ambiverts. I call them the nimble majority because it describes most people and it's people in the middle are more naturally wired for a good give and take in conversation anyway. So I would say don't limit yourself when it comes to messengers in terms of their specific direct role in the company. Think more broadly and also by personality type. It's not just a game for extroverts. This really is something that the vast majority of people inside and outside your company are naturally pretty well wired to do.

This is great. And I especially like the the point about understanding the different personalities of the people on your team and how different people can add value in different ways. It kind of speaks to the value of diversity too, because I think we often limit ourselves with what we think about with regard to diversity. Race, gender, sexual orientation, those type of things, but also personality style. Right. This is very important. Everybody's different in that type of, in that regard and they have a different role to play.

This is one of those areas where true diversity makes a big difference and does give you a bit of an advantage. Again, the right questions to ask, the right recommendations to make, and just adopting the right language all along the way.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I know you want to talk just a little bit about management and I think management habits, I'll just touch on that a little bit. So this is not about calling your managers into question. In fact, I find that this process is really empowering and it works for almost any sort of team, any sort of organization. But here's the thing to keep in mind is that these days we know how scarce labor is, we know what turnover is like. And if you think about people coming into or out of your organization, or people who have been front line employees and now they're a manager, or they have a level at which they're supposed to help evaluate and coach other people in the absence of some strategic process, something that you do intentionally, having a guide, doing, coaching, doing feedback around customer conversations, what's going to happen? People won't do it. They won't know how. You're asking people to be coaches and managers who are probably never coached themselves. And so when you think about the natural turnover within organizations and the roles that people have, you do need some base that can be updated on a regular basis and specific coaching and help for people who really do want to know how to do this, it's very uncomfortable if you don't really understand what the company does and what value it has. And the way that you help your communities as well as your customers. I think we're finding more and more is if you can get your internal folks as well as your external folks really engaged in that through the message, through the value that you have, it really creates a flywheel for both more employee engagement and certainly doing better in your growth plans as well.

Absolutely. Now, as we're able to see this holistically, we can see how the message, the messengers, management, all of those things, they come together holistically and cohesively too. But what I'm realizing though, and this is something you touched on earlier, is that this doesn't happen by accident. It doesn't just happen organically. This takes work and intentionality.

Organically, again, nothing will happen. People will do things their own way. They'll avoid the conversation. It'll be tribal. And so any disconnects that you might have between sales and marketing and customer service and the back office and distribution and all that will just not only linger, but they'll get worse over time, and it'll be a frustrating drag on growth. And so, yes, it needs to be intentional and strategic. I think recognizing how expensive this problem is, how fundamentally important it is to your growth plans, but also, again, you don't have to do heroic feats here. We don't need to ask people to do something that they're not capable of doing or that they don't want to do. The skills are pretty basic, but it's getting together and deciding those pieces and how they'll fit together. So let's craft the best elements of a conversational message, the elements of a good conversation. And we'll do that with people from different parts of the business. Again, so we'll want to capture the right language. I always like my clients to have a small working group that represents people from marketing and sales and product and maybe sales partners and others from across the business. So everyone's fingerprints get on there and people with a range of experiences. And then you are very intentional in thinking about who your messengers are and how do you feed that system, Whether you're onboarding new people or giving them ongoing training, or maybe they're important elements of your business that have changed. You acquired something, you're going into a new territory. You have a different product mix, you have a new competitor that comes in, and you have to be able to message around that. So thinking through what's our message, being very intentional about the care and feeding and training and encouragement of our messengers, and then make it as a habit on the management side so that you're developing this in the coaching, feedback, support, celebration of a job well done and having that single source of conversational truth in the form of a playbook or a guide that you can keep updated on a regular basis.

Oh, this is good, Jim. I really appreciate this. I know we're coming up on time, but before you go, can you let the listeners know again, where they can get in touch with you and how they can work with you?

Sure. And again, my pleasure. I'm always happy to be a sounding board or just hear feedback or even some pushback from your big audience as well. You could go to my website. The biggest challenge that you'll have is spelling my last name. I did buy the domains for some of the most common misspellings, Kwame, so you'll get there eventually. It's jimkarr.com, k A R R H. I do have a podcast, the manager message podcast. Kwame, you were gracious enough to come on be a Guest not long ago and also LinkedIn. It tends to be my platform of choice. So if anyone wants to connect, follow, or send a message to me there, I'd be delighted to be a sounding board for you. And of course, I have to recommend my book as well. But for the most part, I really enjoy the work with executives and teams and good professionals, and it hurts my heart. It might hurt your heart, Kwame, when you see people who that could use negotiation skills and be so much more fulfilled at work and at home and in their communities. I'm much the same way. I don't want any of you to be frustrated or to lack confidence in how to talk about your business. I want you to be as confident in how to talk about your business as in the business itself.

I couldn't agree with you more, my friend. Jim, appreciate it. Thanks again for coming on the show.

My pleasure, Kwame. Thank you.

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