Why isn’t your message sticking with Buyers?
In the Top Business book of 2007 “Made to Stick”, the Heath brothers are interested in the question of what makes some ideas effective and memorable and other ideas utterly forgettable? Some ideas stick and others fade away. Why?
“People tend to think that having a great idea is enough, and they think the communication part will come naturally. We are in deep denial about the difficulty of getting a thought out of our own heads and into the heads of others. It’s just not true that, “If you think it, it will stick.”
And that brings us to the villain of our (their) book: The Curse of Knowledge. Lots of research in economics and psychology shows that when we know something, it becomes hard for us to imagine not knowing it. As a result, we become lousy communicators. Think of a lawyer who can’t give you a straight, comprehensible answer to a legal question. His vast knowledge and experience renders him unable to fathom how little you know. So when he talks to you, he talks in abstractions that you can’t follow. And we’re all like the lawyer in our own domain of expertise.
Here’s the great cruelty of the Curse of Knowledge: The better we get at generating great ideas - new insights and novel solutions - in our field of expertise, the more unnatural it becomes for us to communicate those ideas clearly. That’s why knowledge is a curse. But notice we said “unnatural,” not “impossible.” Experts just need to devote a little time to applying the basic principles of stickiness.
JFK dodged the Curse. If he’d been a modern-day politician, CEO (or a VP of Sales & Marketing), he’d probably have said, “Our mission is to become the international leader in the space industry, using our capacity for technological innovation to build a bridge towards humanity’s future.” That might have set a moon-walk back fifteen years”.
Elizabeth Newton PHD at Stanford discovered the Curse of Knowledge in 1990. In a controlled group study, she had half of the group act as Tappers, tapping a choice of 25 well known songs like Happy Birthday by knocking on the table and the other half acting as listeners whose job was to guess the song based on the rhythm being tapped. Out of 120 songs, the listeners only guessed 2.5% of the songs. What’s interesting is that before the listeners guessed the name of the song, Newton asked the Tappers to predict the odds that the listeners would guess correctly. They predicted the odds were 50%.
So, the Tappers think they are successful at getting their message across 50% of the time yet they are successful only 2.5% of the time, why? (Try the tapping exercise now yourself.)
When a Tapper taps, they hear the song in their head. The listener, however, can’t hear the tune, all they hear is a bunch of disconnected taps.
The problem is that the Tappers have been given knowledge (the song) that makes it impossible for them to imagine what it's like to lack the knowledge. This is the curse of knowledge.
Isn’t the curse of knowledge reenacted everyday in enterprise sale? Just as the Tappers can’t believe the Listeners could be so stupid to guess ‘Happy Birthday’ to ‘Hey Jude’, are salespeople not equally exasperated how stupid buyers are to not see the value of their offering? To the buyer, are you not speaking in abstractions the buyer can’t understand? Are you not just tapping: Speaking the arcane language of specialization?
Aside from de-learning what you know, the best way, according to the authors, to beat the Curse of Knowledge is through the use of stories.
So, how could you help buyers write their own story about how they could visualize using your offering to achieve a goal, solve a problem and satisfy a need?
After the buyer admits a goal, would it help if buyers write their own story; e.g, if your salespeople could ask the buyer a series of diagnostic questions to fully uncover the buyer’s problem/cost [incentive to change] to their operations?
If the salesperson then followed up on this meeting with a letter outlining what the buyer said was their goal, what what was holding them back and the capabilities that the buyer said could help, [all in the buyer’s words], would that help your message stick with your buyers?
Buyers still might not buy into your message, but would it be such a bad thing if they bought your offering, not based on your message, but instead based on their own?
If you would like to find out more about how to move away from "proposing value" based on product features, and instead, start to help the buyer "create value" by linking your best capabilities to their real business issues, then attend the upcoming CMA event “Aligning Marketing with Sales: Turning theory into reality” on Sept 4th in Toronto.
