Verve! Management Consulting

We've all been there: Management wants you to cut costs, but isn’t willing to change the behaviour that started the spending binge in the first place. Your salespeople pledge to do anything it takes to make their numbers. Anything, that is, except change the way they sell. Your employees keep making the same mistakes over and over, long after you’ve shown them the right way to do things. Sounds familiar? Then it’s time you harnessed the power of persuasion. Persuasion assumes that if you want people to genuinely change the way they behave, you have to win them over through reasoning. Problem is, when most of us try to get someone to change their behaviour, we fail. Why? All too often it’s because we confuse persuasion with vocalisation: Telling people they should change. If you really want someone to change their behaviour, stop talking about it. Instead, show them why they need to change, frame the need for change in their own language and bring them face to face with a real live customer.

Cutting costs is never easy. But when was the last time you had to shave $2 billion off of your company’s purchasing budget? That’s the kind of problem Dave Nelson had on his hands when he became Vice President of worldwide supply management for agricultural equipment manufacturer John Deere & Co. Nelson had been in the purchasing business long enough to know that the only way Deere could achieve such colossal cost cutting was to treat purchasing as a strategic driver—not a back-room evil. He also knew that making this shift would require more than a change of heart – it would call for a significant investment. What Nelson didn’t know was exactly how to convince Deere’s executive committee to support his ambitious strategic sourcing plan. So he went looking for gloves. During his visits to the company’s numerous plants, Nelson noticed that Deere had a lot of different-styled gloves lying around. He stopped counting at 424. That’s four hundred and twenty four different styles of gloves. To his next meeting with the executive committee Nelson arrived early. On the boardroom table he piled 424 pairs of gloves. Nelson made his demand clear to the group of stunned executives seated around the table: “It’s time to fish or cut bait.” Their response? Nelson got the green light to execute his strategy AND the funding required to implement it.

Seeing is believing. What made the committee change their minds? Not the extent of the problem (they knew they had to cut costs). Nor Nelson’s plan (they had seen it before). It wasn’t even Nelson’s conviction that Deere had to change its ways (Nelson himself knew that wouldn’t be enough). What got the committee to change the way they behaved was seeing for themselves just how out of control their own system was. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Sometimes, a pile of gloves can be worth even more.

“You want to know just how different things used to be around here?” Jamie, the sales manager at a once high-flying tech firm led me to a storage room and pointed to a stack of old customer orders. “We used to get orders like this all the time,” she said, holding up a six-figure order for IT equipment. “This one came in by fax. No phone call even. Heck, back then we didn’t even have to sell – the orders just kept pouring in on their own!” But that was six quarters ago. Six long, painful quarters of decreased sales. “I guess I’m as much to blame as anyone for the fact that it’s taken us that long to get our act together. When the numbers started getting ugly, I gathered the team and gave them my ‘burning platform’ speech about how we all have to sell harder.”

We were now sitting in Jamie’s office, and I couldn’t help noticing the sign she had on her wall; a quote from Albert Einstein: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”

Jamie leaned back in her chair and continued: “It took me six months to understand that selling harder was not what we needed to do. We needed to sell differently.” “What made you realise that?” I asked, knowing that Jamie’s scenario was all too common in today’s post-bubble economy. “It took me some time, but I finally understood that the real problem was the customer”. I cringed at this last sentence and Jamie noticed. Throwing responsibility for declined sales over to the customer was easy. It was also the least constructive thing a salesperson can do. “You see,” Jamie began with a smile, “what we didn’t understand, or were afraid to understand, was that our customers no longer valued what we were selling. They weren’t interested in buying equipment from us when foreign manufacturers were selling the exact same equipment at 40% less. What our customers really wanted from us was help in executing their strategy.

It really wasn’t until I invited Amy Tao over that things really began to change”. “Who’s Amy Tao,” I asked. “Amy is the buyer for our most important client”. Even I recognised the company’s name. It was one of the most prestigious firms in the industry. Getting Amy’s company on your client list was as good as getting a blessing from the Pope. “We used to start every sales pitch by telling the customer that Amy’s company is one of our clients—we were all very proud of this. So when I asked my team to come to a meeting with her, everyone showed up.” “What did Amy do that got your people to change the way they sold?” I continued to prod. “It wasn’t what she did. It was what she said. She started the meeting by saying ‘Good morning everyone. I’m Amy Tau and I’m here to tell you that, as of tomorrow, my company will no longer be your client.’” “How did people react?” I asked Jamie. “I never saw so many jaws drop in my life,” she giggled. “It was as if someone had dropped a bomb in the middle of the room. It didn’t take long before things started changing around afterwards. “So all it took was to understand how your customers had changed?” I asked. “No,” Jamie answered. “Three months before Amy came to visit us I had pretty much told my team the same things she had said at the meeting. But they had to hear it from the horse’s mouth to actually understand that they had to change.

Who is “them”? Most companies have long forgotten who their products and services were created for. When this happens they begin to see the world not from the customer’s perspective but from their own product’s perspective. Thus, the world is no longer comprised of Andrea Malik (single mom, requires a financial plan to save enough money to send her 3 year-old son, Terence, to university when he grows up), but of Customer #234-3456 (a tier-3 customer with less than £500 in their checking account). Next time you want your people to change because the customer has changed, bring one to the office. You’d be amazed at the impact they can have.

What do you do when a careless employee keeps making the same mistakes, even though you’ve repeatedly told him his mistakes cost your business money? Lionel Conacher faced this dilemma when he owned a Canadian Tire store (Canadian Tire is Canada's leading hard goods retailer). Connected to Conacher’s store via conveyor belt was a warehouse, where inventory was kept until it was needed. Each time the store shelves needed restocking, an order would be sent to the warehouse. When the order was ready, it would be placed on the conveyor belt, operated by an attendant who ensured the goods arrived safely to the shop floor. One summer, Conacher had the misfortune of employing an especially stubborn attendant. The man kept operating the conveyor belt against company guidelines, resulting in endless cans of paint spilling on the floor.

At first, Conacher tried simply explaining to the man that his lack of attention was costing Conacher a lot of money, but to no avail. The belt kept rolling and the paint kept spilling. At this point, Conacher could have fired the man.

Help them “get it”. We often have a hard time understanding why some people simply “don’t get it”. After all, many times the things we ask our employees, supervisors, partners and even kids seem like common sense. In reality, things are rarely that simple. We all operate in what Conacher calls different “fields of relevance”. Thus, something that makes perfect sense to a line manager can easily draw a blank stare from someone in the marketing department. If you want to persuade someone to behave differently, you’ll have to change the way they feel. And to change the way they feel, you’ll have to describe a world and use examples they can relate to.

Persuasion isn’t about forcing people to do what they don’t want to, nor is it about tricking them into doing what you want them to. It’s about showing them the world in a way they haven’t seen before, causing them to draw the right conclusions.