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SELLING THEMSELVES

When I walk into an Apple retail store, I get the feeling that I am on my own to explore,
touch, lift, try and compare. Sure, I can get help if I want it. But what the store is
designed to do is get people engaged with the product directly.
MITs Michael Schrage calls this a selling themselves strategy, opposed to the sell
to approach we get when we listen to a sales pitch.
Id argue that the future of salesmanship and innovation alike will increasingly depend
on giving people easier ways of selling themselves on whatever it is youre selling,
Schrage writes. Its not enough to be persuasive; youve got to make it easier for people
to persuade themselves.
Even professional service firms should adopt this approach, Schrage argues on his
HBR.org post, Let Your Customers Persuade Themselves. A PSF would be well advised
to ask the question, What can we give away to entice prospects into a serious
conversation about becoming a client?
Its all a matter of degree, I think. Some people are uncomfortable trying on a new
technology or law firm without some guidance and context, which comes in the form of a
quick sales pitch.
Schrage admits he doesnt like being sold to. I dont mind it at all, as long as the sales
person is listening to what I want, a point sales guru Tom Hopkins makes in this nice
interview with my BNET colleague Geoffrey James.
So at the end of the day, your best bet is to understand how your own customers want to
be approached, and be ready to mix and match tactics to help them make a decision.
From your experience, what company really gets it in terms of a compelling sales
experience? Who gets the balance right?

Let Your Customers Persuade


Themselves
11:39 AM Friday January 22, 2010 | Comments (7)
While working at MIT's Media Lab, "Demo or Die" not "Publish or Perish," was
our academic motto. I quickly observed that we basically produced two kinds of
demos.
The first was show-and-tell: We'd show off a clever object or a device or software
snippet. The goal was to make jaws drop and/or blow people away. There was
something of a "magic trick" quality to the best of them. How did you do that?
Cool! Did I mention that Penn & Teller were huge fans and welcome guests at the
Lab?
The other kind of demo though culturally less cool intrigued me more.
These were demos where you'd give your prototype to people to play with. Try
this...see if you can get it to... Designers of the former type loved the theater of
their demos. They loved an audience. They loved performing. Designers of the
latter kind of demo preferred participants to spectators. They wanted to watch
people having fun with their inventions instead of putting on a show. Their demos
weren't props they were playgrounds.
You might say that the first group enjoyed "selling" people. Whereas the second
group liked people to "sell themselves."
That design distinction stuck. Although I consider myself open-minded, I dislike
people no matter how charming or expert trying to "sell" me something. To
heck with charisma. I don't like being "sold." On the other hand, I do like selling
myself. I'm less likely to be persuaded by someone doing a fantastic show-andtell than by someone giving me the opportunity to sell myself. If you hand/send

me something and say, "Play with this for as long or as little as you'd like and get
back to me," I'm yours. Some people need to be some people want to be
convinced. But I want the chance to convince myself. Which type are you? How
do you know? Better yet, which type is your best customer?
When working with technical innovators and marketing entrepreneurs, I'm struck
by how little creativity and effort go into exploiting these fundamental behavioral
differences between people. Designing a model, prototype, or simulation that
makes it easier for an innovator to "sell" it is fundamentally a different task than
coming up with something that makes it easy for a prospect to sell themselves.
Everyone reading this post can think of mobile phones (or enterprise software)
that invite playful exploration that leads to new value or those that end up
inadvertently deleting your most important data. Clearly, Apple's appstore has
become a virtual in both meanings of that word paradigm for innovative
sampling and sampling innovation. Less celebrated but remarkably clever is
Google Labs, the search engine's public playground for its more offbeat
innovative betas. These are "sell yourself" marketplaces. I'm surprised that IBM,
with its strong cloud computing infrastructure and "Smarter Planet" campaign,
hasn't done more of this. Then again, IBM is a classic "sales" culture rather than
one empowering customers to convince themselves.
But the "sell" vs. "sell yourself" sensibility transcends digital devices. Professional
service firms are fools if they're not constantly looking for ways not just to better
communicate the value of their work, but to give people things that let them sell
themselves on the firm's value proposition. What should a law firm or financial
services practice "give away" that prospects could play their way into a serious
conversation about becoming a client? Or what about retail? If I were running
Ikea, I'd tell the Swedish superstore they'd sell even more DIY furniture if they'd
let me see YouTube-like videos of people actually building the darn things.
Whether you're Whole Foods, Wal-Mart or Best Buy, you have to acknowledge
that as important as friendly and knowledgeable staff may be you need to
create places, spaces and opportunities for your customers sell themselves
through self-sampling instead of selling-sampling.
For completely understandable reasons, managers and executives feel
compelled to be better salespeople both inside their organizations and out.
Whether its consultative selling or Zig Ziglar motivational selling, people are

always looking for tips, techniques and technologies to sell better. That's fine. But
between the Media Lab, my research into innovation adoption and the global
pervasiveness of digital media, I'd argue that the future of salesmanship and
innovation alike will increasingly depend on giving people easier ways of selling
themselves on whatever it is you're selling. It's not enough to be persuasive;
you've got to make it easier for people to persuade themselves.
Are you making the right kinds of persuasiveness investment?

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