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-and-tell 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?
Source - Harvard Business Review
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