The Power of How and Why

Have you ever read something that made you say “oh, that’s so obvious now that it’s been stated.  Why couldn’t I see that for myself?”

I recently had just that experience reading Putting Challenger Selling to Work – One on Brian McIver’s blog.

To put Brian’s post in context, if you work in sales and you dabble in social media (you must do, or why else are you here?) you will know that there has been a huge amount of buzz about The Challenger Sale by Matt Dixon and Brent Adamson.  The book (not yet read) is based on surveys of over 6,000 sales reps across geographies and industries.

One of Brian’s ‘things’ is that he is a firm believer in evidence-based sales skills.  He argues his point strongly from a position of very deep and wide knowledge.  My poor, undeveloped brain struggles to keep up most of the time!

What I particularly like about this blog post is the fact that Brian has applied his knowledge of the Challenger ‘ethos’ to a behavioural analysis study he was running and distilled out some very simple but straightforward advice.

In 278 words he has applied two extremely complex concepts and written what I consider to be one of the finest pieces of advice on selling that I have ever read.  This appears to be such a simple concept – replace ‘why’ with ‘how’ – that I’m amazed I haven’t seen it before.  I guess I’m just not that well-read (and not as clever as I thought I was!)

Additionally, the piece illustrates very clearly how very small changes to our language can have profound effects on the results we achieve.

It also panders to the (quite large) part of me that gets very annoyed when people try to defend the increasingly sloppy use of language and, particularly, punctuation.  Their argument generally goes along the lines of “it’s what you say that’s important, not the way in which you say or write it.”  How wrong can you be?!  Just look at Lynne Truss’s book “Eats, Shoots and Leaves”.

The title is taken from a description of a panda’s diet.  Correctly punctuated, (eats shoots and leaves) it lives on a variety of plant material.  Incorrectly punctuated, (eats, shoots and leaves) it eats whatever it likes, kills or injures someone and then vacates the premises.  All that difference from a single comma!

Anyone have any recommendations on what else I should be reading?