14   

Parting Thoughts

Over the course of this book, you’ve learned the frameworks, situational fluency, and tactical skills your organization needs to message effectively to existing customers in the four acute commercial moments—renewals, price increases, upsells, and apologies.

And yet underneath it all, there’s a broader story to tell. It’s the story of the difference between assertions made from “best-practices” capture and assertions made through applying scientific rigor to your understanding how your customers frame value and make choices.

Much of what passes for thought leadership in sales and marketing is really best-practices capture. People at companies are surveyed. They’re asked how they do things. And then an analyst summarizes those findings and says, in essence, “Do what these people do, because they are in the top quartile of performance with respect to their peers.”

There are challenges with that type of analysis.

The most important challenge is that the assumption of cause and effect is unfounded. Just because people engaging in one set of behaviors happen to be clustered near the top of their peers doesn’t mean the behaviors themselves caused the performance. It could be any one of hundreds of other factors that caused the performance. For example, it could be that the most successful companies happen to be in a market space that’s very hot, and because companies tend to copy each other’s behavior, they all are using the same tactics.

Does that mean the tactics caused the performance? No. Any tactics would have worked in that situation.

The fact that those companies chose to copy each other tells us nothing insightful. It simply captures herd behavior.

Might it still work? It might. But because you’re simply copying tactics without an underlying understanding of how or why they work, you’re going to find yourself in a position where you have to guess how you should implement those tactics. You might be successful at the end, but you’re going to have to work really hard to get there.

Throughout this book you’ve seen a different approach. You haven’t been reading about best-practices capture. Instead, you’ve learned the results of many studies conducted across thousands of participants around the world.

These studies were funded by us, but they were designed and conducted by independent scientists. These scientists designed these studies purposefully, so you could see true cause and effect, something that can’t be seen through best-practices capture.

The net effect is that not only can you apply these messaging techniques in the described situations, but you also can be situationally fluent in unique situations, because you have an understanding of how your customer frames value and makes choices.

A useful way of thinking about this is that best-practices capture is analogous to our understanding of the solar system before Copernicus. When scientists believed that everything revolved around the earth, it made it difficult to track the movement of the other planets, but not impossible. You simply kept gathering observational data and trying to come up with very complex mathematical models to explain the observed behavior of the planets.

But once Copernicus reoriented thinking to the idea that the planets revolved around the sun, everything got easier. You understood why your observational data looked like it did, and now the math got easier, as well. And that led to much more accurate predictions for where the planets would be in the sky.

The same pre-Copernicus problem exists if you try to understand marketing and sales through the lens of following best practices. You can observe customer behavior, but it is very difficult to predict that behavior. You have to come up with increasingly complex models to match your observational data with your results.

But when you move from a best-practices imitation approach and instead view your customer’s decision making through the lens of Status Quo Bias, your ability to predict customer behavior in unique situations grows.

Just as Copernicus swapped out the earth for the sun in the center of his maps, sales and marketing professionals need to swap out best-practices capture for an understanding of Status Quo Bias as the center of their maps.

When you combine that knowledge with an understanding of concepts like the power of anchoring, emotional decision making, and visual storytelling, you’ll have a framework to create the most impactful messages, regardless of the uniqueness of your situation.

Use these tools often. Use them well. And thank you for the gift of your time and attention.

Erik Peterson                

Chief Executive Officer  

Corporate Visions, Inc.