Selling ideas successfully

Ian Wharton at Aide Health argues that you need to ignore popular culture clichés if you want your ideas to fly

Popular culture likes telling you how to sell an idea successfully, and it might be killing your ability to move from idea to execution.

Dragon’s Den, Shark Tank and Don Draper take the first hurdle that every idea faces — the moment when the idea is sold to others — and turn it into theatrics. These are heightened environments to do one thing, and one thing only: entertain the audience at home. There’s a stage and a script to capture a performance.

In reality, ideas are sold in much quieter moments.

Your potential commissioners, the people you need to bring your idea to life, don’t want to be entertained by you; they want their problem solved. Falling into the caricatures of popular culture cliché and turning the articulation of your idea into a performance leads to three things: the hard sell, undervaluing context, and forgetting who the idea is for.

Each of them, when unaddressed, lowers your chances of success.

Trust, not the hard sell

Selling an idea is to take something incomplete but full of potential and get those around you to see what you see. To have them rallying behind it and influencing it. Keeping an idea alive long enough to reach accomplishment takes people, sometimes hundreds of them, and your sell needs to create the space to invite them in.

Performances are one-directional and unwelcoming of the voice or needs of the commissioner. It positions them as a source of capital or gatekeepers to a platform and nothing more. Certainly not as a partner or collaborator. It deploys language to create false urgency and hyperbole to try and guide the commissioner’s decision towards certainty. Instead, it leads to overselling, and the opposite is achieved.

To execute an idea means to spend years together through the highs and lows, travel, late nights and uncertainty. It requires a relationship. If the initial delivery of your idea, however brief, signals anything other than that being enjoyable or possible, you will be figuratively or literally shown the door.

Instead, the delivery should be a conversation. The idea is not something that’s happening to your commissioner, it’s happening with them very much involved. An exchange built on trust, not transaction.

Context

Cultural depictions of selling an idea are, at best, a 10-minute moment. They create the illusion that the sell starts and ends there. It doesn’t. Selling an idea is dozens of moments with multiple people over time, and then the idea is almost always sold on your behalf when you’re no longer in the room.

The only way the idea survives is if it carries with it context.

Any time you sell an idea, you are in one world, and your commissioner is in another. Each world has its unique frames of reference, motivations, and distractions. Going through an exercise of context acts as a bridge between these two worlds. Miscommunicating or misunderstanding context will leave your commissioner with friction, detachment and poor judgement.

To avoid these things, you need to do everything in your power to create context before, during and after your sell. For example, before the moment of selling, you need to ask; “What is the context of the commissioner’s expectation?” Ask yourself what the people in the room expect to see. Simple, but so often, teams do not explicitly discover this before selling. Once known, you can explore what expectations you can meet, which expectations must be met, and whether any can be subverted to catch them off-guard and make your idea more memorable.

During your sell, you need to set and understand context in each individual moment. Every time you reveal a piece of information, more perspective or a new part of your idea, context can shift. Sometimes slightly, sometimes dramatically — a budget concern, more complexity, a technical element that might not be fully understood. As the seller of the idea, you need to anticipate and be alert to these shifts to stop a gap between the worlds opening midway through the sell. This will reduce detachment and the chance of fielding questions that derail your sell.

Treat the defining of context as an exercise that’s just as important as coming up with the idea itself. All creative projects are hanging by a thread, but bringing the two worlds together through the exercise of context is how you align and move forward to do something hard with unanimity.

Who the idea is for

The selling of an idea is not about your commissioner or your ego. Performances make it all too easy to forget the real reason you are there — the intended recipients of the idea — and instead make it about that moment.

Expert selling of an idea quickly talks about the audience of your idea. It speaks to what they need, what’s holding them back, what their process of decision-making is and why your idea will matter to them. Your sell is about these people. It’s not trying to look good in front of your audience.

Every new idea is asking a lot of your audience. Whether to entertain them, make their lives easier or make them more informed, they need to donate limited time and resources to choose your idea over doing something else. Great commissioners are looking for you to have God-like knowledge of your audience and empathy for the challenges they are facing that can be overcome by your idea. This will make you, your delivery and your idea impressive. Not 10 minutes of fame.

Entertaining as they might be in TV and film, the theatrical selling of an idea discounts everything beyond being ‘in the room’ at that moment. It is hopelessly short-sighted to build your sell around a stage and a script. Instead, aim for a delivery that builds trust, creates context so the idea can be fully understood by that specific commissioner and no one else, and makes it about the audience, not the moment. 

Ian Wharton is the founder and CEO of Aide Health, an author, and the creator of the online course Sell the Idea. He writes on LinkedIn

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com