Retention, Referral and Raving Fans (R3) - Part 3
Innovation Doesn't Sell
Part Three is an extension of Stealth Influence…
Stealth Influence
Your prospects and clients might like your ideas. But do you know whose ideas they will always like better? Their own. A little proactive empathy, Socratic questioning, and an understanding of how ideas diffuse - and you can make them think your ideas are theirs.
A warning. If you have a strong desire to sound smart, win an argument, or get credit, you will struggle with this. For Stealth Influence to work, you have to value getting the ideal outcome over getting credit for it. The Stealth Influence workbooks and masterclass dive deeper into this can be found in the resource section linked earlier.
There are three components of stealth influence that apply directly to R3.
Rebuilding Belief Systems
Everyone is carrying their own belief system, not yours (shocking, I know). Sometimes, their belief system is built on false premises, preventing them from taking the steps that your product or service can help them with.
You have to quickly put a crack in their false belief system so that they are receptive to a new, more productive one. To do this efficiently you have to be clear on what their limiting belief is and which one you want them to replace with it. If you remove a belief without a substitute to replace it, they will replace it with the first thing that comes along - whether it’s productive for them or not.
The Four Trust Lenses
There are four primary lenses through which people process the world and develop their beliefs. Everyone biases one or two over the others and guess what? Not everyone carries the same biases you do. GASP!
Once you have figured out a structure to rebuild beliefs through the lens(es) that are most natural to you, it’s just a few steps to apply them to the other lenses.
The Five Adoption Decisions
According to Diffusion of Innovation, Fifth Edition, there are five adoption decisions that determine whether or not someone adopts something that is new to them. Key: new to them, not new to you. (If you haven’t figured it out by now, if you think the world revolves around you, this strategy won’t really work) Each adoption decision has a simple question to answer.
Strive to answer all five questions at each step.
It seems like a lot, but if you get it down it’s probably less than what you’re doing now. If you can master the rebuilding beliefs stage, the rest is easy.
So let’s start there…
Rebuilding Belief Systems:
Proactive Empathy & Understanding starts with answering three questions. To answer those questions, you’ll need to have an understanding of what you’re trying to do and what’s standing in the way.
What you’re trying to do. There is a belief that, if adopted, would make your product, service, or the next step the obvious next step for the client or customers. For example, if someone believes they are one funnel away, building a funnel is the obvious next step. You have to know what belief, if adopted, would make the next step the obvious next one.
What’s standing in the way. Remember, everyone is carrying baggage; a belief system that was formed as a byproduct of their experience. In order to help them work through it, we need to understand their belief system and the experience(s) that formed them.
The three questions you need to answer are: what is the belief you need them to adopt? What is their current limiting belief system? What experience(s) formed or gave them that belief?
What is the belief you need them to adopt?___________________________
What is their current false or limiting belief? ___________________________
What Experience gave them that belief?_______________________________
If you can’t answer these questions, I recommend spending time talking to your best customers and prospects. Listen to the language they use, the things they complain about, and their struggles.
To start, make a list of everything you dislike about your industry, and focus on the things your market believes that you know is wrong. You can start with something as simple as “my market believes”....” because”...
My market believes… Because…
My market believes… The only way to make money is through Facebook ads to webinars to phone calls
Because… They are sitting around watching webinars by people running Facebook ads to webinars to phone call
My market believes…The only way to lose weight is to starve and exercise nonstop
Because…They joined a fitness competitor gym that has a culture of guilt and shame
Then…
Putting A Crack In The Belief:
Show them a client or personal story that challenges that belief.
It’s simple. If their belief is that all swans are white because all the authorities are telling them that and every swan they have ever seen is white, you don’t need fancy copy, charts, graphs, or a 14-step funnel.
Just show them a black swan.
That will put a major crack in the armor around their belief system built on the premise that all swans are white. Here’s an example:
What is the belief you need them to adopt? You don’t have to restrict yourself or starve to lose weight and get healthier
What is the current false belief? Carbs are evil and anythign that tastes good I should feel guilty about
What Experience gave them that belief? They joined a bikini competitor gym where everyone was shamed for doing anything enjoyable.
Show or tell them a client or personal story that challenges that belief. This is Mary. Mary used to feel a ton of guilt and shame because she joined one of those bikini gyms - she starved herself and never made the progress she wanted to make. She had given up when I met her - now, she is actually leaner than before and has ice cream with her kids every day.
Mary is the black swan. Simple, yet effective.
Continuing the example above, we now have the story of Mary that challenges the existing belief. Basic stealth influence is chipping away at the foundation of false belief and installing a new one. Rinse and repeat the above. You’ll find dozens of false beliefs to deconstruct if you know your audience.
Intermediate Stealth Influence
Basic stealth influence is identifying the “black swans” to deconstruct the beliefs that all swans are white and then telling the story however it most natural to you. Developing this process/skill lays the foundation for the Four Trust Lenses.
The Four Trust Lenses
People develop their beliefs primarily in one or two of four ways
Aspirational: Develop and change their beliefs based on stories, like the one of Mary above. Tell them stories.
Analytical: Develop and change their beliefs based on data and analytics. Show them data.
Actionable: Develop and change their beliefs based on what they can do right now or take action on. Give them something to do.
Anthropological: Develop or change their beliefs based on what they learn about the human condition; biases, etc. Explain why they behave the way they do and what’s holding them back.
We all know the person that isn’t moved by stories and if we only tell stories, we won’t reach them. The next step is taking the black swan story and running it through the trust lenses to reach the people who develop their beliefs differently.
Your default communication is going to be one or two of the four, meaning the other two to three types of people are neglected in your process. For example, I am not a storyteller. It’s not until the fifth or sixth pass through my process - this book included - that stories get included. People moved by stories will likely be the last of the segments to move through my stuff. This process ensures that I have a system to reach them - eventually.
Here’s how it works:
The rebuilding belief process from basic Stealth Influence provides a black swan story. Proof that their existing belief is not universally true, putting a crack in it.
Now you can take that story, and extract just the data from it. There’s your analytical piece.
Then extract the just action steps someone can take right now to try it. There’s your actionable piece.
Then explain the mental blocks, biases and mindset components the person has to overcome. There’s your anthropological piece. If you get the rebuilding belief piece right, you end up with four powerful communications that will move four different segments of your audience.
Aspirational.
Tell the story using a standard storytelling framework.
Once upon a time… Mary joined a gym to lose weight
And then…she was starving
And then..she stopped losing weight even though she was starving
Until she was ready to give up
And then she learned how to eat using our method
Happily ever after… Looking good, feeling good, eating ice cream with her kids
Analytical
Extract the data from the story…
Before:
120lbs
800 calories
7 hours in the gym
measurements
After:
117 lbs
1800 calories
5 hours in the gym
measurements
Actionable
Extract the action steps from the story
Try this:
Take your average weight from last week
Spend one less hours in the gym this week - just for a week
Compare your average weight this week to last
Anthropological
Explain the human condition
The reason most people won’t do this is they have a deep-seated issue with guilt and shame
As if they don’t deserve good things if they don’t suffer.
See how that works?
You’ll notice that your current communication is heavily saturated in one or two of the trust lens columns. You probably don’t have to make anything new. You can just take all of the existing communications, identify which lens it falls under, and run it through the other ones.
You’ll be tempted to make one piece of content that covers all four lenses...and then think to yourself or let yourself believe “I spoke to all four trust lenses”
DON’T.
You didn’t.
If I make decisions from and am looking for actionable information, it’s absurd to ask me to sit through 7 minutes of a video just to see if you touch on what I need. I’m not going to sit through stuff that is irrelevant to me to see if anything relevant comes up.
These should be four separate pieces of content or, at the very least, laid out in a way that the viewer or reader can quickly find what they are looking for.
Okay.
We’ve got a belief-busting framework that gives us a story to rebuild beliefs.
We’ve got a framework to quickly turn that story into four pieces of content to reach and impact significantly more people.
Now.. we have five questions to answer. Answering those questions will get people to take action and adopt the next step in the process. We have to answer them because…
Innovation doesn’t Sell.
How about that headline - “Innovation doesn’t sell”.
Before you object, let me ask you a question. If I pulled up to one of your events and told you that I drove over in a brand new, entirely self-driving Tesla. A Tesla with no steering wheel, no brakes, nothing like that - it’s entirely self-driving so there is no need.
How many people in the room would want to see it?
Probably everyone.
How many would buy it from me and drive it home?
Probably none.
Even if I discounted it dramatically - it’s unlikely that one is going to buy it and drive it home because they have never seen anyone do anything like it. It’s too innovative.
Innovation gets attention.
It does not get adopted.
If Innovation Doesn’t Sell… What Does?
Information.
Well then how does innovative stuff like new tech and ideas get adopted? It’s diffused at it become information. What is information to one person, is innovation to another. This is really important to understand.
For example, a doctor says to a room of people:
“If you take metformin it will lower your A1C by inhibiting hepatic gluconeogenesis and opposing the action of glucagon”
If the statement helps someone understand something better, it closes the gap of uncertainty - it’s information.
If the statement makes someone more confused, it widens the gap of uncertainty - it’s innovation. Data is
information if it closes the gap of uncertainty.
innovation if it widens the gap of uncertainty.
So whether or not “what is said” is helpful in moving people along a process depends entirely on the person on the other side and their base knowledge. The same data can be information to one segment of the population and innovation to another.
That’s why some people take action and others don’t, given the same data. If you tell someone:
“Just join Zoom” and they don’t what Zoom is, they are more likely to stop moving through the process. You may think you’re providing information, but in this case you’re providing innovation. Little bit of Rocky Road stuff.
This is the biggest reason advertising stops working, by the way. The early adopters bought from your ad, which was information to them. Then, you try to put it in front of other people, and it’s not information to them - it’s innovation. Innovation doesn’t get adopted.
So what should you do?
Turn innovation into information.
For this, we turn to the diffusion of innovation by Everett Rogers
The 5 Key Decision Points
…That Your Customers Will Navigate To Make A Single Decision.
I almost didn’t include this section because it’s more advanced than the rest of this book, but it’s powerful. It’s based on how industries are transformed.
The five key decision points turn innovation into information and should be applied to every stage of every business - but it’s also okay to skip this for now and circle back to it later. Even then, I recommend applying one key decision point at a time.
Everett Rogers' diffusion of innovation research shows that there are five adoption decisions that every customer runs through before deciding to adopt something new. That decision might be the decision to buy, or the decision to continue with your services, or whether or not to tell their friend they are a customer of yours. Remember, each stage represents a new, different decision from a new vantage point.
The graph above is the Diffusion of Innovation Curve.
Diffusion of Innovation is Marketing 101. For some reason, it seems everyone skipped this class.
For any business, there is a small group of the population that will buy your product or service; “the marketplace”. The marketplace has people who will buy right away, people who will buy soon, and people who will buy much later. It has people who will buy from facts, people who will buy from stories, people who will buy only after they see their friends do it, and people who will only buy once they are forced to (some people only switched to DVD after VHS players become impossible to find or replace).
The blue line is the “rate of adoption”, which is basically how fast your product or service is adopted. The yellow line is what percentage of the marketplace has already adopted your products or services. Once everyone in your market buys your product, you have 100% market share and you can’t possibly have anyone else adopt the same product, so your rate of adoption goes to zero.
You’ll also notice there are five different types of buyers: Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority, and Laggards.
Each type of buyer buys for different reasons and from different tactics.
Innovators and early adopters need very little “marketing” to make a purchase. The early majority will buy stuff off of an advertisement, or sales page. They are also educated enough to buy off whitepapers and educational material. They buy early, and their personality lends to trying new things. They’re okay with not knowing every detail, and taking more risks. They tend to be both more risk-tolerant and affluent. They’ll even spend thousands of dollars just because they are curious about what will happen. They’re generally going to have more financial liquidity- one of the reasons they’re more risk-tolerant.
But they do not represent a majority of the market.
This is why something that works in the beginning (like a webinar funnel) stops working pretty quickly. It’s not the platform, model, or product, necessarily…it’s that the nature of the new potential buyers changes as a product or service scales to capture more of the market.
The webinar, in the example above, was information to a small percentage of your marketplace. It’s innovation for everyone else. (You can tell when this is happening because the sales calls get more difficult and time-consuming)
Tesla, for example, isn’t trying to scale by advertising the Model S to more people.
Understanding the diffusion of innovation, they are doing something like this instead:
Sell the Model S to the small segment of innovators that will spend $100k+ on the sexy-sounding thing without even knowing what they are getting (those people exist in every market)
Let everyone else see the Model S on the roads, which gives the early adopters what they need to start making a buying decision. Some of them will purchase a Model S now that they have seen it on the road. Others won’t be willing to (or can’t) spend that much money on a vehicle, but the desire has been built up.
Roll out the Model 3 and cheaper Teslas. The group of people above that wouldn’t buy the Model S will buy the Model 3 - which puts even more Teslas on the road for people to see and build a desire to have.
This is how all technology scales. Remember when flat-screen TVs were super expensive?
The innovators bought them, the early adopters saw them and wanted them and as the sales came in, it allowed the TV companies to drive down the cost of manufacturing and provide other, more affordable options to grab more of the market.
Ever started advertising, had some success, and then the advertising stopped working? Once you get past the early majority, that’s exactly what you should expect to happen.
You may think it's audience fatigue, competition, or something like that but the reality is you've just gotten adoption from the early adopters - the people who will buy from that type of advertising.
In other words, you cannot just advertise more to make more for very long. The key to the examples above is that Tesla, Samsung, etc can acquire new customers by reaching a segment of the market - a segment of the market that values seeing and hearing about the product from other people like them.
Turning Innovation Into Information. When someone is trying to decide if they should take the next step - adopt the next stage of your thing - they’re looking for 1 or more of 5 things.
These five things turn innovation into information.
Note: This is all AFTER the Sale. Before the sale, they are looking for the answer to one question:
“What happens after I lose my leverage?”
The internal dialogue of your customer is something like this…
“Right now, I have the credit card - the leverage - and you're being nice to me and making me promises. When I give you my credit card number I lose my leverage. Then what happens?”
If you try to hug a young child who has been abused, even if you mean well… he will still flinch, maybe even duck and run away.
You didn’t abuse him. You know hugs are positive… but the kid will still run away because of their previous experience.
Adults aren’t so different.
We’re all carrying baggage from previous experiences. Meaning well and having a great product is not enough to overcome the experiences your prospects and customers have had in the past with people making them promises.
And even though you did not create the baggage, you still have to assuage their fears that you’re not like the other companies that have left them high and dry in the past. These people indeed need education on you, your products, and your services, but the education you're putting out there is not the stuff that helps the vast majority of the marketplace make a purchase decision.
Okay back to the five adoption decisions.
Each phase of your customer journey should answer all five of these questions, eventually. It will close the gap of uncertainty turning innovation into information.
Relative Advantage:
What is the relative advantage of your thing over the thing I’m already doing? How is this better than what I'm doing now? How good is this compared to what I'm already doing? Is this food better than the food that I eat now? Is this restaurant better than the restaurant I go to now? Is this program better than the program I use now?
Remember, adopting one thing often means making room for it by letting go of another. They need to understand why your thing is better than what they would otherwise do.
The Question You Need To Answer:
My resources are limited, by choosing your thing I am choosing not to do something else...why would I choose this over what I am doing, already?
Compatibility:
Is this compatible with my beliefs, my religion, my family life, my schedule? How would my family, friends, etc feel about this? Is this congruent with my identity?
Remember, people have identities, religions, and all kinds of stuff going on. They need to understand how your thing fits within their current life.
The Question You Need To Answer:
I have a core set of values, and I don’t want to violate them or for people to think I am violating them. Is your thing compatible with my identity?
Complexity:
How complex is it? Is it too complicated? Is it overly simple? Can I figure it out on my own? Can they help me figure it out? Am I smart enough to do this?
Remember, even people know, like, and trust you - they also have to trust their ability to implement or use your thing. If it seems complex, they won’t buy.
The Question You Need To Answer:
Even if I know you, like you, and trust you, how can you be sure that I can trust myself to hold up my end and use this product or service effectively?
Trialability:
This is where most marketing fails, especially anything that’s higher priced or requires contracts. Is there a free trial? Is there a sample or smaller smaller-priced version? Can I maybe do a month to try it out? Trialability is huge for later adopters in the mass market.
Remember that most people will test drive a car before they will buy it.
The Question You Need To Answer:
Can I try it?
Observability:
Have they seen their friends use your products or services? Can they see the results in the real world, if they use your products or services? Are they going to physically, actually, see tangible results? It’s much easier, for example, to sell solar panels to someone if they can visually see their neighbor’s solar panels.
Remember, if your neighbor has solar panels that you can see, you feel like you understand solar energy better. Of course, you don’t understand solar energy any more than you did before but observing someone else with it makes you feel like you do.
The Question You Need To Answer:
Can you show me someone else who went before me?
Similar to the Trust Lenses, you’re probably heavily saturated in one of the adoption decisions. At each step, list out the questions you are answering and which ones are not being addressed.
For the questions you are answering already, can you communicate them better using what you’ve learned up to this point?
For the ones you’re not, can you answer them?
If it all seems overwhelming, that's okay. The next pillar will help simplify it all.
If you need help…we will be working directly with Success Circle Members to implement this in their business. You can learn more about the success circle here.
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Live To Learn. Give to Earn.
PS. Speaking of referrals…we already have someone on the Leaderboard. It’s a safe bet that they’re going to get WAY more than expected. (Remember the emotional peak and valley thing, this is an example)
live to learn. give to earn.
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