Flip the Script by Oren Klaff

Author:Oren Klaff
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-08-13T00:00:00+00:00

FROM NOVEL TO THE NEW NORMAL

Imagine you just created a new cold medicine, and you find it’s 35 percent more effective than other popular cold meds on the market. Users administer it by vaping rather than taking a pill, so it doesn’t have to be swallowed. And it’s completely safe to use. Great! You’re obviously excited and your mind is going a mile a minute thinking about how popular this new product will be (and how much money you’re going to make). Some wealthy friends think it sounds like a slam dunk, so they give you a cash investment and you spend two years working out the details, and when you finally put it on store shelves . . . nobody buys it.

Cold medicine that requires a vaporizer? No thanks. It’s just too novel.

For the most part, customers and consumers rely on their tried-and-true suppliers or on their network of friends to suggest new products, rather than trying every new solution that hits the market. Certainly there is a small set of adopters who will try unproven products and take the risk on new ideas and technologies—but this is not true of the mainstream, middle-of-the-road consumer. In practice, too much novelty produces avoidance and not the hoped-for attraction effect.

The grocery store shelves are already lined with a dozen different kinds of cold medication. Your customers have all been seeing the common brands on the shelf for years and years. They already have a medication they use, which their doctor recommended and all their friends use too. These people aren’t out looking for a new cold medication that might be one-third better. And they definitely don’t want to switch from taking pills to vaping, because they’ve never heard of anyone taking cold medicine like that before; it’s too unfamiliar.

To influence people to try a new kind of anything, you first need to find somebody who is willing to listen to you talk about your new thing, whatever it is. At this stage, positioning a project or idea as completely new and original can cause a deceptive amount of interest. These people will listen to the idea. And yes, they’ll be intrigued, maybe even engaged and excited. But when it comes to making a decision, they’re likely to return to the products and ideas that are already in place and known to work—even if those products and ideas are just average.

This counterintuitive consumer behavior has frustrated thousands of entrepreneurs, who often get fired after telling their board of directors, “It’s a great product, so much better than anything else on the market . . . but we are just not selling, and are not going to hit our revenue goals this year.”

For more than a decade my colleagues and I have watched countless companies attempt to sell their products, services, and ideas to all types of buyers. Through interviews, working sessions, and consulting directly with hundreds of executives, I’ve seen the way most sales presentations go:

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