February 5, 2007
Objections
In the early stage of a company it's all sales mode: team, funding, partners, yourself. Everyone needs to be sold.
And when you are selling there are certain patterns you run into -- of which one is the "objection".
A classic objection pattern is the "first thought bias". You say some stuff, an idea occurs to the listener, they either listen till you are done or tune out, then they say..."My first thought on this is XYZ."
XYZ is typically something deeply revealing about their personal background. If they came from hardware, it's a comment about hardware. If they just came back from India, "can this work in the developing world?". And so on. Which in itself is only mildly bad (that perspective so much drives people's topline reactions rather than "objective" truths driving their observation).
What is seriously bad is that the first thought always comes back. At the end of the call in the recap, in the next call's recap, and in the ultimate "here's what we think about your business" bottom-line you will hear that first thought 80% of the time.
One way to handle people's first thoughts is to be understanding -- "I hear you but there are some things I would add...", the collaborative discussion approach that I have been coached toward over time (in Philosophy and in business) in part because of my personally confrontational debating style.
Another approach though is to utterly destroy one of these first thoughts. If you believe in first thought bias, letting a person make an invalid observation initially will saddle you with it for life. So you must crush it. I haven't tried this one very much yet, but I'm going to. Tell me how it goes for you.
Posted by amol at February 5, 2007 7:41 PM
