When you say it, you’re selling. When they say it, you’re closing.
When you just spout facts and features of your product or idea without understanding your customer, you will almost always lose engagement and interest.
Alternatively, if you truly are looking to serve others, you try to explore and diagnose their fundamental needs before prescribing any solutions, illuminating their thinking and building ethos. Allowing the individual to arrive at the conclusion on their own, this is when you know they have bought into the idea.
As such, across disciplines, the art of persuasion is not a skill in just speaking, but also listening.
This is an insightful blog for sure! At the same time, I think that there are many innovations that don’t follow the linear model that you have described. This can be both good and bad. On the good side, massive innovations can change the way that people see their needs and desires. Think Apple’s iPhone or the Internet. If you asked people what they needed, they would never have come up with these things, because they would not have even envisioned them as possibilities. And yet, these innovations are central to our lives today.
On the other hand, there is a troubling trend in tech that seems to increasingly break this mold. Particularly social media apps like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat are going the other way. Users of these social media apps know that they are toxic, to a great extent, even the general public knows this. Unfortunately, when firms bring psychology into the mix, such as addictive AI algorithms, there is a divergence between what consumers want and what they are actually consuming. This is harmful in both an economic sense and a social sense. These apps remain successful. But they are damaging.
I knew it was The Futur. Great video and a great life lesson.