Selling Change To Others
People don't fear change just because it's different or new. They're afraid of it because of its higher level of perceived risk over that of the status quo.
If you work for a company and see an opportunity for improvement, it may be hard to pitch the idea to management because they're stuck in their ways. If what they've always done has worked, then why bother fixing it?
As long as the status quo appears less risky, people resist change. So how do you sell people on changing this? Reframe the status quo to appear more risky than the change you're proposing. Yes, it's fighting fire with fire; you're turning people's fear against itself by giving them a different perspective. But in a lot of cases, it might be the only chance you have of convincing them.
There's no way that Obama's campaign slogan of "Change we can believe in" would have worked in the 1996 election. The economy was soaring, we were in peacetime, and Tom Green had yet to garner widespread publicity in the media. Things were going too well. People would have viewed change as a threat, not an opportunity.
In the climate of mid-2008, however, the notion of change became a necessary evil we had to face. People voted as such.
It would have been much more difficult to sell the American people on the 2003 Iraq War without the events of 9/11. An attack on home soil got people ready to mobilize for war, because not doing so started to seem like more of a threat than not doing it.
Selling is not about reciting facts, but a transference of emotion. If you can make people uncomfortable with what is, and turn the status quo into an itch that seems to need scratching, you might be able to convince them to consider the change.
If you work for a company and see an opportunity for improvement, it may be hard to pitch the idea to management because they're stuck in their ways. If what they've always done has worked, then why bother fixing it?
As long as the status quo appears less risky, people resist change. So how do you sell people on changing this? Reframe the status quo to appear more risky than the change you're proposing. Yes, it's fighting fire with fire; you're turning people's fear against itself by giving them a different perspective. But in a lot of cases, it might be the only chance you have of convincing them.
There's no way that Obama's campaign slogan of "Change we can believe in" would have worked in the 1996 election. The economy was soaring, we were in peacetime, and Tom Green had yet to garner widespread publicity in the media. Things were going too well. People would have viewed change as a threat, not an opportunity.
In the climate of mid-2008, however, the notion of change became a necessary evil we had to face. People voted as such.
It would have been much more difficult to sell the American people on the 2003 Iraq War without the events of 9/11. An attack on home soil got people ready to mobilize for war, because not doing so started to seem like more of a threat than not doing it.
Selling is not about reciting facts, but a transference of emotion. If you can make people uncomfortable with what is, and turn the status quo into an itch that seems to need scratching, you might be able to convince them to consider the change.