1: Did you know that Babe Ruth began his baseball career in 1914 using a 54-ounce bat?
“That’s a big bat,” Erik Peterson and Tim Riesterer write in their powerful book Conversations That Win the Complex Sale.
“For those of you who are not familiar with what’s ‘normal’ for baseball bats,” the authors note, “most professional baseball players today use a bat that weighs between 31 and 35 ounces.”
Babe was a legendary hitter. In 1918, he led the league in home runs, hitting 11 that year. He went on to lead the league in home runs fourteen times.
In the early 1920s, Babe switched to a lighter, 40-ounce bat, and his home run totals exploded.
In 1927, he hit 60 home runs, surpassing the home run totals for all but two teams.
“That’s right,” they observe. “Even though he started his professional baseball career as a feared hitter, he didn’t become the greatest hitter of his generation, and arguably the greatest hitter in history, until he dramatically changed his approach to hitting, reducing the weight of his bat by more than 25 percent.”
2: So, why did it take Babe so long to realize he needed to reduce the weight of his bat?
“Because it went against his instincts,” Erik and Tim write. “His instincts told him that to have the power he needed to hit home runs, he had to swing the heaviest bat he could carry and still make contact with a pitch.”
It seems obvious, right? But it’s wrong.
“To hit for power,” the authors observe, “you also need to think about bat speed. Now, you’re not going to hit home runs with a toothpick, but most people’s instincts tell them to put too much emphasis on bat weight and not enough emphasis on bat speed.”
The lesson here extends beyond baseball—your instincts can mislead you in many fields.
There’s another well-known experiment that drives this point home. “People were assigned the task of being either a ‘tapper’ or a ‘listener.’ The tapper’s job was to tap out the tune of 1 of 25 famous songs, like “Happy Birthday.” The listener’s job was to guess the song that was being tapped.”
Participants were asked before the experiment started to predict how often the listener would guess the song correctly.
They guessed on average around 50 percent of the time.
The actual results? 3 percent.
“Why did the listeners do such a poor job?” the authors ask.
“Well, it turns out that while the tappers could hear the music in their own head, to the listeners it just sounded like a disconnected series of taps.
“But really, this isn’t about the listeners doing a poor job,” they note. “It was the tappers who assumed that the listeners would do much better. It was the tappers whose instincts were wrong.”
3: Similarly, sales is another arena where our assumptions get us in trouble—just like with Babe Ruth and the tappers.
“You see,” Erik and Tim observe, “when salespeople fail to achieve their potential, it’s almost never because of laziness or lack of effort. If you’re like most salespeople, your intentions and effort are great, but your instincts are wrong.”
They explain, “Your instincts often lead you astray, and you may deliver a message your customers don’t hear as intended. They don’t hear the tune in your head. That’s the core idea of this book.”
As a salesperson, your instincts tell you to:
• Help your customers. (Good intention)
• Give your customers as much information as possible. (Bad instinct)
• Show your depth and professionalism. (Good intention)
• Use sophisticated language to reveal your depth. (Bad instinct)
• Build relationships with your customers. (Good intention)
• Move from agreement to agreement with your customers and never challenge their point of view. (Bad instinct)
• Deliver your message in a memorable way. (Good intention)
• Play it safe and focus on being as polished as possible. (Bad instinct)
The key challenge for salespeople is to understand messages exactly as customers do.
When you do this, “you can make a remarkable change in your sales performance,” they promise.
“The approach and techniques in this book have been shaped through 20 years of delivering our Power Messaging workshops,” Erik and Tim write. “During that time, we’ve worked with tens of thousands of salespeople in 56 countries. The companies that use this approach range from high-tech to low-tech and include familiar names like GE, Oracle, Volvo, and AmerisourceBergen.
More tomorrow when we start our exploration!
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Reflection: Where might my instincts be leading me in the wrong direction, even though my intentions are good?
Action: Identify one important situation and challenge my default instinct by testing a different approach.
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