How to get buy-in without trying

Strangers won’t help you

Strangers won’t help you

One of the most under-appreciated skills of an exec is the art of getting buy-in.

It looks easy when done right, but is incredibly difficult to execute for a newbie.

I started to learn about it almost a decade ago and I still have not mastered it.

• I have asked execs for money, and even learned how to do Monte Carlo simulation to show them the expected outcomes from the action. I was naive.

• I have kept coming out with weird out-of-the blue proposals to my boss, and only ended up getting overlooked for promotions.

• I jumped to too many conclusions when communicating intent & strategy to the teams I have worked with. They didn’t outright reject them, but the initiatives didn’t always lift.

I felt the pain as recently as last year. I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of being unable to create massive action around me.

So let’s try to figure out how to get buy-in, so we can feel less frustration, more unity of purpose and action + this kinetic energy of something that is beyond yourself.

Buy-In Is About Stories

Great leaders are storytellers.

And great stories share the same elements.

There’s a quest, there are villains, the main conflict and the call to action.

There’s a hero & his actions make sense, and the plot moves in a logical way. Once the hero has left his home on his quest, you’re either turning pages in a frenzy, or putting the book back on the shelf.

We want a page-turner.

I’m not going to suggest you read more mystery novels.

In business, originality of the plot matters less than the detail and the logic of the quest.

The style of storytelling we’re looking for is more like an investigative piece than a work of fiction.

Ultimately, someone needs to make a call on what needs to happen to resolve the situation.

And non-fiction stops short of telling the reader what needs to happen. Same as fiction, it offers an opinion, and lets the reader fill in the rest.

The bible of consulting, The Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing and Thinking by McKinsey’s Barbara Minto, is dense and dry in style.

It offers an inverted pyramid approach close to how newspapers edit their stories: Don’t bury the lede.

You start with the What, then walk the reader through the Why & the How of your argument. Don’t drag them through your deduction process, tell them what needs to happen, then why. It may be how you think, but that’s not how you should write.

I wrote a quick guide on the Pyramid Principle here so you don’t have to read the lengthy book.

We’re really not trying to get buy-in for anything but action — the type of action we feel is necessary.

Stories end. We’re trying to start one.

It’s closer to the storytelling that politicians do during their election campaign. And they take it up after the best advertising people.

Buy-in Is About Trust

It’s impossible to craft the perfect plot. The story will always have holes in it.

In good fiction, the reader fills the holes in the prose with their imagination.

We don’t notice the vast majority of detail around us due to the limitations of our faculties & the ancient prioritisation methods that have us focus on the immediate danger around us.

We fill in the rest of the picture by heuristics and approximations.

Heuristics are if-then formulas that shortcut the complexity and simplify the world around us. We crave for them as we crave for certainty in our lives.

Heuristics look like this: if X, then Y.

• If the sky is cloudy, it’ll probably rain today.

• If the skin is red, there is inflammation.

• If the website has a black background, the product must be on the luxurious side.

• If I like this person, so their ideas must be good.

Some people use buy-in and “influence” interchangeably, further interpreting it as “evil manipulation”.

You need to influence, not deceive. Influence, not bully.

Celebrity influencers hold the attention of their audience. They stand for a particular brand & type of thinking. They make you feel a certain way. They are avatars for who we aspire to be.

Why do we forget about how WE buy, and think that for SOMEONE ELSE, the decision is logical, not emotional?

Why do we forget one of the main heuristics: that other people are more like us than they are not?

A brand’s market share is in part a measure of the presence in the mind of consumers. The willingness to believe in the story that you represent depends on familiarity, and familiarity is a big part of trust.

People buy things because they believe they need them and how those things transform them. But they must first simply know and remember them. Even when you buy something on impulse, it’s unlikely that you’re seeing the thing for the first time — you’ve interacted with its clues, indirectly before. It looks like something else you know & love.

At some point, the story recedes to the background, becomes status quo. But if we study how our memories work, how we store some events as positive & others as negative, we’ll know that the learning curves are different and take multiple events to be stored reliably in our head.

You can’t just have one event for buy-in. Yes, Apple keynotes are one big event, but how much prep do you need to be primed for them?

You know Apple. You expect it. It’s now a cozy feeling — you know you’re in for a delightful presentation that makes you feel a certain way, and when you leave the hall, you’ll be craving for whatever they had to sell to you.

I recently shared an analysis of the Apple keynotes in my weekly newsletter. 👉 Sign up for more interesting ideas.

It is continuous work that you keep doing. Keep saying the same thing. Over and over. Until it’s second nature to other people, not just yourself.

So what?

So how’s that helpful to us?

Stories have one common thing that we tend to forget about. They start with familiarity. You know the author. You love the genre and love how it goes. You liked the cover. Someone you respect recommended it.

Learn & practice how brands are developed

• Be visible.

• Be known for a noun or a verb.

• Learn the jobs that your sponsors are trying to do and help them do those jobs.

• Know thyself.

• Narrow your scope.

• Talk to them before you ask them for anything. It’s a basic human principle. Why would a stranger help you?

Learn & practice storytelling today

• It starts with a call to action: “we must go on this quest.”

• There are dangers = risks to call out upfront.

• There are guides = people, things that help us get there.

• There’s a roadmap = a sequence of problems that we’ll have to solve to get there.

• There’s the grand prize at the end.

• Take anything you want to pitch today & craft the story around it.

One thing common to most stories is that in the resolution, we feel a certain way.

Our emotions rise.

We see it, we believe it, we see ourselves in it.

The story is often about us.

Additional Materials

• Find out what kind of storyteller you are with this quiz: Product Maestro Storytelling for Leaders (Free)

• Watch this video on the Pyramid Principle: Executive Communication w/ Harrison Metal | Heavybit (Free)

• Take the Storytelling Class from Connie: Storytelling Class for Product Leaders ($1195)