What’s usually missing from common advice for ‘getting to yes’

When I was a designer at a software design agency in London, my team had one recurring challenge: Clients would want to jump straight to developing solutions for their business problem and de-scope the much-needed upfront user research. In their eyes, it was unnecessary and expensive. Eventually, I worked out an approach to solve this problem. Not only did it get clients to reliably agree to finance research, but they’d get outright excited about doing so. Today I use this method whenever I believe something must be done but won’t without the blessing of others.

If you’ve made it this far in your search for a solution, you’ve likely discovered variations of the same incomplete list of advice for how to influence people:

The incomplete list of advice for getting others to support your idea

1. Be confident it’s a good idea: Is this the most important thing for you to drive and get others involved in? What alternatives have you considered? To convince others, you should be convinced. It would be best if you had a strong view and the ability to defend it.

2. Get others involved early: Solicit feedback and align with stakeholders right from the start before pitching ideas in the forum where decisions get made.

3. Mind the timing: If you know it’s a busy time for them, it’s best to wait for a little while until they might be more receptive to adding something else to their plate.

4. Demonstrate value in terms they understand and care about: Hint: it’s often money. It would be best if you also dropped your jargon. Use terminology that they are comfortable with.

5. Make them look good: Make your idea relate to theirs. If there is an initiative they are pushing for - maybe even with their bosses - can yours help them get the job done?

6. Anticipate their questions and counter-arguments: Put yourself in their shoes. What would they be concerned about?

7. Keep it simple: Focus on the core elements and drop the detail. They can ask you about it if they want, but if you overwhelm them with an avalanche of information that makes it hard to see a clear point, you’ve lost before you’re out of the gates.

What’s missing?

Now you might think, Tom, this is a pretty decent list. Thanks! But hold it right there. Because even if you do all of these things, you are still unlikely to succeed. Here are the three additional points that made the difference for me:

8. Walk before you talk

How did we break the deadlock with clients who didn’t want to pay for research? We went ahead and did it anyway. When all the talking got us nowhere, we’d make an investment ourselves, running a much smaller version of what we had in mind and inviting them to observe. All we’d ask of them was an hour of their time and to withhold their judgement. All we did was demonstrate what we’d only been talking about previously, but that made all the difference. Before the hour was up, they were throwing post-its on walls and brainstorming how to expand this work to several other workstreams. These days, I skip the negotiation upfront altogether, only presenting an idea when I’ve already made it a reality in some small way.

Why is this so effective? Practising before you preach takes the ambiguity and misinterpretation out of the equation. Different people’s minds function in different ways. A line of reasoning that is obvious to you likely isn’t to someone with different experience from yours. A demonstration fixes all that. Making an investment yourself further demonstrates your conviction. A side benefit is that it forces you to prioritise. Ideas are cheap; implementation is expensive. If you’ve decided to act on one idea, this implies that it is the single most crucial thing you could be doing. That’s a strong message. 

You can observe this mechanism in B2B pitches as well. When I went to pitch for a piece of design consulting with the same agency, we didn’t just rock up with a slide deck of past work, telling would-be clients how good we were. We invested a few days in essentially delivering a minute version of the project we were pitching for, including research, strategy, prototyping, and proving value. Of course, now I work at a management consultancy, I observe the same patterns. If you can use this method to convince CEOs to pay large sums for your services, it should be possible to get your boss to let you run with your initiative. Sure it’s a lot of work to pull off as a side project. But if you’re not willing to invest in it, how would you expect anyone else to?

9. Have a clear ask

Things were going swimmingly at the design agency’s user research lab as stakeholders grew more excited by the minute. When the time for the session was up, we huddled over their sticky-note plastered walls. One question sounded the loudest among the chatter: “Now we get it! So what’s next?”

Sometimes I got so caught up in the excitement over my idea and my efforts to get buy-in that I’d not think beyond the point of getting to yes. Most decision-makers are busy. Once they are on board with your “so-what?” - your chain of reasoning about how your plan will translate to value for them - they’ll want to quickly get to the next point: “What do you need from me?”. You don’t want to let them hear crickets. 

Be prepared with a clear answer to that question before you pitch your idea. Better still, always have an answer to that question. Opportunities to pitch your concept aren’t always planned - think of the classic elevator pitch scenario - and you don’t want to squander them by being unprepared, waiting for a scheduled presentation. One way to approach this is to create a plan for your initiative that assumes stakeholder buy-in and look at the difference between that and your current reality. And again, focus on the one or two ways they can support you that unblock you the most, rather than submitting a kitchen sink of demands.

10. Build trust by delivering on your promise

Once we had the research budget and roadmap for signed-off, we knew this was only one win towards a more trusting relationship with the agency’s client. The real work would only just begin, and keeping the client involved throughout was vital.

Building trust with decision-makers is essential to getting your ideas signed off and, in many organisations, even heard. Amongst other factors, this relies on showing yourself to be reliable. Once you get the go-ahead and support for your initiative, you must deliver on what you set out to do. Don’t maintain radio silence until you’ve finished, though. Always over-communicate. Building a regular cadence for sharing progress updates will show them that you can be trusted to run this thing independently. It will further double up as a way for them to provide continuous feedback if they so choose. And the more feedback they can leave with you, the more invested they will become in your efforts.

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As you can see, getting your ideas signed off requires you to balance numerous stakeholder considerations at once. I added three more points to the more commonly known tactics to get the job done. It’s a lot to think about and I still frequently miss the mark. But if you only take one thing away from this - the one I see as having the most significant impact and the one that I see done the least often - it is to run with your idea before asking for help. When you think critically about what is holding you back, you might find that you can overcome many of those perceived barriers on your own. Maybe they don’t exist at all. Perhaps there are different ones you didn’t anticipate. You might not even need stakeholder support just yet either. You might get others involved who share an interest in your idea or problem, which you’ll only discover once they see you working on it. The benefits of a bias to action never stop. But if you end up pitching your idea in front of a committee, I hope the steps laid out above will boost your chances. Good luck!