This articlewas written by Joe Procopio and originally published onBuilt In.
Every startup is going to have its detractors.
When youre an entrepreneur, youre going to face armies of people who doubt you.
At best, theyll throw a cutting remark out on social media.
It’s free, every week, in your inbox.
You have to kill these detractors with a combination of kindness and knowledge.
This is never easy to do.
Believe me, theyve fought and won their battle many more times than you have.
But not more than me.
Ive been battling the status quo hero for a long time.
Heres what you oughta know to get inside their head.
Dont get mad at them.
Dont complain about them.
You know what this does?
It makes your customer think that you think that theyre stupid.
venture to close that sale.
No, after 20 years of fighting detractors, one thing Ive learned is that logic doesnt matter.
Well, you know how that goes over.
This is the bane of innovation.
You cant argue with a detractor, you have to empathize with them.
You have to win them over and become their secret weapon.
Ive done it before, and the industry is an entire detractors user group working in one building.
I imagine even Band-Aids were vilified at some point.
This company constantly faces old-school healthcare people not wanting to use the solution and actively fighting against it.
I bet 50 percent of you will just think, Yeah, I know what you mean.
And another 49 percent of you will think, What website?
How does a status quo like that happen?
The same way it happens in every industry, and Im here to tell you its technologys fault.
In healthcare, in particular, its decades of enterprise resource planning-style software replacing paperwork.
Credit:Built In
1.
Stop selling technology
Technology can be a dirty word to some people, and again, thats technologys fault.
What youre selling is the benefit that the technology produces for the customer.
It could be software that automates tasks, not digitizes them.
It could be machine learning that eliminates the drudgery of simple decisions, not replaces human employees.
Your customers arent stupid.
Technology is the primary weapon in your detractors fight against you.
Sell benefits, not specs.
Get into the walkthrough business.
It can also remove the complexity argument entirely.
It had about nine months of coding and technical development behind it.
Youre basically fighting the detractors from the inside, which is insidious and awesome.
We did this at Automated Insights, a company that produced narrative reports like news articles from raw data.
Yes, the double whammy.
How could we replace their jobs if our tech didnt work?
Remember what I said about logic being a non-factor?
Incentivize change
A great way to beat detractors inside of your own organization is to incentivize change.
This is not just handouts and kudos, its rethinking the way performance is measured.
Their solution disrupts the process entirely, with quantifiable results.
We werent taking their jobs, or their power, or their inefficient kingdom.
Even the most hardline detractor will find it tough to argue with that.
