Selling with insights is no longer an option—it’s a mandate for reps hoping to lay the groundwork for a memorable, differentiated story. But new research shows that if you’re only challenging your prospect’s status quo with surprising data points, you could be doing insights all wrong. To make the change scenario you’re proposing more compelling to your prospects, your insights-based message needs to do more than create risk—it needs to show how you can resolve the risks you’ve identified.
In my mind, this is the difference between insights that excite and insights that incite. The former message gets consumed and forgotten about, while the latter drives the buying intent you’re looking for.
This distinction was the focus of a recent experiment my company conducted with Dr. Zakary Tormala, a social psychologist and professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. We designed the study to measure the messaging effectiveness of two different types of insights-based messages:
- Risk-only insights designed to make prospects feel their status quo is “unsafe” by introducing them to surprising new industry data, statistics or studies.
- Risk + resolution insights similarly designed to make the status quo feel unsafe, but also introducing solutions that resolve the prospect to a “new safe” in the same message.
Specifically, the aim of the experiment was to determine whether insights that present risk with resolution have more persuasive impact than insights that only bring risk into the conversation—a so-called insights-based approach I’ve seen many companies follow.
The study, an online experiment, included more than 320 participants, evenly split by gender. Prior to the study, the participants—unbeknownst to them—were randomly assigned to one of three different messaging conditions.
- In the risk-only condition, participants received a message offering new, potentially surprising information about vitamin D deficiency (namely, how widespread it is and its associated risks).
- In the risk + resolution condition, participants received the exact same information designed to create risk, but also received a follow-up message describing several straightforward, practical solutions for combating vitamin D deficiency.
- The study also included a solution/resolution-only condition to act as a control. Participants in this presentation received only a message about possible remedies for vitamin D deficiency but without any of the surprising, upfront findings.
All participants were then led to a separate screen where participants were instructed to answer a series of questions assessing the effect of the message on their behavioral intentions and emotions.
To measure behavioral intentions, participants were asked how likely they would be to change their behavior as a result of reading the information about vitamin D and how likely they would be to take action based on that information. Each question was accompanied by a scale ranging from one to nine, with higher numbers indicating more favorable responses. We then averaged the numbers to create a composite index of behavioral intentions.
In terms of both behavioral intentions and emotional impact, there was a statistically significant effect favoring the risk + resolution message. This insight condition generated more positive behavioral intentions than the risk only or resolution only conditions, which did not differ from each other statistically. Specifically, the study revealed that presenting both risk and resolution in an insight enhanced the message’s behavioral impact by an average of nearly 9 percent, compared to the other conditions.
The study also examined emotional-type reactions to these messages, since the purposes of insight is to elicit an emotional response that creates the urgency a prospect needs to feel to take action. In this measure, the experiment revealed that the risk + resolution condition generated a greater emotional response than the risk-only or solution-only conditions, which, again, did not differ from each statistically.
All told, the insight message containing risk and resolution generated a 12 percent boost in emotional responses, relative to the other conditions.
The big, important takeaway here is that, across several key dimensions, you can boost your persuasive power by delivering insights that contain novel risk information connected to possible resolutions to those risks. A message structured in this way doesn’t just challenge the status quo, it shows prospects what a new, safe alternative to that status quo looks like, and how it resolves their most pressing business problems.
While an interesting data point is a good start in terms of creating risk and urgency, it may not translate into anything more than fleeting excitement. To actually incite buyer action, you need to pair the risks you’ve identified with a change scenario that shows how you can resolve them.