Selling backwards

I had lunch with heads of two of our Special Business Units today and we talked about the best way to present our ideas to clients. A really good point emerged which is about the power of insights in selling the idea, and keeping the idea alive.

Examples were discussed where the idea itself was so strongly rooted in a powerful insight that you'd have to be mad not to go with it. And, importantly, when you are planning a complex and time-consuming implementation you can hit quite a lot of turbulence and flak along the way. But with powerful insights driving the idea, it is much easier to fend off these issues and stay true to the idea.

What this means of course is that selling of the idea is not so much on the day, but in the research (desk and commissioned) that you do at the start of the process.