“E-commerce is such a fast-growth channel! It’s the future! Why aren’t we doing more?”

If you’re a grocery e-com evangelist, you’ve probably found yourself shouting this (at least, inside your head) at a colleague.

But shouting doesn’t often help. Nor does imagining you are Hong Kong Phooey and karate-chopping them into submission, sadly.

Why do some people adopt a proactive e-commerce position and others don’t?

It’s Not About The Facts

My key learning over the years is that it’s not because the facts are missing or misunderstood.

Almost everyone agrees and has seen the stats that:

• E-commerce is a fast-growth channel

• It’s responsible for a high proportion of grocery sales growth

• It will be a significant portion of sales within a few, short years

It’s not the facts that people are accepting or rejecting, it’s where the organisation’s focus is in relation to those facts.

For example, if your organisation has historically taken a wait-and-see approach to emerging industry trends or disruption, it’s likely it will focus on the relatively modest size of the e-com prize now and the complexity of the channel.

If your organisation believes that there is significant advantage in being ahead of the curve on innovation, then e-com is a great un-mined opportunity to eek out additional growth.

People often get caught up in thinking, “If only I could prove the ROI of investing in e-com?” or “If I could make a clear sales growth business case…”. But the problem is that while logic says this *should* work, we need to appeal to the senior team’s way of thinking about resources and focus and risk and reward.

Time For Some Verbal Aikido

The trick is to identify your organisation’s MO or way of thinking and then work with that to direct the team to a balanced way forward.

There’s a concept in Aikido that we can borrow from to get the results we want: blend and re-direct. It means that we should understand, then blend in with the prevailing thinking, then use that thinking to re-direct to the outcome we want to focus on.

Let’s say that your company’s leadership team believes that e-commerce is not a priority and that there are bigger fish to fry. And we want to persuade them of the advantages of doing a bit more in e-com to not get left behind, or lose sales to more savvy competitors. We need to adopt some ‘verbal Aikido’.

Them: “E-com is not a priority. We don’t have the time, money, or people to do more. Let’s focus on the 90% of sales we understand.”

You: [blending…] “Yes we shouldn’t risk resources in the wrong place when we’re focussed on our growth targets. We need to be sensible with putting our best foot forward into areas we understand well.”

Also You: […and re-directing] “And because this is a whole new area to learn that I know Competitor X is focussed on, we need to be cautious that they don’t steal our share while our focus is on the main business. Wouldn’t it make sense to sense check at regular intervals that our share of online sales is where it should be and not impacting the bottom line negatively?”

You See What We Did There?

We used their way of thinking to speak in their language then, holding that frame of reference, we directed them to the possible negative consequences of doing nothing, while suggesting minimal engagement.

We borrowed their way of thinking to show the risks of doing nothing further.

Of course, the most persuasive people can talk like this effortlessly. The rest of us need to practice our ‘pitch’ and then communicate it.

Have you used this technique yourself?

I’m not suggesting it will instantly Derren Brown your senior team into submission, but talking someone’s language has much more effect that logically stating the counter-reading of the facts and hope they will switch sides.