If I could teach only one skill to entrepreneurs, it would be Jujitsu.  This naturally enough brings to mind the thought of thousands of well coached entrepreneurs felling petulant potential investors with a single chop. That’s not quite what I am getting at…..  Jujitsu is a martial art that turns the energy of an attack against the attacker. If you try to punch someone and you are suddenly on your back looking up at your adversary’s smiling face while your wrist is pinned against his left leg – that’s Jujitsu.  The energy of your attack becomes the energy he uses for the defense – basically you are fighting yourself.

In the context of entrepreneurship, Jujitsu means something else – it’s taking the unspoken negatives that someone brings into a relationship with the entrepreneur and turning them into an advantage.  How to do this, and when to do this, is the most important thing any entrepreneur can do to improve his prospects of success.

As I have mentioned in prior blogs, I often think of an emerging business as a series of “sales” transactions. Broadly speaking, each time an entrepreneur needs to influence another, whether it’s obtaining investment, finding an advisor, hiring the first employee, getting the first customer and so on, the entrepreneur has to influence the other person in the transaction.  I describe that as a “sale” transaction, since ultimately the skills of sales – getting someone to see the value in what you are offering and agreeing to consume it – really describes just about anything an entrepreneur has to do to grow his business.

In any sale transaction, the target of the entrepreneur approaches the interaction with the entrepreneur with many unspoken “nos”, reasons why going into the interaction with the entrepreneur the target is not disposed to bending to the entrepreneur’s will.  All entrepreneurs, indeed, all people have experienced situations where the people they are trying to influence seem less receptive, or suspicious; or, situations where a discussion is “going well” and then suddenly changes in tenor “for no reason.”  These are situations where the unspoken “nos” have come into play.

When people go into an interaction with pre disposed reasons for why something doesn’t make sense for them (the unspoken “nos”), there are often unwilling to share these preconceptions, or are uncomfortable about sharing them. There are a number of reasons for this.  Sometimes, they are embarrassed to share – it might not be politically correct to express them, or they are based on some prior experience that is uncomfortable to share.  Other times, they are withheld to keep the other party off balance – knowledge is power in a negotiation – keeping one’s true feelings obscured is a proven negotiation technique.  

Sometimes people expect others to “know the score” and address the unspoken nos as a matter of course – in other words they use the unspoken nos as a way to see if the other party is sophisticated or has done similar transactions. Venture investors, for example, are very good at using how entrepreneurs respond to unspoken nos in a venture transaction as a filter to see whether the entrepreneur understands the dynamic of a venture transaction.

Whatever the reasons for the unspoken nos, there are two common elements: first, the person holding them is usually not willing to overtly share them and (ii) the entrepreneur who addresses the unspoken nos is much more likely to complete the sale.  The other thing that is interesting about this dynamic is that one often gets a “bonus” for answering unspoken nos.

 It’s a funny thing about people, when you provide them with information that they value without them “having to ask”, or if you turn their prejudices around, they will respect you more, not less.  You rise in their estimation and they are much more likely to be “sold.”  This is the art of entrepreneurial jujitsu – taking the unspoken no and turning it into an unspoken, or a spoken yes that is more powerful.  The art of answering the unanswered question, without making the asker uncomfortable is the jujitsu of entrepreneurship.  

There are so many unspoken nos in every transaction, that a good entrepreneur will put himself into the place of his potential target and first ask this question: “why would my target not want to do business with me?”  An honest assessment of this is the first place to go for the unspoken no.  The next question would be “is they anything about my background that would make the target uncomfortable?”  As you can see, this process might not be comfortable, but it’s not supposed to be, it’s designed to help you address these issues in your presentation or sales call.

The last point to make on unspoken nos is that I am not suggesting that you bluntly say “I know you don’t like lawyers,” “or, if I were you I wouldn’t want to deal with a start up either.”  People rarely like to have you call out their unspoken nos; it is uncomfortable.  So, the trick is to answer their questions as a natural part of your presentation without actually calling out the question.  Here are a few practical examples of how you would apply entrepreneurial jujitsu:

Clearly the list above is not exhaustive, but is illustrative of the wide range of unspoken nos that an entrepreneur addresses on a daily basis.  The secret is for the entrepreneur to be reflective and honest with herself as to how the listener is really going to receive their sales pitch and to disable the unspoken nos.  The entrepreneur that learns how to do this effectively will find it much easier to grow his business.