An issue’s place on your organization’s list of priorities depends heavily on how you package the idea. A new technological development might seem like techie trivia until you explain how it supports a strategic goal, such as increasing responsiveness to customers. It then becomes important. Once people see how your initiative fits into the big picture, they’ll be more willing to devote resources to it.

Similarly, if you’re a unit head presenting one of your directors to top management for promotion, you’ll want to say that she exceeded her targets and spell out how she can contribute to key goals. You can describe how moving her into a more strategic role will help turn around a struggling department, for instance, or bring energy and creativity to a modestly performing part of the business. By framing her as a leader the organization needs instead of simply letting her impressive work speak for itself, you create a sense of urgency for decision makers. This isn’t just someone who has accomplished a lot and deserves to advance, whenever and however that’s convenient. It’s someone with the skills and drive to make changes that matter now.

As these scenarios show, it’s often effective to highlight an idea’s business benefits; the successful sellers in our research took that approach significantly more often than those who’d failed. For example, a chief investment officer at a financial firm described how he very gradually made the case that subscribing to a proprietary real estate database was “a need and not just a want.” Every six months or so, over a period of about five years, he would float the suggestion at a moment when access to the database would be useful, and a tech-savvy ally in the asset management department would vocally agree. But they needed broader support for the idea, because most people viewed it as a luxury. “We are a lean-running organization that has historically resisted adopting new technologies,” the chief investment officer explained. Eventually he identified a relevant need in another part of the business: The database could help the accounting department meet its public-reporting and audit requirements. That was the tipping point. He’d spelled out the business benefits for multiple departments. The firm decided to subscribe.

Moral framing appears to be less powerful than business framing. In our research, the few instances of moral framing were associated with failed attempts or uneven results. When issue sellers peddle their principles too aggressively, people may react negatively to what they perceive as a judgment of their character.

Although focusing on business benefits is often safer, sellers may need to underscore the urgency. They might, for instance, present the idea as an opportunity that shouldn’t be missed. Our successful sellers were significantly more likely than the others to explain what the organization stood to gain from their ideas. Emphasizing the positive can give your audience a sense of control over the situation and inspire optimism and buy-in.

Highlighting a threat — a consequence of not adopting your idea — can also create pressure to act. But it can backfire: When decision makers focus on potential loss, they sometimes then bury their heads and avoid the issue. The amount of threat framing did not differ between successful and unsuccessful selling attempts, perhaps because it was viewed as a mixed bag: It’s hard to predict whether it will spur action — the classic “fight” response — or result in “flight.”

Finally, issue sellers often find success by bundling their ideas with related ones. For instance, someone lobbying to increase leave time for employees caring for aging or sick family members might allude to efforts to increase parental leave. When attached to a larger initiative, a small idea can gain prominence. It’s no longer just an elder-care issue; it’s a work/life balance issue.

It’s critical to find the right moment to raise your ideas. That moment might be when organizational priorities shift, when certain players leave or join the company, or when a boss’s preoccupations change. Successful sellers in our study reported greater sensitivity than others to timing, by a wide margin. The best sellers notice when more and more people are beginning to care about a larger topic or trend that’s related to their issue, and they position their idea to “catch the wave.”

For example, the managing director of an Ecuadoran holding company’s luxury division chose just the right time to persuade his CFO and board to tap an unexplored market in Peru. He’d gotten the idea in 2007. Though it was a viable option then, he held off on proposing it, given Peru’s recent civil unrest and the fact that his division still had room for growth in its home market. In 2009, after the recession, “Peru had the best-performing stock market in the world,” the director said. So his team took a trip to assess the potential. “We looked at new construction developments, and the modern minimalism was in stark contrast with the high-walled constructions from the guerrilla and terrorist era.” It seemed that Peru was not just doing well but primed for growth. “There was only one prominent shopping mall, and ‘hard’ luxury items such as designer-branded bags, watches, and sunglasses were scarce or sold informally,” he explained. “Yet Starbucks cafes were full every day and expanding.” The director and his team decided that a luxury boutique carrying various products but focusing on watches would be the best project to pursue. They knew that department stores wouldn’t cover the demand, because customers would want the luxury experience. “We thought Peru was ready for it,” he said. The timing was excellent for another reason: The market in Ecuador had become saturated by then.

The director got the approval he needed, and the company opened two luxury stores in November 2010. “The day we opened our first boutique we sold the entire inventory of perfume we had bought from the pharmacy next door,” he said. “One customer came in and bought all our stock of ink for his luxury writing instrument out of fear of not finding the ink again.” That store accounted for 40% of the division’s profits over the following three years. By 2011 all the most prestigious luxury brands had entered the Peruvian market — but this company had gotten there first.

In addition to keeping a close eye on larger trends and events, it’s important to be mindful of deadlines. If an idea relates directly to an imminent product launch or software release, by all means speak up — now is the time to be heard. But as recent research shows, when a deadline is far away and decision makers are still in exploration mode, open-ended inquiry can be more effective than proposing a specific solution. Of course, sellers can’t always know their audiences’ deadlines. If you discover an immediate challenge, though, you can try to address it in your proposal — and shelve other ideas until people have time to really think them through.

The tactics we’ve covered so far draw on two types of knowledge that successful issue sellers need: strategic (understanding the organization’s goals, the plans to achieve them, and the roles decision makers play in those efforts) and relational (figuring out who will be affected by your issue, who cares about it, who might object to it, and so on). Here we’ll discuss a third type: knowledge of organizational norms, such as what kinds of data your leaders like to use to make decisions, how they prefer to receive information, and whether they tend to get behind issues similar to yours. Grasping such norms can give you a sense of how effective the other tactics described in this article will be. For example, a study of employees selling environmental issues found that the use of drama and emotion worked only if the organization already had a strong environmental commitment.

One important norm to understand is whether it’s generally best to use formal or informal approaches. Casual conversations allow issue sellers to get an off-the-record read on their ideas and avoid putting their target audience on the spot in public. But formal approaches can convey seriousness and apply helpful pressure on decision makers to respond. Issue sellers need to consider these trade-offs in light of what’s expected in their organizations. In one company we studied, senior managers claimed to want innovative thinking but were described, even at “blue sky” meetings, as chastising those who didn’t present slide shows using company-approved templates. Not surprisingly, their employees reported selling in very formal ways while acknowledging the dampening effect this probably had on innovation.

Successful sellers used more formal — and fewer informal — tactics than those whose pitches failed. So it seems that many business settings require a certain level of convention and decorum, and that the best sellers adapt their behavior to fit that norm. Our qualitative data suggests that sequencing matters, though: People who succeeded tended to roll out their ideas informally early on, in order to gauge interest, and then switch to formal presentations.

There’s more to a pitch than a big presentation and a yea-or-nay decision. Those are just the most visible steps in the process. Leading up to them, you should carefully lay a foundation for your argument, tactic by tactic, as you acquire resources and knowledge. Here are some principles to help you make the most of the tactics we’ve described.

Choose your battles. Some ideas are just plain tough to sell — those that are too far ahead of the audience’s current understanding, for instance, or too much of a stretch beyond the organization’s norms. That’s especially true of any idea that may seem an indictment of the status quo or, worse, of the audience’s intelligence, judgment, or morality. In such cases, you may have an uphill battle no matter how skillfully you frame the issue and manage emotions.

Even the best issue sellers can’t win every time, and sometimes the payoff isn’t worth the effort. To determine whether to invest resources and social capital in selling an issue, ask two questions: How important is this to my company? And how important is it to me? That will help you assess how much risk to take on. Raising concerns about a company’s approach to foreign labor practices or about managers’ treatment of employees will probably elicit much more pushback than ideas for enhancing products or improving processes. But if the former issues are critical to the organization’s well-being or your own professional identity, you might sensitively pursue them even if you know you won’t succeed in the short term.

Combine tactics. In our regression analysis, we found that campaigns using multiple tactics succeeded more often than those using any single tactic. Indeed, the combined use of all seven tactics accounted for about 40% of the difference between successes and failures. We saw the same kind of impact in individuals’ descriptions of their selling efforts. The engineering manager at the energy company managed the GM’s emotions, suggested a solution backed by data, and turned to an outside expert for further support. The Ecuadoran managing director also combined tactics: In addition to choosing the right moment to launch the luxury goods stores, he adhered to his conservative organization’s norms for proposing projects — starting with informal conversations, looking at proxy businesses in other industries (in this case, Starbucks), talking with customers and partners to gather insights, and finally building up to the formal review process, using traditional financial tools and outsourced market studies for analysis.

Approach the right audience. It’s a common dilemma: Should you air your idea with your boss and risk getting nowhere because he or she lacks sufficient power or interest to back you up? Or go straight to decision makers who will care — and quite likely pay a price for bypassing your manager? Wishing to avoid trouble, many sellers start with their boss and hope their ideas make their way up the hierarchy. But their issues often die right away or languish until senior management becomes aware of them. Sometimes the immediate boss doesn’t even bother escalating the issue; other times the messenger isn’t as skilled as the initial seller at making the case.

So ask if you can accompany anyone selling on your behalf, whether that’s your manager or a colleague who has an “in” with a formal decisionmaking body. If that’s not possible, do everything you can to prepare that person to sell effectively: Work out the details of the business case, help identify the right time and venue for presenting it, and so forth. If you decide to approach decision makers directly, keep your boss in the loop. Otherwise you’ll need to have a very good answer when senior leaders ask why you’ve come to them instead of to your manager.

NO SET OF PRESCRIPTIONS can capture the nuances of every environment or remove the risks and disappointments of issue selling. But sellers who routinely and effectively use these tactics enjoy greater success than those who don’t.

Issue selling isn’t a discrete event; it’s an ongoing process that requires groundwork, pacing, and patience. When midlevel managers do it effectively, their ideas get decision makers’ attention and make a real difference.

HBR Reprint R1501E

Research shows that managers who gain buy-in from senior executives use seven tactics more often than managers whose ideas don’t go anywhere.

These questions will help you use the seven tactics effectively: