by Oren Klaff
Whenever your mind desires 100 percent certainty about a deal but your gut says it’s got a 50 percent chance to work out, you’re mentally experiencing a Certainty Gap. The larger this gap gets, the more you will start to feel psychological anxiety and even physical distress—causing you to back away from the deal.
Every decision we face, every purchase we make, and every agreement we enter is a function of great uncertainty.
When a buyer says, “I need to think about it,” at the end of a presentation (a common response), it means they don’t have enough certainty and confidence to move forward. Sure, what you’ve promised sounds good, but what if it doesn’t work out as you say? How can the buyer be sure?
The goal of every sales presentation is to reduce the Certainty Gap in the buyer’s mind—improving the chance of getting to yes.
THE LINE BETWEEN TOO LITTLE AND TOO MUCH INFORMATION
The standard method for closing the Certainty Gap is to provide the buyer with more information. For example, we could inform him about some of our recent accomplishments, list twenty other firms we’ve worked with, talk at length about our features, things like that.
This is the classic sales script: Give us the money and we will deliver as promised. Look at all these customer logos—and here’s a testimonial, two awards, and a thousand “likes” on social media.
Instilling certainty is different from creating Status Alignment. With Alignment, your goal is to show the buyer you’re similar to them and make them instantly feel like you “get” them—whether you’re talking to a coal miner or a Fortune 500 CEO. To instill certainty, on the other hand, you need to prove that you are a complete, absolute, undisputed authority in your field. So, in Billy’s case, his Status Tip-Off would have to prove to the room full of Swiss bankers that he’s one of them—an experienced and well-connected banking professional. Then, he would need to prove his bona fides as a cybersecurity expert . . . all within two minutes.
GETTING TO STATUS ALIGNMENT WITH SWISS SKEPTICS
I had spent weeks preparing Billy for this precise moment. What he said in the next couple of minutes would make or break all our efforts. He needed to prove to these men that even though he might look different, eat different foods, and dress differently (Go Buckeyes!), he still belonged in this room; he was a critical part of the banking industry. He needed to create Status Alignment. To start, it was time for a Status Tip-Off.
He adjusted in his chair and said, “Excuse me.” All eyes turned to Billy. “I like these offices you have here,” he said with a smile. “Beyond impressive. An almost perfect Victorian restoration.”
The Swiss nodded appreciatively at the compliment.
Billy continued, “Then again, when I take a closer look”—his eyes squinted slowly—“it’s not really Victorian, is it? Take this room, for instance, overlooking the gardens. The design of the room is all about proportion and balance, with sash windows, stucco cornices, the six-paneled door. This is older than Victorian, right? It’s way older. There’s a kind of symmetry and grandness . . . hmmm—oh, of course, now I have it. These construction elements were really part of the Georgian era, where wealth and influence were on more conspicuous display.”
He crossed the room as he spoke and gazed out the large windows along the southern wall of the room, overlooking miles of lush countryside, dramatically pausing for ten seconds.
“I especially admire these windows. With eight large panes there’s more glass in here than modern building codes allow, and I’m sure you know, in the Georgian period, the number of windows in a house denoted how wealthy a family was, because there was a heavy window tax at the time to help fund the war effort.
“These windows . . . they’re a signature for you, right? High ceilings, grand views, they add to the feeling of being among the ‘financial elite’ when you’re in this room. It makes me feel like I’m in an iconic Swiss bank—don’t take this the wrong way either; it’s just terrific, I love it!
“But the windows, they’re a problem too, aren’t they? Physical security here is obviously impossible . . . anyone with a two-dollar crowbar can waltz right in.”
Then Billy struck a dead serious tone, and stared directly at Philippe as he continued. “Guys, there’s no way in hell you’re ISO 2700 cyber compliant under G7 banking regulations, so you can’t trade directly with any financial exchanges, right? NASDAQ, Börse, hell, even SIX Swiss probably won’t take any of your buy-sell activity.”
I had no idea where this was all headed, but I was loving it. By starting with the architecture and history, he was showing he understood these men culturally. Now, with a shift into a discussion of banking transactions, he was aligning his status on a technical and business level.
“You have no real ability to secure this—your main office—so you can’t have any high-speed servers on-site, right? They’d be totally exposed!” Billy was not really asking—he knew. “So no servers here. . . . Aha, you’re renting co-location racks at remote sites? That’s a real pain—I estimate your trade times are, what, a hundred milliseconds per cycle?” He chuckled. “A hundred milliseconds is a joke. In Akron, we’re making trades in less than two milliseconds.
“Look, don’t take this the wrong way. You guys are terrific; I love this grand architecture, the gravel driveway stacked with Ferraris, and the European traditions—and this cappuccino right here is one of the best ever—but let’s get real with each other. When someone in this office puts up an order to buy or sell stock, you have to send it to a remote trading desk two hundred miles from here to process at a millisecond cycle time. You guys must be getting killed with that lag time. I mean, you might as well be placing trade orders from the North Pole.
“Listen, if you’re interested, I could take a look at your setup and recommend a security work-around. You could definitely get your trade times down to inside of ten milliseconds without much work. I bet we can get you into the three-to-five-millisecond range in about a month. But anyway, just a few thoughts; I know we’re here today to talk about my company and our software . . .”
Holy crap, that was unbelievable. Billy had just laid down a flawless Status Tip-Off. He had nailed a major pain point for these guys: They were two hundred miles from the nearest banking exchange and were operating without a banking compliance rating—that’s like trying to get into an exclusive New York City nightclub with a note from your mom. They were surely the slowest trader in the region, and in banking, slow means last in line. Not a good way to run a bank.
Philippe stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Yes, this is true,” he admitted. “The trading lag costs us millions every year but we cannot bear to move to another location. It is a tradition that we bank here, in Geneva. This building is a part of our legacy.”
“I can see why,” I said, jumping into the conversation. “It’s beautiful. Trust me—if anyone can help, it’s Billy. But let’s shift gears for a minute. Let me tell you about the latest technology this guy has been developing.”
The four men all nodded, leaning eagerly toward us. I could immediately tell from their body language that Billy had achieved Status Alignment. They were interested and viewed him as a peer. We’d cleared the first hurdle.
But now things were going to get more difficult. It was time to explain the deal and how Billy’s complicated technology worked.
I would do this using a Pre-Wired Idea (more on that in the next chapter). But before I could get to any of that, we had to provide the bankers with a sense of complete confidence that Billy and his product were worthy of a $10 million investment, and that he would use the money properly. We had to instill certainty.
When you ask someone to give you $10 million, it’s stressful for all involved; because the stakes are high and a no really means no. You need the buyer to feel certain you’re a good bet. The problem Billy and I were about to face is that when the “buyer” is a team of the most calculating
and risk-averse men on the planet, and you are an ex–Ohio State linebacker turned computer security guy from Akron, this level of certainty isn’t naturally occurring. You have to create it.
Thankfully, my team and I have found a solution to this problem. Billy was about to fill in the Certainty Gap using a very specific type of script called a Flash Roll.
THE FLASH ROLL
In the film My Cousin Vinny there’s a classic scene in which the prosecutor, played by Lane Smith, is questioning a witness, played by Marisa Tomei, who is on the stand as an auto mechanics expert for the defendant. Smith’s character is trying to prove that Tomei’s character, Mona Lisa Vito, an attractive Brooklynite with heavy makeup, big hair, and a too-tight dress, just isn’t qualified to comment on the details of the case. He sarcastically asks her, “Can you tell me, what would the correct ignition timing be on a 1955 Bel Air Chevrolet with a 327 cubic-inch engine and a four barrel carburetor?”
“It’s impossible to answer. . . . Nobody could answer that question!” she replies.
“Your Honor,” the lawyer declares triumphantly, “I move to disqualify Miss Vito as an expert witness.” The judge seems to agree. After all, with the hairdo and tight dress, she looks like she knows nothing about auto mechanics. Everyone in the courtroom is thinking the same thing: What could this woman possibly know about cars?
But then Tomei delivers one of the most iconic speeches in film history. In about fifteen seconds, she establishes herself as an absolute automotive authority and completely changes the way everyone in the room sees her. Even the opposing lawyer is impressed and has nothing more to ask.
How did she instill so much certainty in so little time?
“It is a trick question,” she said, talking a mile a minute. “’Cause Chevy didn’t make a 327 in fifty-five. The 327 didn’t come out till sixty-two. And it wasn’t offered in the Bel Air with the four-barrel carb till sixty-four. However, in 1964 the correct ignition timing would be four degrees before top dead center.”
As she finishes, a stunned silence hangs over the courtroom. Only an expert in automotive mechanics could have made that assessment and explained it so thoroughly, rapidly, and matter-of-factly.
“Well . . . uh . . . she’s acceptable, Your Honor,” Smith says meekly, admitting her testimony before sitting back down.
This is a classic Flash Roll—a linguistic fireworks display of pure technical mastery over a complex subject. A Flash Roll is specially designed so that no matter how skeptical your listeners are when you start talking, by the end they’ll be convinced you’re a total expert and you know your industry and your craft cold—down to the finest detail. The Flash Roll should take just sixty to ninety seconds to deliver—that’s about 250 words.
Have you ever taken a mountain bike to a repair shop? To your mind, all you know is the brakes don’t brake and the shifter doesn’t shift. The mechanic—that’s the guy with tattoos of flames, flowers, playing cards, and sea serpents covering both arms and a slick hipster mustache—takes one look and says,
“Look here, you’ve got a worn control arm at the gear insert point where the guard plate connects to the head sprocket and you have too much plate pressure so the trailing edge is catching the gear cable every time the spoke set rotates toward the center hub . . .”
“Stop,” you say, fully convinced this hipster bike guru is a technical master in your precise problem. You happily hand over the bike and leave with complete certainty that the fix will be done correctly, to the highest standards. This makes the seven-hundred-dollar repair bill easier to swallow.
Without knowing it, the bike shop repair guy just delivered an impeccable Flash Roll.
A good Flash Roll must locate a problem; it should take a point of view and it should arrive at a deductive conclusion about how to solve a problem. You need a Flash Roll with a clear beginning, middle, and end.
What you want to create is an action sequence delivered in highly technical language, which does something special to establish you as an expert. There are no creative thoughts in a Flash Roll. There are no statements such as “then I noticed” or “and that made me start to wonder” or “I started to think.” You are not explaining your philosophy, you are not throwing out a few ideas for discussion, or passionately talking about your business or product. In fact, a Flash Roll is told dispassionately, with no emotional content or display. It must be completely stripped of all editorial, emotional, and extraneous details; it is literally just a list of technical actions that can be taken to solve a very difficult problem. Without ego or pride or even charisma, it should explain exactly what you did to solve a specific problem and then what the outcome was. And, of course, what makes the Flash Roll fun to perform is that you are going to purposely use dense, technical jargon that most people will tell you to avoid using. For about ninety seconds you’re flipping the script.
An important and helpful step is to memorize your Flash Roll so you can deliver it at double your usual rate of speech. Think of it this way: As written, a Flash Roll is about 250 words. Your average rate of speech is probably 125 words per minute. So in order to get through the whole thing in about 60 seconds you’ll need to speed things up quite a bit. When you’re delivering a well-written Flash Roll at this pace, the buyer has the sense that you’re simply describing something you’ve done or dealt with a hundred times before. Especially when you make such a decisive conclusion on such a specific problem so matter-of-factly. The fast pace with the technical detail and the finite conclusion will make it obvious that you are for real.
You start a Flash Roll by making the problem seem simple, routine, or trivial—to you, it’s something so basic, you hardly think about it. For example, consider a time you showed your doctor a rash that wouldn’t go away. “Oh, yeah,” the doctor said, “we deal with these all the time. Had a guy in last week with a plant-induced contact dermatitis . . . had to give him furosemide to reduce the edema, and do a quick photorefractive laser pass; it was touch and go, but finally got him out of critical with an endovascular aortic aneurysm repair. . . . But looking at yours, it doesn’t look half as bad as that—you probably just got a meningococcal septicemia and we can knock it out with a course of epinephrine and quick Z-Pak.” And even though you don’t have a clear idea what she’s talking about, you instantly relax. Good, you think, this doctor knows what she’s doing. I’m in good hands here.
To write your Flash Roll, describe the problem being faced, your assessment of it, your proposed solution, and the economics (how long it would take and what the results would be, or were the last time you did it). Freely use technical terms, writing exactly the way you talk to the technical people in your business when you’re one-on-one with them. Recall the mechanic at the bike shop explaining what is wrong with your bike. Or think about the doctor who looks at the rash and says, “It’s nummular dermatitis. We’ll treat it with oral cyclosporine, topical corticosteroids, and ultraviolet light therapy for a week and you’ll be good as new.”
Doctors have a flawless Flash Roll. They may not call it that, but their job depends upon their ability to instill a sense of certainty in patients that the treatment they are proposing will work for them—even while at the same time saying, “There’s no guarantee this will work.”
The manner in which you deliver the Flash Roll is of the utmost importance. You absolutely cannot be seeking validation or opinion of the buyer. You are the expert, not he. This Flash Roll assessment shouldn’t come across as something you are proud of. Instead, it should seem like it’s mundane and uninteresting to you—not a big deal at all; like if I asked you about it in a few hours you might forget you even said it.
To end the Flash Roll, you can just shrug and say something like, “Anyway, based on what I’m seeing here, that’s what I would do.” Then leave it all behind and move on to the next part of the presentation.
In one deal I was involved with, Heather, an incredibly sma
rt sales executive wasn’t getting a good hit rate on her sales calls with clients. Heather was extremely knowledgeable about her industry and how her software worked, but no sales were coming in. So they sent me out to talk to her.
As soon as I saw her I immediately understood what the problem was. Heather had cropped blond hair, a rock climber’s physique, and dressed smartly for the corporate world. And she was trying to sell software to logging mills, a completely male-dominated industry where everyone drives pickup trucks, has a chainsaw or two in the back, and in October every year puts enough frozen elk in the fridge to make it through winter. Most sawmills haven’t been modernized and suffer from operating inefficiencies, which Heather’s software is designed to fix, but first she had to convince a bunch of male sawmill executives to see her as an expert, to trust her recommendations, and most important, to be certain her software would fix their problems.
I worked with her to write a Flash Roll that would get the mills’ executives believing in her abilities, and told her to practice it as if she were learning a movie script. Yes, it was a business presentation, but I suggested she treat it more like a theatrical performance—after all, it was just for 60 seconds. At her next meeting, she landed the sale and over the years became a top executive in the industry.
Here’s what I wrote for her, word for word:
Last week I was at one of your competitors’ sawmills, where I saw that a new 50-megawatt heat-recovery unit had been installed on a black-liquor recovery boiler with a 2,000 tons per day load setting. They spent $50,000 to install it, because of a 200-watt surge-induced power shutdown, but they didn’t think to regulate the motor brush speed, so that Johnson X4 heat-recovery unit needed to be removed and rebuilt with ceramic 228-needle bearings. The problem turned out to be a 75-psi pressure drop at the weld joint where the air fans couldn’t handle the volume, shutting down and jamming all the NOS valves. We came in to install and override the processor and adjust the electronic pressure valves, which worked perfectly first time out, and they’ve increased pump production 200 percent, saving over $10,000 a month on downtime.